text:
How to let my players fail their rolls intentionally, but covertly?
I'm experimenting with some pen-and-paper role-playing involving characters with hidden agendas. To foster a proper sense of paranoia, I want these hidden agendas to be unknown to not only the other PCs, but the other players, too. A PC's hidden agenda is known only to the GM and their player.
One of ways the secret agenda can manifest in the game is through the PCs intentionally failing tasks that would contradict their hidden agenda. For example, an undercover agent in a terrorist organization could try to aim their shots wide of the intended target, pretending to just have a bad day with their aim. Mistakes happen!
I want a rolling system that allows my players to intentionally make "unfortunate" mistakes without automatically implicating them of such treachery to the others. Here's a list of criteria I'd like the system to fulfill:
As little overhead over normal rolling as possible: no pen and paper public key crypto!
The system must keep intentional failures indistinguishable from unintentional ones, at least between the non-GM players. Relying on suspicious gestures like note-passing or secret signals should preferably be avoided.
In particular, there mustn't be a way for a player to prove that their roll was honest, lest the players decide to require such proof from everyone after each roll.
Preferably, the system makes it possible for a player to cheat downwards only - failure can be arranged, but success still requires luck with the dice!
Preferably the players roll their own dice - it's not a huge deal, but getting to roll has a certain feel to it!
Does anyone have a system they have used or seen used that works given these criteria?
Note: Methods using cards and other randomization devices are also acceptable in lieu of dice, as long as the method proposed meets the standards outlined above.
gm-techniques game-design dice
mxyzplk
kviirikviiri
\$\begingroup\$ This strikes me as a really good question--situation and criteria explained clearly--that's attracting a lot of really bad answers. "Here's this idea" with no discussion of how it worked in play, repetitions, &c. I've downvoted a lot of unsupported suggestions, and suggest further readers do the same. Back It Up! is a real thing. \$\endgroup\$
– nitsua60 ♦
\$\begingroup\$ Yes, we expect answers to cite sources or experience, and encourage "here's an untried idea" answers to be downvoted. Consider rescinding or revamping your answer if it lacks this. \$\endgroup\$
– mxyzplk
\$\begingroup\$ This question still continues to attract "try this thing I just thought up" answers. It would be a shame for it to get closed since there are about 3 good sourced answers. So what we'll start doing is if people flag an answer as Not An Answer because it fails to Back It Up!, we'll delete it. Consider this before adding an answer. \$\endgroup\$
\$\begingroup\$ Several "untested idea" answers have been deleted due to multiple delete flags. If this has happened to you, feel free and edit your answer to Back It Up! and flag for undeletion. \$\endgroup\$
\$\begingroup\$ Remember, it's up to everyone to ensure we can have nice things. \$\endgroup\$
Secret Rolls
You could simply ask that the players roll all of their checks in secret, then tell the other players the result. The success of a lie depends on the player's bluffing skills. You can choose between announcing the difficulty of any roll (if your system has such a concept), allowing players to be sure that such-and-such a result will fail, and by how much. Alternatively, you could ask the player to announce their result without revealing the difficulty, forcing them to make an educated guess if they want to fail.
To make the rolls secret, players might:
Roll behind their hand, a piece of paper, or a 'player screen';
Roll in an opaque box, or rolling cup (such as those that come with perudo, and other dice games);
Use a dice-rolling app on their phone without showing other players the screen.
I did this for death saving throws in my last D&D 5e campaign. This allowed players who wanted to save their characters to lie when they failed. This could easily work the other way round. You would just need to have your players' word of honour that they wouldn't try to pass failures off as successes.
Policing Rolls
If players are rolling into a pot, you could ask that a player who has just rolled in the pot should pass the pot to you to check, before shaking the pot to obscure the result from the other players. The success of this depends on:
The number of players (more players makes passing the cup to you in secret more difficult for those further away);
The number of rolls (more rolls makes this a more tedious, and time consuming exercise);
Number of dice used per roll (more five in the cup are more likely to knock against each other);
Number of faces on dice used (more faces makes the die more likely to roll around during 'transit').
Essentially, in a game with frequent rolls (particularly d20 rolls, as in D&D, or rolls of many dice, as in Edge of the Empire), or many players, the system is likely to be tedious, and difficult. In a game with infrequent rolls of dice with fewer faces, and fewer players, the system could work effectively.
If players are using a dice-rolling app, the success of the system depends on the number of players, the number of rolls, and the players' willingness to hand their phone to you frequently.
If players are rolling behind something, you have to be willing to get up and come round to them for every roll. That would be very tedious in a game with frequent rolls.
Regardless, I still do not recommend the checking system, as I have found that it is always better to trust one's players. For example, as far as I can tell, no-one has yet cheated my death saving throw system, despite the possibility being there, probably because of the guilt involved in doing so.
LadifasLadifas
You might want to take some inspiration from the game Paranoia.* In particular, instead of trying to avoid hidden notes, make note-passing between the GM and players a common and ubiquitous mechanic in your game, so that no single note stands out as unusually suspicious in any particular situation.
Combined with a mechanic where the GM is the final arbiter of rolls (i.e. players don't know the exact targets they're rolling against) you can easily support intentional failure simply by having the player pass a note to you in advance saying e.g. "please fail my next Electronics roll" or "please fail my next roll to shoot an NPC." Such a note doesn't necessarily need to be passed immediately before the roll it affects, reducing the potential for correlating the note with the outcome.
To make this work, you will need three things:
First, as stated above, you need a mechanic that lets you, as the GM, apply hidden modifiers to a roll (or to do the roll itself secretly). If the players get to roll the dice and also know exactly what they're rolling against, then fudging a roll becomes all but impossible.
Second, you need to let your players know in advance that they can do this. Since you will presumably be communicating privately with each of your players before the game, that's probably a good time to also explain the note-passing mechanic, and to suggest some examples of how their character might want to use it to advance and conceal their mission.
Finally, you need to ensure that note-passing will indeed occur frequently enough at the table. One way to encourage this is to occasionally pass "dummy" notes to your players, and to suggest that they do the same. For example, if you notice that there aren't enough notes being passed around, you could hand a random player a note saying "please ignore this note," or even "write something on this note and return it before your next roll." With all players constantly writing and receiving notes, there's no way for anyone to know whether any particular note really means something, and if so, what.
Of course, you also need a setting where a certain amount of mistrust between players is to be expected, so that having such a note-passing mechanic in play won't by itself seem out of place to any players. That said, the scenario you describe, of a terrorist organization with a suspected infiltrator, would certainly seem more than suspicious enough to warrant some secret communication between you and your players.
*) Disclaimer: I haven't actually GM'ed Paranoia, only played it a couple of times. I may, however, just possibly have picked up a thing or two above my security lev&f(77DT687%&57/&% <SUBJECT TERMINATED. A NEW CLONE HAS BEEN DISPATCHED. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.>
In the past we have tried a few of those methods in roleplaying games. It always sucked. We never got it right. It always felt artificial and cumbersome.
Recently, my group (re)started playing boardgames, too. Some of them have very interesting mechanics so that you can have "traitors" in a cooperative game, although there is not even a neutral GM.
Battlestar Galactica was one of the games that really impressed me in that regard. It has a spaceships crew fighting for survival, where one or more of the players in reality are traitors that try to destroy the ship.
How this works is: Every turn, an "event" happens. This event has a goal (think a DC in D&D) and it requires means to reach said goal. Every player has cards of different colors and each card has a numerical value. Red for combat, blue for logistics, yellow for politics and some more (I think I missed exploration and another). So every event requires certain colors. In terms of roleplaying, an event might be a bandit ambush DC 17 that requires combat and exploration to beat. So all players put in cards face down to beat the DC 17 with combat or exploration cards. The "event" gets two random color and value cards added to the pot. Then the pot is shuffled (so you don't know who put in which card) and turned up. Card values with the right color are counted. Cards of other colors are counted against them. So every yellow card would subtract it's value from the total, because it's neither combat nor exploration. If the total beats the DC, the event is a success. If not, it's a failure.
The players are not allowed to talk about card values in absolutes. They are allowed general chat, like saying "I can do most of it, just need a little help", or "I cannot give cards, I don't have that color". And it's obvious how many cards someone gave, just the color and value is unknown.
There is a tremendous amount of ways how you can be a hidden traitor and look all innocent. You could put in a single card and it could be a high-value failure card. Or you could add 5 cards of correct color... but all are just low value. Or you could spend all your cards on a stupid unimportant event and then when it would count just go "well, I spend all my cards to help you last time, now I have no cards left in my hand, see?"
The point is that people get different colored cards each round. For RPG, the fighter might get combat and exploration, the bard might get social, magic and exploration, the cleric might get magic and social, the mage might get magic and combat. Now when you need combat and find a lot of social cards (that fail) you know it was either the bard or cleric. So you need to be careful not to show who you are by failing more than plausible by the two random cards.
All in all, it's a great system that you can easily use without a board for roleplaying games. The only drawback it has is that it does not feature those "lone" decisions or dicerolls. It's always the whole group that succeeds or fails a task. So you cannot say "Bob missed the bad guy by a mile", but it will always be "your party fails to capture the bad guy" and everybody will look to Bob as the main source of combat cards... and Bob will say "what, somebody dropped a high-value social, I cannot do it all alone guys!". And you will never know if that was the random event card, or the bard... or maybe Bob itself got hold of a social card and used it to fail.
nvoigtnvoigt
This system is a combination of open rolls and hidden cards which I tried once and which worked quite well:
Each player has a deck of cards. The composition of the deck represents the character's competence. So players who play characters with specific strengths get more and better cards which apply to these strengths. An easy convention could be:
Club: Combat-related skills
Spade: Knowledge-related skills
Hearth: Social-related skills
Diamond: Dexterity-related skills
The player draws a hand from that deck. The rules explicitly forbid players to talk about what cards they have on their hand (because it's not character-knowledge).
When one makes a skill check, roll a D10. At the GMs discretion, add or subtract from it depending on difficulty of the task. For the task to be completed successfully, the player must then play an appropriate card from their hand which is lower than the result. When they can't or don't want to, the task is failed and they have to discard an unrelated card. In either case, the card is passed to the GM face-down, so the other players don't know if it was successful. The player then draws a new card from their deck.
These game mechanics had the following effects on the game which I found quite interesting:
Players can justify losing rolls by saying that they either didn't have a low enough card at that moment or had one but wanted to safe it for a more important situation. But that doesn't work without limits. If one rolled very high and still failed claiming not to have an appropriate card, it was quite likely that they failed intentionally.
It created suspicion: "Why did you say you want to try defusing that alarm when you don't have any good diamond cards on your hand right now?" "Why did you refuse to do it even though you have the dex-focused character? Do you really just have a bad hand or do you want to sabotage us intentionally?"
Pure psychological effect: Each player having a hidden hand of cards is a constant reminder that everyone has a hidden agenda and knows things the others don't.
Note that Ladifas's answer covers hidden rolls behind a player screen. This answer focuses on its implementation and potential issues.
We ran a few games like that. The solution was to have a screen, similar to the GM's one, for each player. That way all the dice rolls are hidden. This allows the player to roll dices and either take the "true" value or fudge it so it fails. No one is the wiser.
The added bonus is that the character's sheet is hidden as well. This also works for referring to the rule book(s) as no one knows who is spending way too much time looking at the "evil cleric spell lists" or whatnot.
A slight problem with this is that it covers the gaming table in screens leaving very little room for maps, miniatures, or snacks/drinks. If you have no gaming table, this is easier: rolls are done on the player's note pad and no one is allowed to look!
This is where this method fails. We always role play with honest people.
Depends a bit on what system you're using, but for D&D and similar it works reasonably well to discuss it privately with each player ahead of time and set up a covert signal. A particular luck invocation, using a particular color of die, whether they roll overhand or underhand. Whatever they think they can keep the other players from noticing and you think you can remember to watch for.
Mechanics-wise, when they give their signal, swap the DC for performing the action with the DC you'd estimate for a "convincing" failure. To this end, it's helpful to keep a list of potentially relevant skills the player has such as bluff, acrobatics, perform, etc. The worse the roll, the easier it would be for someone to notice that the failure was intentional, with a bad enough roll making it obvious to anyone who's watching.
Edit: I'm not sure what all the downvotes are for. It's a simple enough way to handle it that doesn't interrupt the flow of the game and is hard for the other players to spot. I've used it in one "evil party" D&D campaign, and in several Paranoia games (Where stabbing other party members in the back is a major part of the fun and a simple "I want to fail this" signal saves a lot of passing suspicious notes.)
What works best for a signal will be highly table and DM specific. Different people are better at paying attention to different things.
I don't expect this will work nearly as well with "collaborative storytelling" type systems, In lots of those an abject failure ends up being suspicious in and of itself.
PerkinsPerkins
\$\begingroup\$ At my table, using a particular set of dice as a signal could work. Most players use multiple sets in order to swap if one becomes "unlucky", so changing dice is unremarkable. \$\endgroup\$
– neontapir
Baked spindown d20s
In 5e we had a similar situation, the DM wanted to make an "advantage die" (there are many advantage die online but they always swap the 1 and 2 for a 19 and 20, which is lame and obvious). They bought a spindown d20 and loaded it by baking it in the oven at 90c for about 10 minutes. They bought another one, and didn't bake it. If they really wanted a roll to succeed, they could roll the cheated d20 out in the open and we'd be none the wiser.
This is a simple solution and elegant. Each player gets 2 spindown d20s. One has been baked with the 1 up and the 20 down, so it will roll lower than normal. Whenever they have to make a dice roll, they can pick which dice to use and make the roll.
Picking up the normal dice instead of the cheat dice requires milliseconds of overhead
Intentional failure cannot be deduced during play
There is no signalling required
The only way to prove the roll was honest is to make dozens of rolls to prove the dice is statistically fair or not
You can only cheat downwards
Players still roll their own dice
Be aware that this solution is best used on spindown die, since the high and low numbers are clustered. If you try this on a normal d20 then you will increase your chances of rolling a 20 most, but a 2 will also have an increased chance since it is right next to the 20. People have been cheating d6s with this method since forever, but I think spindown d20s are the best.
A similar solution would be possible with any other tools. For example if you want to draw cards from a deck, let the player have 2 decks, one of which is loaded with failures.
user-024673user-024673
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged gm-techniques game-design dice .
How to get a new group into the spirit of the game Paranoia?
Balancing players' rolls, not characters
Is there any known limit for how many dice RPG players are comfortable adding up?
My players want a tighter narrative, but have wandered off course. What now?
Is Pathfinder feasible without players knowing the rules?
How can I communicate to my players, that I like them to roleplay their skills more?
Player has trouble imagining the ingame situation
A player got upset because he made a wrong move and now I can't DM
How to create dice rolls for multi-attacks in a custom tabletop RPG system


text:
Home/Health Communication, Insights, News/Data Storytelling & Innovative Health Communication
Data Storytelling & Innovative Health Communication
CDC is implementing innovative data stories
CDC's Division of Global HIV and TB (DGHT) has begun the implementation of Data + Storytelling communication method
STRATEGY & SOLUTION
HIV and TB are the world's two deadliest infectious diseases – accounting for more than 3 million deaths each year.
As a key implementing agency of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief(PEPFAR), the CDC plays a critical role in the global response to fighting these diseases. In 2018, CDC contributed more than 50 percent of all PEPFAR outcomes aimed at controlling HIV and TB worldwide.
Budget restraints, especially in global health initiatives, have made it more difficult than ever to reach and engage stakeholders in the fight against global health threats such as HIV and TB.
Despite numerous successes, awareness around the CDC's many contributions to these global efforts has remained lower than desired, particularly among those responsible for approving or advocating ongoing investments in these vital programs.
The challenge, then, is to increase awareness and visibility and engage stakeholders and policymakers in CDC's messaging and work through innovative communication methods. The goal: to achieve a large impact with a small investment in order to reach key CDC audiences.
Strategy & Solutions
A fresh approach to communications
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "CDC: Faces from the Frontlines of the Global HIV Response." YouTube, 14 January 2020, https://youtu.be/yHEuLlWK98A
Drawing from the success of other visual storytelling programs, CDC and DGHT partnered with international photographer, Thom Pierce, to shoot over 40 Faces from the Frontlines of CDC's global HIV response to create a Data + Storytelling campaign.
With Karna's assistance, these personal narratives convey the positive impact of CDC's work. By juxtaposing powerful images and stories with data, DGHT is able to put a face on these global health crises and reach key audiences through multiple photo exhibits, stories, and media exposure.
A seamless transition
Visual storytelling + compelling data + powerful narratives = Strong outcomes
This innovative and fast-growing approach to communicating key messages and data has been frequently utilized with positive outcomes within the private sector, but has been less frequently utilized within national public health institutions.
By combining analytical and quantitative information with compelling narratives and images, CDC and DGHT are able to share their message, increase awareness, engage their key audiences on an emotional level, and inspire action and commitment from key stakeholders.
"This photo and narrative exhibit, Faces from the Frontlines, depicts the everyday experiences of our beneficiaries, their caregivers, our partners, and our experts."
— Dr. Hank Tomlinson, Division Director – CDC/DGHT
[1] Through our contract vehicles, Karna provided overall communications support for DGHT. We worked closely with the DGHT federal full-time staff to develop a strategy that addresses the communications obstacles in the fight infectious global health threats. [2] Dykes, B. Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative and Visuals Wiley 2019 [3] Knaflic, C. N. Storytelling with Data., pp. 228, Wiley 2015
Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health
Infectious Disease and Vaccinations
HIV/AIDS and other STDs
Program and Policy Evaluation
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Cinegy focuses on the research and development of media and television software and technologies. Cinegy Workflow is the software platform which combines digital asset management, video ingest and software based encoding, broadcast automation and playout, production tools, archive storage & retrieval – all integrated into one seamless database driven production workflow.
The development of Cinegy Workflow began over 10 years ago, as an integrated digital archive, asset management and production environment, based on desktop PC hardware for the front-end and standard IT server equipment on the back-end, all sitting on the existing network infrastructure. This design forms the basis of today's workflow. The work resulted in first pilots during 2001 and first commercial products became available in 2002 branded as Cinegy. The goal was to have the archive not as a mere afterthought, but as a process that starts by accumulating metadata right from the start to create a complete lifecycle as a never-ending process that keeps adding value to the media assets throughout their existence. The Cinegy platform from the start was designed as an enterprise level system that is resolution independent, storage systems agnostic, extremely scalable and absolutely open in terms of architecture. Over time, additional elements such as news integration, broadcast automation and playout have been added to the solution as well.
SQL database driven digital asset management forms the basis, taking collaboration and team workflow way beyond just shared storage. The digital asset management platform abstracts physical storage to virtual storage and in addition provides load balancing, different storage classes, storage migration, HSM integration, garbage collection, and very elaborate user access rights policies.
Cinegy licenses a number of these core technologies to various broadcast and consumer video software and hardware manufacturers that use them in their product offerings, to offer the best-of-breed solutions in the industry. Cinegy directly addresses the needs of the broadcast, television and production markets, to become the premier provider of media technology and production systems.


See what kind of throwbag ropes You find on the market. If you already have one: check which category it fits in and get to know a bit more about.
Abrasion test (see it here): destroyed in 3 sec.
general comment: sorrily there are plenty of thowbag ropes without core on the market. Producers have lower production costs but does not mean you pay less. Your rope will be extremely weak and non durable. the advantage is: light and small. My advice is: Try to avoid these!
general comment: the idea behind the stretch is to avoid the "big pull" when catching a swimmer. To use mechanical advantage or simply pull some pinned material is almost impossible. My experience is that even rescuing swimmers makes it a "Catapult". After absorbing the energy it gives it back. i personally would never use again, they are like bungee ropes.
Abrasion test (see it here): 5-10 sec.
general comment: good ropes on the market, compared to the ones before, these are worth to buy.
general comments:expensive double priced ropes. If You have the money buy it! Still the biggest damage on ropes is caused by abrasion, so it gets damaged easily just like the other ropes. It does not give you a longer life or better resistance against abrasion, just a higher tensile strength.
general comment: more durable and resistant rope on an affordable price, though it gets damaged just like all. The advantage is that after a surface damage it will hold until you finish your rescue as the core is extremely durable. The Polyester brings the heat away from the abrasion zone. New generation of WWTC ropes coming May 2019 with even better abrasion resistance.


The successful candidate will work in the TTS Implementation Project Management team in EMEA and will be responsible for the implementation of cash and trade deals and dedicated client portfolio management.
The candidate will have the management skills needed to succeed in a complex organizational environment with shifting priorities while managing client expectations and the delivery of multiple Projects.
To lead the implementation of multiple projects in line with project management methodology and have end to end management of dedicated client deal portfolio enhancing the client on-boarding experience.
Oversight of all client on-boarding activity end-to-end (including low to Medium complex deals).
Manage and coordinate the work involved in an Implementation Project working with partners including Sales, Product, Technology, Client Operations, Marketing, Risk and Controls, Legal and other teams.
Serve as single point of contact for the client and internal functional partners, responsible for the coordination and successful end-to-end delivery of projects. Closely manage the expectations of the client organisation.
Develop and maintain a customized project plan tailored to client's requirements, outlining deliverables, milestones, critical path items and actions.
Establish appropriate governance model to deliver client requirements ensuring strict adherence to defined quality standards & practices outlined in "best practices" collateral.
Continuously reduce implementation cycle time, minimize deal slippage & associated revenue conversion lead time. Accurately report project status, escalating effectively for "on hold" & slow moving deals.
Effectively manage client relationships and ultimately act as trusted advisor for dedicated client portfolio.
Lead meetings and coordinate activities of the cross-organizational implementation teams.
Maintain solid relationships with key client and internal stakeholders.
Partner with the client to escalate and manage critical issues to resolution.
Effective maintenance & communication of MIS and project metrics. Provide ongoing senior management updates on key projects as required.
Manage project scope and apply the change control process.
Ensure effective transition from project to production.
Identify opportunities for process improvements and contribute to department initiatives to implement process enhancements.
Proven track record of consistently strong performance. and excellent project delivery.
Wide organisational knowledge and cross-functional team work experience to deliver multi-work stream projects.
Communication and presentation skills to command client and internal stakeholder meetings.
Strong Leadership skills; ability to promote team building and develop strong partnerships with other teams.
Ability to analyse and solve complex problems; strong influence skills.
Project Management Certification by a reputable organization (i.e. PMI) is preferential.


text:
The Golden Age of Intelligence?
Busts of Greek philosophers (Wikicommons, Matt Neale). Did the Ancient Greeks have the highest mean IQ of any human population then and since?
Francis Galton argued that average intelligence had been much higher in ancient Greece than in modern England. He came to this conclusion after comparing the proportion of eminent men in Athens of the fifth century BC with the proportion of eminent men in the England of his day:
It follows from all this, that the average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own-that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African negro.(Galton 1869, p. 342)
This high ability was then presumably lost:
We know, and may guess something more, of the reason why this marvellously-gifted race declined. Social morality grew exceedingly lax; marriage became unfashionable, and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans, and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class. (Galton 1869, pp. 342-343)
If we accept Galton's reasoning, Ancient Greeks had the highest mean IQ of any human population, something like 120 or 125. By comparison, Ashkenazi Jews have an estimated mean IQ of 110. But was Galton right? His calculations were criticized at the time, specifically for underestimating the number of Athenian citizens. He consequently revised his calculation downward to 1.5 grades higher, i.e., a mean IQ of 115 to 119 (Challis 2013, p. 56).
That's still impressive. But higher IQ doesn't necessarily imply higher innate intelligence. Conditions in ancient Greece may have simply been better for intellectual discussion, such activity being respected as an activity in its own right. By comparison, intellectual discussion was much more circumscribed in the ancient Middle East, where it was confined to specific people who performed specific duties, most often writing and copying texts at the request of others.
Admittedly, this explanation does not exclude a genetic one. If the cultural environment favors intellectual development, it will tend to reward the most promising people with reproductive success. A scribe is thus praised in a Jewish wisdom book from the second century BC: "Many will praise his understanding; it will never be blotted out. His memory will not disappear, and his name will live through all generations. Nations will speak of his wisdom, and the congregation will proclaim his praise. If he lives long, he will leave a name greater than a thousand." Book of Sirach [39.1-11].
In the ancient world, 'leaving a great name' did not mean being written about by historians but rather having many illustrious children to carry on the family name long after death. Intellectual ability thus co-evolved with a supportive cultural base. Indeed, we humans have co-evolved much more with our cultural environment than with our natural environment (Hawks et al. 2007).
A new yardstick
Galton's conjecture can now be tested with two new research tools:
1. Ancient DNA. Large quantities of genetic data have been collected from ancient human remains and are now being made available to researchers. This year, the Reich lab at the Harvard Medical School released over 2,000 ancient genomes, including 30 from ancient Greece.
2. Polygenic cognitive score. Some gene loci are associated with differences in educational attainment. By examining the variants at these loci and by adding up the ones associated with higher educational attainment, we can calculate a polygenic score that correlates with mean IQ (r = 0.98).
By examining 102 ancient genomes, a research team led by Michael Woodley of Menie was able to chart the evolution of cognitive ability in Europe and Central Asia. His team found that genetic variants for higher educational attainment gradually increased in frequency from 4,560 to 1,210 years ago (Woodley of Menie et al. 2017). Now, with newly released data from the Reich lab, he is leading a research effort to look specifically at ancient Greeks. The results are still preliminary, but they indicate a progressive increase in the polygenic score from Neolithic to Mycenaean times, followed by a decrease. When? We don't know because we lack post-Mycenaean data (Woodley of Menie et al. 2019).
This is a promising avenue for research. In particular, we need:
- A larger sample of modern Greek genomes. This should not be difficult.
- Samples from post-Mycenaean times to the end of Ottoman rule. Was Galton right in placing this cognitive decline during the ensuing Hellenistic and Roman periods? Or did it happen over a longer span of time?
The final published paper should explain at greater length the research team's use of a restricted polygenic score, i.e., a polygenic score based only on those genetic variants that seem causally related to high educational attainment, and not simply associated with high educational attainment. This approach is acceptable if a third party had identified these variants; otherwise, there is a risk of focusing on those variants that support Galton's hypothesis.
Another point: in the presentation of his new project, Woodley of Menie spoke repeatedly about population replacement at various times in the history of ancient Greece (Woodley of Menie et al. 2019). Yet the current thinking is that immigration was historically unimportant in Greece. Present-day Greeks are largely descended from the Mycenaeans, with some later introgression by Slavic tribes and other peoples (Gibbons 2017; Stamatoyannopoulos et al. 2017).
This research is especially exciting because the Reich lab released ancient DNA data not only from ancient Greece but also from elsewhere. History may end up being seen in a new light. For instance:
- Rome probably went through a similar increase in mean intelligence, followed by decline. When did the decline begin? During the collapse of the fifth century? I suspect earlier, perhaps in the third century. The barbarian invasions were both a cause and effect in the collapse of Roman civilization.
- The Enlightenment was due only in part to things like the invention of the printing press, the voyages of discovery, and the founding of universities. These were subsidiary causes that resulted from and supported a more fundamental change: a steady increase in the smart fraction of European societies—the proportion of people who enjoy reading, writing and, above all, thinking.
Angel, J.L. (1950). Population size and microevolution in Greece. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 15: 343-351. doi:10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.031
Challis, D. (2013). The Archaeology of Race. The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie. London: Bloomsbury.
https://www.academia.edu/1520119/Archaeology_of_Race._The_Eugenic_Ideas_of_Francis_Galton_and_Flinders_Petrie_Bloomsbury_2013_
Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: MacMillan.
http://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/
Gibbons, A. (2017). The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals. Science August 2
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals
Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104: 20753-20758.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henry_Harpending/publication/5761823_Recent_Acceleration_of_Human_Adaptive_Evolution/links/0c9605240c4bb57b55000000.pdf
Stamatoyannopoulos, G., A. Bose, A. Teodosiadis, F. Tsetsos, A. Plantinga, N. Psatha, N. Zogas, E. Yannaki, P. Zalloua, K.K. Kidd, B.L. Browning, J. Stamatoyannopoulos, P. Paschou, P. Drineas et al. (2017). Genetics of the peloponnesean populations and the theory of extinction of the medieval peloponnesean Greeks. European Journal of Human Genetics 25: 637-645.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg201718
Woodley of Menie, M.A., S. Younuskunju, B. Balan, and D. Piffer. (2017). Holocene selection for variants associated with general cognitive ability: Comparing ancient and modern genomes. Twin Research and Human Genetics 20: 271-280
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/holocene-selection-for-variants-associated-with-general-cognitive-ability-comparing-ancient-and-modern-genomes/BF2A35F0D4F565757875287E59A1F534
Woodley of Menie, M.A., J. Delhez, M. Peñaherrera-Aguirre, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Cognitive archeogenetics of ancient and modern Greeks. London Conference on Intelligence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UES_tpDxz9A
Posted by Peter Frost at 1:44 PM 2 comments:
Labels: ancient DNA, Ancient Greece, Francis Galton, intelligence, Michael Woodley of Menie
Why did brain size decrease after the Ice Age?
Nubians (Wikipedia). After the last ice age, brain size decreased in Europeans and East Asians. In western Europeans, this trend continued until some time before 1800. No decrease is observable in a large series of crania from Nubia.
In my latest paper I argue that northern hunting peoples were the first to break free from the cognitive straitjacket of hunting and gathering. Because women at northern latitudes had few opportunities for food gathering, they took on new, more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation. This increase in task complexity, led by women, provided these peoples and their descendants with the mental toolkit for later developments: farming, more complex technology and social organization, and an increasingly future-oriented culture (Frost 2019).
That paper left out a key piece of evidence. As these northern hunting peoples expanded southward into the temperate zone, they must have had excess mental capacity, especially the women, who were now redirected toward the cognitive demands of food gathering and, later, farming. Cognitive demand also decreased for men, who no longer had to store huge quantities of spatiotemporal information for tracking game and finding their way home. On the other hand, men put some of this excess mental capacity to new uses, by exploiting many of the technologies that women had pioneered.
So is there evidence of decreased cognitive demand after the last ice age? According to a study by Maciej Henneberg (1988), brain size steadily shrank from the Mesolithic to modern times, on the order of 9.9% for men and 17.4% for women. This is consistent with the reduction in cognitive demand being greater for women than for men.
Henneberg ignored the sex difference, preferring to attribute the decrease in brain size to a corresponding decrease in body size for both men and women. This explanation has been challenged by John Hawks, who reanalyzed Henneberg's data and showed that the decrease in body size explains only one-fifth to one-seventh of the one in brain size. He also showed that the declining ratio of brain size to body size did not affect all human populations. In fact, it can be securely demonstrated only for Europeans and Chinese. Indigenous southern Africans and Australians may have had similar declines, but the sample sizes are too small to conclude with certainty. No overall change is seen in the one case where we have a large cranial sample from a non-Eurasian population (Nubians):
A large series of crania from ancient Nubia covers the period from roughly 3400 years ago to 600 years ago [20, 21]. Samples show a slight trend toward decrease in the major length, breadth and height measurements from Iron Age (Meroitic, external cranial module 145.2) to Medieval (Christian, external cranial module 143.9) times, but the intermediate series of crania (X-Group, external cranial module 147.1) is somewhat larger in these dimensions than either of the other groups. In this context it would be misleading to speak of a reduction in cranial vault size in this region. (Hawks 2011)
A recent reversal
This trend reversed itself at some point in time, apparently before the 1800s. Jantz and Jantz (2016) and Jellinghaus et al. (2018) found an increase in brain size from at least 1800 in Germans and 1820 in white Americans. When I asked John Hawks, he attributed this reversal to improvements in nutrition and a reduction of childhood disease. That, too, was what I thought, initially.
But, then, the reversal would surely have been stronger in women than in men. If brain size had decreased twice as much in women, shouldn't the rebound have been twice as strong in women? Yet this is not what we see in the brain size of Americans born from 1820 to 1990: "Both sexes changed, but female change was less pronounced than male change" (Jantz and Jantz 2016). In Germans born between 1800 and 1950, no clear sex difference was observable in the magnitude of this change over time (Jellinghaus et al. 2018).
Both Jantz and Jantz (2016) and Jellinghaus et al. (2018) are skeptical that these changes could be explained by improvement in nutrition or reduction of childhood disease. Infant mortality is a good proxy for both, and it did not begin to decline until circa 1900. At the very least, the increase in brain size should have accelerated during the twentieth century, yet it didn't (Jellinghaus et al. 2018).
Our knowledge on this subject comes largely from Maciej Henneberg, who concluded that brain size had decreased in all human populations and that this decrease continued into modern times. Both conclusions have been disproven. The decrease did not affect all human populations, and it had already reversed by 1800 in northern Europeans, as shown by two recent studies on white American and German samples.
Perhaps the reason lies in changing patterns of natural selection. After the last ice age, northern hunting peoples had excess mental capacity, particularly the women. This excess capacity enabled them to create and exploit new and more complex social environments—farming, towns and cities, civilizations … It was still more than what was needed, however, and a long-term decline set in. Then, in early modern times, this decline reversed in western Europeans, and brain size once more began to increase. Why? Perhaps this is related to evidence, summarized in my last paper, that mean intelligence steadily rose in western European societies during late medieval and early modern times.
Hawks' study is the only comprehensive critique of Henneberg's work. Unfortunately, it has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. When asked why, he replied: "I did not feel it was necessary to pursue formal journal publication for this, because I did not think it fit well into the journals at the time." When asked why he had removed a post on that study from his weblog (it was put up in 2012 and taken down in 2017), he answered: "I used to have a section on my blog for research manuscripts that were in prep, but I decided to discontinue this as I became involved in more collaborative work."
Is there another reason? I can understand not publishing a post because other work is more pressing, but why delete an existing post? What made it less blogworthy by 2017?
The study in itself seems uncontroversial. Indeed, it leads to the amusing conclusion that European brains got smaller while Nubian brains remained unchanged. But talk about "smaller brains" can trigger some people, and John Hawks is already viewed with suspicion because of his work with Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran. Henry once told me—not long before his untimely death in 2016—about the mounting pressures he was facing to discontinue his research. Have similar pressures been brought to bear on John Hawks? One may wonder. The last three years have seen a remarkable escalation of deplatforming and outright violence in the name of "antiracism." When Steve Sailer (2019) charted the number of New York Times articles that mention the word "racism," he found that this number took off during the mid-decade, rising from 291 in 2011 to 2,353 in 2018. The mentions also changed qualitatively, becoming much more vociferous.
Today, John is a tenured professor, yet he is now much more reticent to say what he thinks than when he was a graduate student. His example should be sobering. The pressure to be "correct" doesn't end when you get tenure.
Frost, P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 2019, 1(1), 166-181
https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012
Hawks, J. (2011). Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution. arXiv:1102.5604 [q-bio.PE]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.5604
Henneberg, M. (1988). Decrease of human skull size in the Holocene. Human Biology 60: 395-405.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41464021
Jantz, R.L., and L.M. Jantz. (2016). The Remarkable Change in Euro-American Cranial Shape and Size, Human Biology 88(1), 56-64
https://doi.org/10.13110/humanbiology.88.1.0056
Jellinghaus, K., H. Katharina, C. Hachmann, A. Prescher, M. Bohnert, and R. Jantz. (2018). Cranial secular change from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in modern German individuals compared to modern Euro-American individuals. International Journal of Legal Medicine 132: 1477-1484.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Bohnert/publication/323952852_Cranial_secular_change_from_the_nineteenth_to_the_twentieth_century_in_modern_German_individuals_compared_to_modern_Euro-American_individuals/links/5ab8dcdcaca2722b97cfe45f/Cranial-secular-change-from-the-nineteenth-to-the-twentieth-century-in-modern-German-individuals-compared-to-modern-Euro-American-individuals.pdf
Sailer, S. (2019). Graphing the Great Awokening. May 28, The Unz Review
http://www.unz.com/isteve/graphing-the-great-awokening/
Labels: brain size, Henry Harpending, hunter-gatherers, John Hawks, Maciej Henneberg
The Original Industrial Revolution
Cro-Magnon woman (Wikicommons) – At northern latitudes, women had fewer opportunities for food gathering, so they were free to specialize in new and more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation.
I've published an article on the theory that cold Paleolithic winters selected for intelligence. This theory is often attributed to J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen but actually goes much further back. The article is open access (see link), and the abstract is provided below. Comments are welcome.
Rushton and Jensen argued that cognitive ability differs between human populations. But why are such differences expectable? Their answer: as modern humans spread out of Africa and into northern Eurasia, they entered colder and more seasonal climates that selected for the ability to plan ahead, in order to store food, make clothes, and build shelters for winter. This cold winter theory is supported by research on Paleolithic humans and recent hunter-gatherers. Tools become more diverse and complex as effective temperature decreases, apparently because food has to be obtained during limited periods and over large areas. There is also more storage of food and fuel and greater use of untended traps and snares. Finally, shelters have to be sturdier, and clothing more cold-resistant. The resulting cognitive demands are met primarily by women because the lack of opportunities for food gathering pushes them into more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation. The northern tier of Paleolithic Eurasia thus produced the "Original Industrial Revolution"—an explosion of creativity that preadapted its inhabitants for later developments, i.e., farming, more complex technology and social organization, and an increasingly future-oriented culture. Over time, these humans would spread south, replacing earlier populations that could less easily exploit the possibilities of the new cultural environment. As this environment developed further, it selected for further increases in cognitive ability. Indeed, mean intelligence seems to have risen during recorded history at temperate latitudes in Europe and East Asia. There is thus no unified theory for the evolution of human intelligence. A key stage was adaptation to cold winters during the Paleolithic, but much happened later.
Frost, P. (2019). The OriginalIndustrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 2019, 1(1), 166-181
Posted by Peter Frost at 4:08 PM 18 comments:
Labels: Arthur Jensen, Cold Winter theory, Europeans, human evolution, intelligence, Phil Rushton, sexual division of labor, Upper Paleolithic
They really are smart ... and other surprises
Rachela - Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879) (Wikicommons). Ashkenazi Jews have a higher incidence of genetic variants associated with high educational attainment.
Intelligence varies from one individual to the next, and most of this variance has genetic causes. But what, exactly, are these causes? Lots and lots of genes, it seems. To be precise, if we look at the genes that influence human intelligence, we find two things:
1. They are very numerous, numbering in the thousands.
2. In general, their variants differ slightly in their effects.
This shouldn't be surprising. Evolution proceeds by tinkering, i.e., by making little changes. Big changes tend to produce big side-effects, and most side-effects are deleterious. So the genetic capacity for intelligence differs among humans through small differences at thousands upon thousands of genes. Does it follow, then, that we cannot understand these differences by looking only at a few genes? Not necessarily. Each gene is like a weathervane. If you can get enough subjects from a human population, even a few genes will tell you the direction and strength of natural selection for intelligence.
Davide Piffer began looking at these "weathervanes" six years ago. He gathered data from different human populations on ten SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) whose genetic variants are associated with differences in intelligence, specifically differences in educational attainment. Then, for each population, he estimated its genetic capacity for intelligence by calculating a "polygenic score"—the number of genetic variants associated with higher educational attainment, out of a maximum of ten.
This score correlated with population IQ (r=0.90) and with PISA scores (r=0.84). It was highest in East Asians:
East Asians have the highest frequencies of alleles beneficial to educational attainment (39%) and consistently outperform other racial groups both within the US and around the world, in terms of educational variables such as completion of college degree or results on standardized tests of scholastic achievement. Europeans have slightly lower frequencies of educational attainment alleles (35.5%) and perform slightly worse in terms of educational attainment, compared to East Asians. On the other hand, Africans seem to be disadvantaged both with regards to their level of educational attainment in the US and around the world. Indeed, Africans have the lowest frequencies of alleles associated with educational attainment (16%). (Piffer 2013)
These results were considered preliminary. Thousands upon thousands of genes influence intelligence, and here we have only ten! Perhaps chance alone produced this geographic pattern. Over the next few years, as other researchers discovered more SNPs associated with educational attainment, Davide Piffer repeated his study with more of these weathervanes.
His latest study has just come out. It uses data on 2,411 SNPs, and the polygenic score correlates even higher with population IQ (r=0.98). The geographic pattern is the same, with East Asians scoring higher than Europeans, and with Africans scoring lower.
Yes, Jews really are smart
This time, however, the highest score was obtained for Ashkenazi Jews:
This dataset included a sample of 145 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals. The IQ of Ashkenazi Jews has been estimated to be around 110 [34]. Remarkably, their EDU polygenic score was the highest in our sample, corresponding to a predicted score of about 108, mirroring preliminary results from a smaller (N = 53) sample (Dunkel et al., 2019) [34]. (Piffer 2019)
This finding vindicates the authors of a paper written more than a decade ago. Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending presented evidence that the mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews exceeds not only that of non-Jewish Europeans but also that of other Jewish groups. The most striking piece of evidence is the high incidence among Ashkenazim of four genetic disorders: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV). All four affect the capacity to store sphingolipid compounds that promote the growth and branching of axons in the brain. These disorders are caused by alleles that are harmful in the homozygote state and beneficial in the much more common heterozygote state, i.e., the brain receives higher levels of sphingolipids without the adverse health effects.
Ironically, these facts are coming to light at a time when Ashkenazi Jews are disappearing through low fertility and high out-marriage. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, they are disappearing from the ranks of top winners at the U.S. Math Olympiad, the Putnam Exam, the Computing Olympiad, and other academic competitions. This decline became noticeable in the 1980s and has accelerated since the turn of the millennium (Unz 2012; Frost 2018). Jews are still present in intellectual and cultural life, but this presence is losing its dynamism and becoming a mere legacy.
African American IQ is higher than predicted
The polygenic score seems to underpredict the IQ of African Americans:
Indeed, the IQ of African Americans appears to be higher than what is predicted by the PGS (Figure 2), which suggests this cannot be explained by European admixture alone, but it could be the result of enjoying better nutrition or education infrastructure compared to native Africans. Another explanation is heterosis ("hybrid vigor"), that is the increase in fitness observed in hybrid offspring thanks to the reduced expression of homozygous deleterious recessive alleles. (Piffer 2019)
I'd propose another possible explanation: higher intelligence in African Americans may be associated with a somewhat different basket of genetic variants. Some of these variants may come from our friends the Igbos, who seem to have followed their own evolutionary path toward higher intelligence (Frost 2015). Many notable African Americans are in fact of Igbo descent, including Forest Whitaker, Paul Robeson, and Blair Underwood (Wikipedia 2019).
Davide is skeptical about this explanation, pointing out that population IQ is in line with the polygenic score he calculated for sub-Saharan African groups (Esan, Gambians, Luhya, Mende, Yoruba). None of those groups, however, are Igbo, and it's really the Igbo who stand out among West Africans in measures of intellectual and educational attainment. If only for the sake of curiosity, we should find out their polygenic score. This score may underpredict their genetic capacity for intelligence, which to some degree would be boosted by genetic variants that exist only in sub-Saharan Africa, but it should still exceed what we see for other West Africans.
This latest study brings to 2,411 the number of SNPs that can inform us about the genetic capacity for intelligence in different human populations. This information was more dubious when only ten SNPs were available, and the geographic pattern could be put down to chance. That argument now seems weak. If chance is causing this pattern, why do we keep getting the same one?
Sure, we can wait until we get even more relevant SNPs, but the overall picture will probably remain the same. We will get finer geographic detail. In France, for example, we will probably understand why educational attainment is so much higher in Brittany (see: http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=5987 H/T to Philippe Gouillou). There are probably several European regions and subregions where the genetic capacity for intelligence is on a par with what we see in Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians.
In sum, these findings deserve to be better known ... and more widely discussed.
Initially, I wrote that Davide Piffer used 127 SNPs. In fact, 127 is the number of SNPs found in the HGDP (low coverage) dataset. In the other two datasets (1000 Genomes and GnomAd), those that the main analysis was based on, there were actually 2,411 SNPs.
**** Hiatus alert ****
I'll be unable to post for the near future, probably the next three months.
Cochran, G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38: 659-693.
https://antville.org/static/sites/kratzbuerste/files/AshkenaziIQ.pdf
Frost, P. (2018). The end of Jewish achievement? Evo and Proud, May 21
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-end-of-jewish-achievement.html
Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa, Evo and Proud, July 4
https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-jews-of-west-africa.html
Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1(1): 55-75
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/5
Piffer, D. (2013). Factor analysis of population allele frequencies as a simple, novel method of detecting signals of recent polygenic selection: The example of educational attainment and IQ, Mankind Quarterly 54(2): 168-200
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Davide_Piffer/publication/260436834_Factor_Analysis_of_Population_Allele_Frequencies_as_a_Simple_Novel_Method_of_Detecting_Signals_of_Recent_Polygenic_Selection_The_Example_of_Educational_Attainment_and_IQ/links/0c9605314d28dba7ea000000/Factor-Analysis-of-Population-Allele-Frequencies-as-a-Simple-Novel-Method-of-Detecting-Signals-of-Recent-Polygenic-Selection-The-Example-of-Educational-Attainment-and-IQ.pdf
Unz, R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy. The American Conservative, November 28
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Wikipedia (2019). Igbo people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_people#Diaspora
Posted by Peter Frost at 12:28 PM 10 comments:
Labels: Davide Piffer, Greg Cochran, intelligence, IQ, PISA, polygenic score, Ron Unz
Autumn in China
Pink Autumn, by Victor Wang (2017) (Wikipedia). China's demographic crisis is much worse than what official statistics let on.
With its population ageing as a result of longer lifespans and a dwindling number of children, the world's most populous nation decided in 2016 to allow all couples to have a second child, relaxing a tough one-child policy in place since 1978.
But birth rates plummeted for the second consecutive year last year. Policymakers now fret about the impact a long-term decline in births will have on the economy and its strained health and social services. (Stanway 2019)
The above Reuters article appeared two weeks ago. Although China lifted its one-child policy in 2016, its total fertility rate is still declining and now stands at 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of 2.1 children. Delegates to China's parliament are saying that "radical steps are needed."
Are things that bad? No … they're worse. China's fertility rate is much lower than the official figure of 1.6 and probably close to what we see in Taiwan (1.1), in Singapore's Chinese community (1.1), and in Malaysia's Chinese community (1.3). Moreover, it is continuing to decline and will soon fall below the threshold of one child per woman, if it has not already done so. Finally, this very low fertility has lasted long enough to exhaust all population momentum. The population will soon begin to shrink, most likely five years earlier than the officially projected date of 2030.
The real figures
The official figure of 1.6 children per woman is consistent with estimates by respected international bodies: 1.62 (World Bank, 2016); 1.8 (Population Reference Bureau, 2016); and 1.6 (United Nations, 2011-2015) (Wang 2018). The total fertility rate can also be estimated from data that China collects every year, i.e., the sample surveys taken by the National Bureau of Statistics. Using this source, Mengqiao Wang came up with much lower figures:
[…] far below the 2.1 replacement level, national TFR fluctuated around 1.4 since 2003, before dropping to around 1.2 since 2010 and finally reaching an astoundingly low value of 1.05 in 2015. (Wang 2018)
This pattern of very low fertility is limited to Han Chinese, particularly those in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin. In those provinces, the total fertility rate has fallen to 0.75 children per woman, and death rates have already overtaken birth rates:
Population shrinkage was already a fact for the northeastern part of the country, and it remained a question of when but not whether that fact would spread to other areas of the nation (official estimate of population peak at 1.45 billion by 2030 but unofficial estimate of 1.41 billion as earliest as 2025. (Wang 2018)
Why are these figures so much lower than the official figures? The main reason given is that the one-child policy caused widespread underreporting of births: many Chinese were having second children but not reporting them to government statisticians for fear of being penalized. This is seen in the differences between the raw data of the sample surveys and the official estimates of the National Bureau of Statistics.
The NBS estimates, however, seem to be based on the sample survey data … with an upward adjustment to take underreporting of births into account: "Ironically, the NBS mentioned that the annual total births announced were calculated and inferred from the same sample surveys this study analyzed" (Wang 2018). So we are trapped in a circular argument: the sample surveys must be missing many births because the NBS estimates show a higher birth rate. But the same NBS estimates have been adjusted upwards because so many births are supposedly being missed.
Moreover, if the one-child policy had caused so much underreporting of births, the number of reported births should have increased in 2016, when that policy was scrapped, and that increase should have persisted in subsequent years. That's not what happened. The number of births did rise in 2016 and then fell in 2017 and 2018. The rise was probably due to some parents deciding to have a second child because there were no longer any financial penalties. The "backlog" of potential childbearing has now been cleared, and the fertility rate has returned to its pre-2016 slump.
It should be emphasized that the decline in Chinese fertility is now being driven by the growing number of women who have no children at all. This childlessness cannot be blamed on the one-child policy, and it is questionable, in fact, whether that policy has had much impact on the fertility rate for the past two decades. Total fertility rates have declined to the same very low level among Chinese people in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia—where there has never been a one-child policy.
Pretty bad. The fertility rate dropped below the replacement level in 1992 and has been at very low levels (1.4 or lower) since 2003. There is very little population momentum left, and an absolute drop in numbers should begin in the mid-2020s. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate may decline even further. In 2018, it was 0.98 in South Korea and 0.75 in northeastern China (Kyu-min and Su-ji 2019; Wang 2018). In all of East Asia, this pattern has only one exception: North Korea, where the rate is 1.98 children per woman (Wikipedia 2019). This is what we call "a failed state."
One can always say that China has well over a billion people and can afford to shed a few hundred million. The relevant figure, however, is not the total population but rather the number of women who can bear children. That figure is a lot smaller and will continue to shrink. Women of childbearing age are defined (generously) as being 15 to 49 years old. Their numbers peaked at 383 million in 2011 and have been falling each year by 4 to 6 million. If we look at the most fertile age group (20-29), their numbers are expected to fall from 107.7 million in 2016 to around 80 million in 2020 (Wang 2018).
There is no real precedent for what is happening. In the Western world, the fertility rate has declined over a longer time and has reached very low levels only in some countries, notably those of southern and eastern Europe. Moreover, unlike those countries China is still creating jobs at a high rate. Who will fill those jobs?
I addressed that question in a series of posts I wrote nine years ago. The abundance of jobs and empty housing will suck in immigrants from poorer countries, initially from Southeast Asia and then increasingly from South Asia and Africa. The African influx into Asia will be the big surprise of the 21st century, being especially noticeable in Malaysia and South China.
The first step toward solving a problem is to recognize that it exists. Most problems go unsolved because no one takes that first step. China is starting to move in that direction, but the word "starting" should be stressed. As Wang (2018) notes, there is a recurring tendency by the Chinese bureaucracy to downplay the demographic crisis. In some cases, the relevant data are not published:
Regrettably, such data for 2016 were no longer published in the most recent 2017 yearbook as the official publication mentioned that "In comparison with China Statistical Yearbook 2016, following revisions have been made in this new version in terms of the statistical contents and in editing: Of the chapter "Population", table named Age-specific Fertility Rate of Childbearing Women by Age of Mother and Birth Order is deleted." (China Statistical Yearbook 2017). Reasons were unknown for the deletion of this table, and it was unclear if the deletion would be temporary or permanent, or whether such deletion would continue in future years beyond 2016. (Wang 2018).
With determined effort, very low fertility can be reversed. Israel has gone the farthest in this direction, having achieved replacement fertility even among secular Jews. One must provide not only financial incentives but also cultural and ideological ones. Marriage and family formation must be seen positively. In this, unfortunately, the West is not an example to follow.
Wang (2018) suggests four measures to deal with the demographic crisis:
- Make demographic data fully accessible for debate and discussion.
- Eliminate controls on couples who want to have more than two children.
- Lower the minimum age for marriage, which is currently 22 for men and 20 for women.
- Allow out-of-wedlock births.
The first three measures seem sensible, although the second one would probably have little effect. Such controls are already absent in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. The last measure is terrible. All things being equal, a single mother will have fewer children than a married mother. Yes, a single mother can eventually marry or remarry, but such marriages tend to be less stable and thus less conducive to future childbearing, largely because the husband is less willing to support children that are not his own.
Of course, not all things are equal. Single mothers tend to be more present-oriented and, thus, more indifferent to the long-term costs of their actions, like those of having children. But what is to be gained by encouraging such people to reproduce? The experience of the West has been that single mothers, and their children, end up being a net cost to society.
In the West, the increase in single motherhood has coincided very closely with the decline in fertility, and both reflect the same underlying problem: people are less willing to commit to a long-term relationship and raise the children it produces. We increasingly live in a culture where the only valid entity is the individual. Everything else—family, community, nation—is illegitimate.
Frost, P. (2010a). China and interesting times ... Evo and Proud, February 25
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/02/china-and-interesting-times.html
Frost, P. (2010b). China and interesting times. Part II. Evo and Proud, March 4
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/03/china-and-interesting-times-part-ii.html
Frost, P. (2010c). China and interesting times. Part III. Evo and Proud, March 11
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/03/china-and-interesting-times-part-iii.html
Frost, P. (2010d). Has China come to the end of history? Evo and Proud, March 18
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/03/has-china-come-to-end-of-history.html
Kyu-min, C. and S. Su-ji. (2019). Fertility rate plummets to less than 1 child per woman. National Politics, February 28
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2019/02/28/2019022801617.html
Stanway, D. (2019). China lawmakers urge freeing up family planning as birth rates plunge. Reuters, March 12
https://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKBN1QT0SM-OCATP
Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3234861
Wikipedia (2019). Demographics of North Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_North_Korea#Size_and_growth_rate
Labels: china, East Asians, fertility, one-child policy, population replacement
IQ of biracial children and adults
First snow in Minnesota (c. 1895), Robert Koehler. Biracial children have IQ scores halfway between those of white children and black children, even when they are conceived by white single mothers and adopted into middle-class white families in their first year of life.
You may have heard about the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. It was a longitudinal study of black, biracial, and white children adopted into white middle-class Minnesotan families, as well as the biological children of the same families (Levin, 1994; Lynn, 1994; Scarr and Weinberg, 1976; Weinberg, Scarr, and Waldman, 1992). IQ was measured when the adopted children were on average 7 years old and the biological children on average 10 years old. They were tested again ten years later. Between the two tests, all four groups declined in mean IQ. On both tests, however, the differences among the four groups remained unchanged, particularly the 15-point gap between black and white adoptees.
The biracial children remained halfway between the black and white adoptees. Could this be due to the parental environment being likewise half and half? Well, no. All of them were raised by white parents, and they were adopted at an early age: 19 months on average for the white adoptees, 9 months for the biracial adoptees, and 32 months for the black adoptees. The last figure is emphasized by Scarr and Weinberg (1976) as a reason for the IQ gap between the black and white adoptees.
Fine, but what about the IQ gap between the biracial and white adoptees? Almost all of the biracial children were adopted at a young age and born to white single mothers who had completed high school. From conception to adulthood they developed in a "white" environment. If anything, the white adoptees should have encountered more developmental problems because they were adopted at an older age.
Could color prejudice be a reason? Perhaps the biracial children were unconsciously treated worse than the white children. By the same reasoning, they may have been treated better than the black children. We can test the second half of this hypothesis. Twelve of the biracial children were wrongly thought by their adoptive parents to have two black parents. Nonetheless, they scored on average at the same level as the biracial children correctly classified by their adoptive parents (Scarr and Weinberg 1976).
The Eyferth study
Another study found no difference in IQ between white and biracial children. This was a study of children fathered by American soldiers in Germany and then raised by German mothers (Eyferth 1961). It found no significant difference in IQ between children with white fathers and children with black fathers. Both groups had a mean IQ of about 97.
These findings were criticized by Rushton and Jensen (2005) on three grounds:
1. The children were still young when tested. One third were between 5 and 10 years old and two thirds between 10 and 13. Since IQ is strongly influenced by family environment before puberty, a much larger sample would be needed to find a significant difference between the two groups.
2. Between 20 and 25% of the "black" fathers were actually North African.
3. At the time of the study, the US Army screened out low IQ applicants with its preinduction Army General Classification Test. The rejection rate was about 30% for African Americans and 3% for European Americans. African American soldiers are thus a biased sample of the African American population.
Another factor is that the capacity for intelligence seems to be more malleable in children than in adults. We see this with the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. In the enriched learning environment of middle-class Minnesota families, all of the children showed impressive IQ scores at 7 years of age. By 17 years of age, however, this benefit had largely washed out:
-------------------- Age 7 Age 17
Black children ----- 97 ----- 89
Biracial children - 109 ----- 99
White children --- 112 ---- 106
Does intelligence really decline with age because of wear and tear on the brain? Perhaps we're programmed to be most intelligent in childhood. That's when we have to familiarize ourselves with the world. The capacity for intelligence may then be gradually deactivated as we get older because it's less necessary.
This deactivation may follow different trajectories in different human groups. In early Homo sapiens, it may have begun not long after puberty. As ancestral humans made the transition to farming, sedentary living, and increasingly complex societies, this learning capacity became more necessary in adulthood, with the result that natural selection favored those individuals who retained it at older ages. This gene-culture coevolution would have gone farther in some populations than in others.
The Fuerst et al study
A recent study led by John Fuerst has confirmed the intermediate IQ of biracial individuals, this time in adults. The research team used the General Social Survey, which includes not only ethnic, sociological, and demographic data but also a measure of intelligence (WordSum):
The relationship between biracial status, color, and crystallized intelligence was examined in a nationally representative sample of adult Black and White Americans. First, it was found that self-identifying biracial individuals, who were found to be intermediate in color and in self-reported ancestry, had intermediate levels of crystallized intelligence relative to self-identifying White (mostly European ancestry) and Black (mostly sub-Saharan African ancestry) Americans. The results were transformed to an IQ scale: White (M = 100.00, N = 7569), primarily White-biracial (M = 96.07, N = 43, primarily Black-biracial (M = 94.14 N = 50), and Black (M = 89.81, N = 1381).
The same study also found a significant negative correlation among African Americans between facial color and WordSum scores. The correlation was low (r = -0.102), but it would be difficult to get a higher correlation because of the measures used. Self-reported skin color correlates imperfectly with actual skin color, which in turn correlates imperfectly with European admixture. Wordsum likewise correlates imperfectly with IQ (r = 0.71). On a final note, the correlation between facial color and WordSum scores was not explained by region of residence, interviewer's race, parental socioeconomic status, or individual educational attainment.
Eyferth, K. (1961). Leistungen verscheidener Gruppen von Besatzungskindern in Hamburg-Wechsler Intelligenztest für Kinder (HAWIK). Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 113: 222-241.
Fuerst, J.G.R., R. Lynn, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). The Effect of Biracial Status and Color on Crystallized Intelligence in the U.S.-Born African-European American Population. Psych 1(1): 44-54. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/Psychology1010004
Levin, M. (1994). Comment on the Minnesota transracial adoption study. Intelligence 19: 13-20.
Lynn, R. (1994). Some reinterpretations of the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. Intelligence 19: 21-27.
Rushton, P. and A.R. Jensen. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11: 235-294.
https://isgp-studies.com/miscellaneous/race-and-iq/2005-APA-Rushton-Jensen-Thirty-Years-of-Research-on-Race-Differences-in-Cognitive-Ability.pdf
Scarr, S., and Weinberg, R.A. (1976). IQ test performance of Black children adopted by White families. American Psychologist 31: 726-739.
http://www.kjplanet.com/amp-31-10-726.pdf
Weinberg, R.A., Scarr, S., and Waldman, I.D. (1992). The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study: A follow-up of IQ test performance at adolescence. Intelligence 16: 117-135.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016028969290028P
Labels: adoption, biracial children, IQ, John Fuerst, Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, Phil Rushton, WordSum
Alzheimer's and African Americans
A village elder of Mogode, Cameroon (Wikicommons - W.E.A. van Beek). African Americans are more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's. They also more often have an allele that increases the risk of Alzheimer's in Western societies but not in sub-Saharan Africa. Why is this allele adaptive there but not here?
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is unusually common among African Americans. Demirovic et al. (2003) found it to be almost three times more frequent among African American men than among white non-Hispanic men (14.4% vs. 5.4 %). Tang et al. (2001) found it to be twice as common among African American and Caribbean Hispanic individuals. On the other hand, it is significantly less common among Yoruba in Nigeria than among age-matched African Americans (Hendrie et al. 2001).
This past year, new light has been shed on these differences. Weuve et al. (2018) analyzed data from ten thousand participants 65 years old and over (64% black, 36% white) who had been followed for up to 18 years. Compared to previous studies, this one had three times as many dementia assessments and dementia cases. It also had a wider range of data: tests of cognitive performance, specific diagnosis of Alzheimer's (as opposed to dementia in general), educational and socioeconomic data, and even genetic data—specifically whether the participant had the APOE e4 allele, a major risk factor for Alzheimer's.
The results confirmed previous findings ... with a few surprises.
Alzheimer's was diagnosed in 19.9% of the African American participants, a proportion more than twice that of the Euro American participants (8.2%).
Cognitive performance and cognitive decline
Cognitive performance was lower in the African American participants. "The difference in global cognitive score, -0.83 standard units (95% confidence interval [CI], -0.88 to -0.78), was equivalent to the difference in scores between participants who were 12 years apart in age at baseline."
On the other hand, both groups had the same rate of cognitive decline with age. In fact, executive function deteriorated more slowly in African Americans. The authors suggest that the higher rate of dementia in elderly African Americans is due to their cognitive decline beginning at a lower level:
[…] on average, white individuals have "farther to fall" cognitively than black individuals before reaching the functional threshold of clinical dementia, so that even if both groups have the same rate of cognitive decline, blacks have poorer cognitive function and disproportionately develop dementia. (Weuve et al. 2018)
Interaction with education.
Differences in educational attainment, i.e., years of education, explained about a third of the cognitive difference between the two groups of participants:
Educational attainment, as measured by years of education, appeared to mediate a substantial fraction but not the totality of the racial differences in baseline cognitive score and AD risk (Table 5). Under the hypothetical scenario in which education was "controlled" such that each black participant's educational level took on the level it would have been had the participant been white, all covariates being equal, black participants' baseline global cognitive scores were an average of 0.45 standard units lower than whites' scores (95% CI, -0.49 to -0.41), a difference smaller than without controlling years of education (-0.69; Table 5), and translating to about 35% of the total effect of race on cognitive performance mediated through years of education. (Weuve et al. 2018)
While educational attainment explains 35% of the cognitive difference between African Americans and Euro Americans, we should keep in mind that educational attainment itself is influenced by genetic factors. These genetic factors vary among African Americans, just as they vary between African Americans and other human populations.
APOE e4 allele
This allele was more common in the African American participants. It contributed to their higher risk of Alzheimer's but not to their lower cognitive score.
Black participants were more likely than white participants to carry an APOE e4 allele (37% vs 26%; Table 1). In analyses restricted to participants with APOE data, racial differences in baseline scores or cognitive decline did not vary by e4 carriership (all Pinteraction > 0.16). Furthermore, adjustment for e4 carriership did not materially change estimated racial differences in baseline performance or cognitive decline (eTable 3).
By contrast, the association between race and AD risk varied markedly by APOE ecarriership (Pinteraction = 0.05; Table 4). Among non-carriers, blacks' AD risk was 2.32 times that of whites' (95% CI, 1.50-3.58), but this association was comparably negligible among e4 carriers (RR, 1.09; 95% CI, 0.60-1.97). (Weuve et al. 2018)
This study offers two different explanations: why African Americans have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's and why they have a higher incidence of dementia in general. Two different explanations are needed because Alzheimer's seems to be qualitatively different from other forms of dementia.
First, African Americans have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's because they have a higher incidence of the APOE e4 allele, a risk factor for Alzheimer's. They may also have other alleles, still unidentified, that similarly favor development of Alzheimer's. This would explain why, if we look at participants without APOE e4, Alzheimer's was still twice as common among African Americans as it was among Euro Americans. On the other hand, the two groups had virtually the same incidence of Alzheimer's if we look at participants with APOE e4.
Second, African Americans have a higher incidence of dementia in general because they have a lower cognitive reserve. When cognitive performance begins to deteriorate in old age, the ensuing decline starts from a lower level and reaches the threshold of dementia sooner. The rate of decline is nonetheless the same in both African Americans and Euro Americans. While this explanation could apply to most forms of dementia, it is hard to see how it applies to Alzheimer's. Euro Americans have a higher cognitive reserve, and yet the APOE e4 allele is just as likely to produce Alzheimer's in them as in African Americans.
Why does the APOE e4 allele exist? It must have some adaptive value, given its incidence of 37% in African Americans and 26% in Euro Americans. African Americans also seem to have other alleles, not yet identified, that likewise increase the risk of Alzheimer's. Those alleles, too, must have some adaptive value.
This value seems to exist in sub-Saharan Africa but not in North America. When Hendrie et al. (2001) examined Yoruba living in Nigeria, they found no relationship between APOE e4 and Alzheimer's or dementia in general:
In the Yoruba, we have found no significant association between the possession of the e4 allele and dementia or AD in either the heterozygous or homozygous states. As the frequencies of the 3 major APOE alleles are almost identical in the 2 populations, this variation in the strength of the association between e4 and AD may account for some of the differences in incidence rates between the populations, although it is not likely to explain all of it. It also raises the possibility that some other genetic or environmental factor affects the association of the e4 allele to AD and reduces incidence rates for dementia and AD in Yoruba. (Hendrie et al. 2001)
There has been speculation, notably by Greg Cochran, that Alzheimer's is caused by apoptosis. Because of the blood-brain barrier, antibodies cannot enter the brain to fight infection, so neural tissue is more dependent on other means of defense, like apoptosis. Such a means of defense may be more important in sub-Saharan Africa because the environment carries a higher pathogen load.
If we pursue this hypothesis, APOE e4 and other alleles may enable neurons to self-destruct as a means to contain the spread of pathogens in the brain. In an environment with a lower pathogen load, like North America, this means of defense would become too inactive. The result would be autoimmune disorders where apoptosis is triggered in neural tissue for no good reason.
Chin, A.L., S. Negash, and R. Hamilton. (2011). Diversity and disparity in dementia: the impact of ethnoracial differences in Alzheimer disease. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders. 25(3):187-195.
https://doi.org/10.1097/WAD.0b013e318211c6c9
Cochran, G. (2018). Alzheimers or did I already say that? West Hunter, July 14
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/07/14/alzheimers-or-did-i-already-say-that/
Demirovic, J., R. Prineas, D. Loewenstein, et al. (2003). Prevalence of dementia in three ethnic groups: the South Florida program on aging and health. Ann Epidemiol. 13:472-478.
Hendrie, H.C., A. Ogunniyi, K.S. Hall, et al. (2001). Incidence of dementia and Alzheimer disease in 2 communities: Yoruba residing in Ibadan, Nigeria, and African Americans residing in Indianapolis, Indiana. JAMA. 285:739-47.
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.285.6.739
Tang, M.X., P. Cross, H. Andrews, et al. (2001). Incidence of AD in African-Americans, Caribbean Hispanics, and Caucasians in northern Manhattan. Neurology 56:49-56.
https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.56.1.49
Weuve, J., L.L. Barnes, C.F. Mendes de Leon, K. Rajan, T. Beck, N.T. Aggarwal, L.E. Hebert, D.A. Bennett, R.S. Wilson, and D.A. Evans. (2018). Cognitive Aging in Black and White Americans: Cognition, Cognitive Decline, and Incidence of Alzheimer Disease Dementia. Epidemiology 29(1): 151-159.
https://doi.org/10.1097/EDE.0000000000000747
Posted by Peter Frost at 11:14 AM 5 comments:
Labels: African Americans, Alzheimer's, cognitive ability, germ theory, Greg Cochran


text:
Q: Creating a 2-D data plot with "vertical" marginal histograms How can I create in python a bi-variate data plot with "vertical" marginal histograms like this?:

Say that the data is generated via:
from scipy.stats import multivariate_normal
import numpy as np

mean = np.array([0, 0])
cov = np.array([[1, 0.5], [0.5, 2]])
data = multivariate_normal(mean, cov).rvs(1000)

A: Here is sample code which shows how one can do this:
import math

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import rc, rcParams
from numpy.linalg import eigh
from scipy.stats import multivariate_normal, norm
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D

rcParams['text.latex.preamble'] = r'\boldmath'
rc('text', usetex=True)

mean = np.array([0,0])
cov = np.array([[1, 0.3], [0.3, .5]])
np.random.seed(0)
mvn_rvs = multivariate_normal(mean, cov).rvs(800)
pdf_x = norm(mean[0], np.sqrt(cov[0,0])).pdf
pdf_y = norm(mean[1], np.sqrt(cov[1,1])).pdf
rv_x = mvn_rvs[:, 0]
rv_y = mvn_rvs[:, 1]

x = np.linspace(-3, 3, 101)
y = np.linspace(-3, 3, 100)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)

fontsize = 30
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
ax.get_proj = lambda: np.dot(Axes3D.get_proj(ax), np.diag([1.15, 1.15, 1, 1]))
ax.plot(y, pdf_y(y), zs=x.min(), zdir='x', linewidth=3, label="$\\mathsf{P_y(y)}$")
ax.plot(x, pdf_x(x), zs=y.max(), zdir='y', linewidth=3, label='$\\mathsf{P_x(x)}$')
leg = plt.legend(fontsize=fontsize, ncol=2, frameon=False, bbox_to_anchor=(-0.10, 1.1275),
           loc='upper left', handlelength=0.7, handletextpad=0.5, columnspacing=2.4)
grid_linewidth = 1.15
ax.xaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linewidth'] = grid_linewidth
ax.yaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linewidth'] = grid_linewidth
ax.zaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linewidth'] = grid_linewidth
ax.xaxis.set_pane_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
ax.yaxis.set_pane_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
ax.zaxis.set_pane_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
ax.w_xaxis.line.set_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
ax.w_yaxis.line.set_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
ax.w_zaxis.line.set_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0))
labelpad = -5
ax.set_xlabel("$\\mathsf{x}$", fontsize=fontsize, labelpad=labelpad)
ax.set_ylabel("$\\mathsf{y}$", fontsize=fontsize, labelpad=labelpad)
labelsize = 10
ax.xaxis.set_rotate_label(False)
ax.yaxis.set_rotate_label(False)
ax.set_zlim(bottom=0)
ax.set_xlim(-3, 3)
ax.set_ylim(-3, 3)
ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels([])
ax.xaxis.set_visible(False)
ax.yaxis.set_ticklabels([])
ax.zaxis.set_ticklabels([])

sx2 = cov[0, 0]
sy2 = cov[1, 1]
rho = cov[0, 1] / np.sqrt(sx2 * sy2)
Sigma = cov
target = 0.1
gamma = math.log(1 / (4*(np.pi**2)*(sx2**2)*(sy2**2)*(1 - rho**2)*(target**2)))
eigenvalues, P = eigh(np.linalg.inv(Sigma))
# Compute u and v as per link using thetas from 0 to 2pi
thetas = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 10000)
uv = (np.sqrt(gamma) / np.sqrt(eigenvalues)) * np.hstack((np.cos(thetas).reshape(-1,1), np.sin(thetas).reshape(-1, 1)))

orig_coord=np.zeros((10000,2))
for i in range(len(uv)):
    orig_coord[i,0]=np.matmul(np.linalg.inv(P), uv[i,:])[0]
    orig_coord[i,1]=np.matmul(np.linalg.inv(P), uv[i,:])[1]

ax.plot(rv_x, rv_y, 0*rv_x, ' o', c='g', markersize=1.1)  # "RdBu_r")
ax.plot(orig_coord[:, 0], orig_coord[:, 1],
        0 * np.ones_like(orig_coord[:, 0]), c='r', linewidth=3)
ax.view_init(azim=-45, elev=20)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
#EspionageAct tag and EspionageAct category Posts
Diplomacy and IR
Chief Editor's Journal
Publisher's Journal
Dan Ellsberg interviewed by Tutsi Gabbard (US Rep Hawaii)
(In 2019 or 2020)
"I was the first person charged under the charges he [Assange I think he's talking about] is now facing. But I was charged as a source, and there wasn't one for 10 years after that. ... and then 3 and 9 and 1 other. There were 3 cases and then 9 under Obama. They were all either plea bargains or won in court. It's never gone to the Supreme Court.
"Mainly they were sources like me, and they were using the Espionage Act, which was designed for spies, and has no provision in it for pleading any public interest. You can't argue in court. I wasn't allowed to speak in court to answer the question--I spoke for four and a half days--but I wasn't allowed to answer the question, 'Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers?'
"So my lawyer, a consitution lawyer, said, 'Your honor, I've never heard of a case where the defendant was not allowed to tell the jury why he did what he did,' and Judge Burns said, 'Well, you're hearing one now,' and that's been true of every case since then..
"So you can't get a fair trial as a whistleblower. ... you can't say anything about what the impact has been, whether there was harm, what you wanted to accomplish.
"But it was never meant to be an official secrets act, a British type official secret s act. ... and in fact they said at the time, in 1917 when they passed this, we don't want an official secret act. The question was could you use it against a source like me. Well, that never had been done since 1917. So it was an experiment with me.
... But the new thing about this [Assange] is that it's the first time a journalist has been tried as a defendent, and that makes it into a full British official secrets act.
"So it's not even just that he can't argue motives effectively, as a journalist he should not be ... it's always been clear to papers that sources, like me, should not be tried under the Espionage Act where they can't plead public interest at all. But the newspapers never got behind us very much.
#People #Assange #Ellsberg #EspionageAct #Law
Category: Human and Civil Rights