Instead, the Nature commentary, titled “A market approach to saving the whales,” begins with how whaling has doubled since the early 1990s, despite the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) moratorium on whaling. The authors go on to propose how a whale conservation market might save some of the 2000 whales destined for slaughter this year – never bothering to note plenty of work in economics, at this point painfully popular, on how putting a price tag on behavior most people see as negative (e.g., picking your children up late from daycare) can actually exacerbate, not temper, a trend (e.g., more parents arrive late because the market has now undermined the norm and the financial penalty is less burdensome than guilt or shame). In the case of whaling, an international price tag, which the authors argue would allow conservationists to buy the lives of whales, would create a clear incentive in favor of whaling and undermine the norm (a norm that Sea Shepherd is using its multi-million dollar media-driven campaigns to cultivate and spread — a hard-to-quantify but valuable addition to the 350 Sea-Shepherd-saved minke whales that the authors report).

This is economics at its most naïve – the same Milton Friedman number crunching that might try to justify markets for child labor, organs, or adoption.

But worry not. This idea operates on the premise of a ‘cap and trade’ system. It would not be an open market; some bright guys would regulate how many whales could be taken each year – a job that that sounds suspiciously like the current role of the IWC, which, as the authors note, is still arguing, thanks mostly to Japan, over the numbers. So much for an improvement on the current situation, and so much for the free market.

The chimpanzee research article is more nuanced. The economic arguments are presented (the average chimp in captivity can cost $642,400 for its lifetime; surprisingly, that number does not include a college education), but the authors never pretend the money is the reason that chimpanzee research is in question. Chimp research might be expensive, but even if we could lower costs by setting up shop in Juarez, Mexico, it’s doubtful public opinion would budge.

We know the reasons chimpanzee research is so distressing: they are too cute, too clever, and too much like us to subject them to the pains of captivity and medical research, even if the conditions have been improved since the horrors discussed in Roger Fouts’ Next of Kin. The ghosts of chimpanzees past haunt our conscience (for evidence, see the film Project Nim). And, most important, we just don’t need chimpanzees to answer most medical questions. In 2010, the EU banned the use of all great apes in research.

Similar to chimp research, it is wrong to think that the question of whaling can be distilled to an economic argument. If it was, whaling would have ended long ago because the enterprise is, in fact, heavily subsidized and, in fact, a money losing past-time, which the authors in the Nature commentary rather conveniently overlook. Yet whaling continues. Not for food, research, or oil. Whaling has continued as an accessory to the notion of empire, which is why numbers are nice but ultimately irrelevant, just as they are in the fight to expand the empire of our morality – to our neighbors, across continents, to our next of kin, and deep into the oceans.

All species of marine turtles (“Squirt” and “Crush”) and more than half of all hammerhead sharks (“Anchor”), mackerel sharks (“Bruce” and “Chum”), and eagle rays (“Mr. Ray”) are threatened. Seahorses (“Sheldon”) are the most threatened group of bony fish in Finding Nemo, with two in five species at risk of extinction. Clownfish aren’t safe now, either, and they certainly weren’t in 2003 after the film’s release when local RotoRooter dispatch centers received calls from families whose kids flushed the fish after watching the movie. Charisma, in other words, is not enough. Despite a demonstrated need for conservation action, regulation of trade in endangered marine species is severely deficient for those with high economic value, like sharks.

Led by Loren McClenachan, who has also done impressive research on shifting baselines in the Florida Keys, the authors used a series of online databases for their research, including the World Register of Marine Species, Fishbase, and the Tree of Life to create lists of the marine species. They evaluated extinction risk with the IUCN Red List assessments conservation efforts in part by using the CITES database. Their study was published online today in the journal Conservation Letters.

Citation: McClenachan, L., A. Cooper, K. Carpenter, and N. Dulvy. in press. Extinction risk and conservation bottlenecks for charismatic marine species. Published online December 13 in the journal Conservation Letters.

From sardines to coral reefs, from Newfoundland to intergenerational optimism — there is a melange on scientific material on the state of the oceans. Many of the chapters have a New England element, reminding us that most trends we see in the North Atlantic — the boom and bust of cod fishing, the invention and shortcomings of fisheries models, the rise, fall, and uncertainty in quantifying the effects of industrial whaling — are harbingers of trends to come worldwide.

Given the diverse backgrounds of the contributors, this book gives a wide view of what the past means for the future: what cod populations really looked like, how to detect genetic bottlenecks (for instance, a population of 100 female whales loses 0.5 percent of its genetic variation every generation), why we need to write communication into scientific budgets. Editors Jeremy Jackson, Karen Alexander, and Enric Sala have tied all the threads together (full disclosure: they are friends and colleagues, as are many of the chapter authors). The book makes excellent reading for anyone or any course interested in the background and methods of historical ecology, introductory population genetics, and science communication.

In a study published last month in Biology Letters, scientists working on the beaches in Zanzibar, Tanzania, tethered a female fiddler crab 10 cm in front of a randomly designated male that could either see or not see his neighbors. (The female was held in place by superglueing a 1 cm piece of cotton thread to the crab’s carapace and attaching it to a nail pushed into the sand.)

In the low-competition treatment, scientists startled the neighboring males into their burrows and enclosed them by covering the holes with bottle caps. Without other males competing, the solo male wave rate was 11.5 waves per minute. When the male crab could see his fellow competition, his median wave rate was about 40 percent faster — 16.5 waves per minute.

When it seems fiddler crabs throw their claws in the air, and wave them like they just don’t care — they do. The crabs care whether there is immediate competition.

Instead, at The New York Times, I can get depressed vicariously by reading the more prominent coverage of politicians and their crazy thoughts, like potential Republican Presidential nominee Herman Cain’s on the Koch brothers. Cain says he is “their brother from another mother.”

The Koch brothers are the anti climate-change, anti-democracy, co-founders of the Tea Party movement. They gave $150,000 to the physicist and former climate skeptic Richard Muller, who planned to prove everyone wrong. The brothers have no trouble lying to the public (for instance, saying they have no interest in the Keystone XL pipeline, when they do), but Richard Muller apparently does. At the end of October, Muller wrote up his results and conclusion in The Wall Street Journal, in a piece that gives away its findings in the title: The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.

The debate about warming might be non-existent, but human behavior has hardly noticed. This week, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab shows the biggest one-year rise in global CO2 emissions: a 6 percent jump in 2010, which means CO2 is rising faster than the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the 2007 IPCC report, which were already unimaginable, like massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity.

All of this to say that it has been very difficult week to ignore climate change.

Thankfully, today’s news comes with more than simply information. There is an event. Thousands of protestors, including actors, Nobel peace prize winner, and, of course, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, are planning to encircle the White House at 2pm EST in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — a 1,661-mile project to transport oil from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Extracting crude from sand emits three times more carbon than conventional oil production, contributing to global warming that Obama pledged to fight.

“You can’t occupy the White House, but you can surround it,” said McKibben. The group is calling for the President to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, a decision President Obama says he will make after the results of an environmental-review are publicly released.

*Update November 9, 2011: More than ten thousand people gathered in Washington, D.C. and Randy Olson happened to bump into them. Next, Tar Sands Action plans visits to Obama’s 2012 campaign offices in all 50 states on November 28 to tell them that we expect the President to live up to his promises and reject the pipeline. Whether you care about climate policy or not, this is an interesting campaign to watch.

*Update November 12, 2011: The Obama Administration will be requesting a 12-18 month review for the Keystone XL pipeline, effectively eliminating the potential the project would go through, according to most analysts. In an email sent from 350.org, Bill McKibben wrote: “Some in our movement will say that this decision is just politics as usual: that the President wants us off the streets — and off his front lawn — until after the election, at which point the administration can approve the pipeline, alienating its supporters without electoral consequence. The President should know that if this pipeline proposal somehow reemerges from the review process we will use every tool at our disposal to keep it from ever being built.” I thought this paragraph that took a straightforward approach to skepticism. Many campaigns seem to assume that its supporters are too sensitive to disappointment to be this honest.

I queried ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ in the following databases of academic literature: Google Scholar, Scirus, Web of Science, SpringerLink, Ingenta, the journal Science, the journal Nature, and JSTOR. In the results below, you’ll find 50% to 990% more publications with the keyword ‘reward’ than ‘punishment’, with the exception of the JSTOR database, which lists more articles with ‘punishment’ — perhaps because it incorporates much more from the humanities and contains more historical research.

Why do scientists seem to be more focused on reward?

*Update November 12, 2011: Some scientists took beef (fairly) with this search, particularly because reward is used across disciplines in different fashions (think computer science) and because reward is both a verb and noun (while punishment is just a noun). To add a little more robustness, here is a similar search for ‘altruism’ and ‘defection’ that yields even more pronounced results (and more variable; check out Ingenta) in favor of academics favoring research related to reward more than punishment.

In an experiment, participants were given a series of photographs. One was the real deal and the others are tweaked along a spectrum up to 50% better and 50% worse looking. Subjects were asked to choose the real photograph and, more often than not chose a face that is more attractive than their own. And that’s just our view of how we look.

People prefer letters found in their own names and numbers found in their own birthdays. Overconfidence is common, and it affects men more than women, at least in arithmetic contests. When given the option between getting paid for correct answers and competing with three other people where the winner takes all the earnings (presumably 4 times as profitable), 35 percent of women choose to compete — close to the 25 percent you would expect (due to probabilities about the intelligence of the other three players). Not so with men, 75 percent of whom chose to compete.

And bad news for mothers and fathers: the brighter children are, the more often they lie. Trivers also points out that that, when lying, we tend to use “I” and “me” less often, instead using other pronouns, as if to distance ourselves from the lie. The explanation for our enlarged neocortex is still hotly debated, but the author puts his chips on our ability to deceive and to detect deceit as the reason for big human brains. He shares how deception research relates to immune function, airplane accidents, and warfare.  Toward the end of the book, Trivers also takes a rare introspective look at the structure of the social sciences and the biases that must exist in fields like psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics, which inform the way we see ourselves in this world: “one might expect their very structure to be easily deformed by self-deception.”

“The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools,” wrote Herbert Spencer, whose line lends itself to Trivers’ title. To fix some of the world’s follies, we should lower the shield and better understand deception and our own self-deception by absorbing the wisdom, risky ideas, and generous admissions of his own foolishness in Robert Trivers’ Folly of Fools. The truth can hurt, but deceit can, too.

It’s also fun to browse old Apple ads. The one below is my favorite:

LAUGHS! from Everynone on Vimeo.

2. This is an opportunity to have a different interaction with a fish than just eating it. You can look into its eye and appreciate its harmlessness, size, and speed. You can see the gills in action.

3. Whale sharks are absolutely harmless. They filter-feed on plankton (you’ll even get some in your hair), which is what brings them to the surface. They also bear live young, which is part of their vulnerability.

4. Do it while you can. Whale sharks are listed on Appendix II of CITES. They are internationally traded for their shark fins and also wanted for their meat. Read more about their status and threats official CITES documents.

5. Support the tourism industry. The local economy of Isla Holbox, Mexico, where I visited, was built upon whale shark tourism (and it’s fairly obvious they are more valuable as spectacles than as soup). I was also impressed by their rules: only snorkeling is allowed, swimmers have to wear a wetsuit or a lifejacket so that they stay buoyant and surface-constrained, no touching, and only two people in the water (plus a guide) with the shark at a time.

6. Afterward, you’ll want to support conservation groups doing great work to save sharks, like WildAid, BLOOM, and Vancouver’s own Shark Truth (whose founder, Claudia Li, went with me to Mexico last month and is the co-star in the photos here; see an article that features her work today in the Vancouver Sun about the certification of a BC shark fishery — another questionable move by the MSC).

7. There are other great things to do. Not far from Isla Holbox there are cenotes, Mayan ruins, and diving.

For those who disagree back to school radio ads exclaiming “It’s not what you learn, but what you wear” — here are a few favorites and soon-to-be favorites in teaching evolution:

–Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish and, more important, his interview with Stephen Colbert;

–Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True and blog of the same title;

–Carl Bergstom’s co-authored soon-to-be-released (November 2011) Evolution textbook;

–Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos;

–And, of course, South Park’s version of the theory of evolution (not appropriate for all audiences).

We’ve catalogued about 1.2 million species in the last 250 years (24.8 species per taxonomist’s career at a cost of about US$48,500 per species). Assuming the current rate and cost, the authors note that describing Earth’s remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion.

The slow rate in the description of species means that many species could become extinct before we know they even existed. (For an example, see this recent story about a newly discovered Hawaiian bird that could already be extinct.)

Taxonomic experts had suggested a range of 3 to 100 million species, and these authors narrow it down. Of the 8.7 million species, an estimated 2.2 million are marine species.

This study reminded me of one of my favorite moment’s in a Dean Young poem: You’re not alone. Read the full poem here.

The overfishing of Chilean sea bass got a bunch of attention: Al Gore got in trouble for eating it at his daughter’s wedding, the fish was de-shelved at Whole Foods and Wal-Mart and was boycotted by chefs. Then in stepped the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which certified a small, distinct population of Chilean sea bass in UK territorial waters, in the midst of heavy overfishing of the Antarctic populations (read more on the back story here). This led to contention during certification, with particular emphasis on the likelihood that the two populations would be mixed in the marketplace. Don’t worry, the MSC said. We have an excellent traceability scheme, even in a seafood market where mislabeling is pervasive. We’ll be able to easily trace and separate the good, abundant fish from the bad, endangered fish.

The worry was justified. Consumers are being duped.

In a study published in Current Biology this week, authors used mtDNA to genetically analyzed 36 samples of MSC-certified Chilean sea bass. Not all the samples were from the certified stock in UK waters. In fact, not all the samples were D. eleginoides – 3 were another species altogether. Out of the remaining 33, 5 were not from the certified area. At least 15% mislabeled. Also looked at 19 not-certified Chilean sea bass samples, 13 of which were labeled as having originated from Chile, 46% (6 of 13) were not from Chile. Read more about the study at Science.

The difficulty with MSC-certified seafood, unlike organic food, for instance, is that the product is similar but the means of production is different. This makes it very difficult to detect fraud, especially in a simple way. These scientists used genetic sequencing to determine if the MSC’s claims of traceability were correct. The fact that uncertified fish are masquerading as MSC is more evidence that the MSC makes false promises to consumers who genuinely want to do the right thing. Not only do we need to question whether the certification has meaning, but now we must ask whether eco-labeled fish are actually certified.

In any case, the works were thought-provoking and definitely worth a MOMA visit. Among my favorites were Level, the 1997 performance piece where participants all wore blue foam footware tweaking each person’s height to 2 meters, BugPlug, which turns off devices when it detects human absence, and Cross-fire, a short film of an emotional dialogue across a dinner table (follow the link and see what I mean).

It was also obvious that the artists, if that is how they should be defined, were overwhelmingly young — with the birth year most often sometime between 1977-1983.

Sometimes mixes between art and science are dull or esoteric, but everything at seemed to genuinely belong. My problem was what was missing. The overall assumption of “Talk to Me” is that technology has played a positive role in communicating, but everyone knows that isn’t always true (consider the many couples on their respective cell phones at restaurant dinners). The SMS slingshot ambitiously stated its use to reclaim “increasingly commercialized urban space” by projecting texts on huge digital screens in urban areas. What about the increasingly digitalized space, like the one that exists just outside the MOMA in Times Square?

Presumably, the exhibit will be a huge success. It’s fun, interactive, and smart. But it was hard to say how the crowd felt today because there was no way to talk back. The curators subtly executed the one sentiment I didn’t hear lifted among the fray — the one that sometimes says: “Don’t talk to me.”

Financial executives received almost $20 billion in bonuses in 2008 amid a serious financial crisis and a $245 billion government bailout. In 2008, more than 3 million American homes went into foreclosure because of mortgage blunders those same executives helped facilitate. Citigroup proposed to buy a $50 million corporate jet in early 2009, shortly after receiving $45 billion in taxpayer funds. Days later, President Barack Obama took note in an Oval Office interview. About the jet, he said, “They should know better.” And the bonuses, he said, were “shameful.”

Read the full essay here.

Watch President Obama talk about “the height of irresponsibility” and “shameful” behavior of Wall St. bankers who “should know better”:

Amazon Mechanical Turk was initially used for hard-for-machines-to-handle tasks such as categorizing information, and translating audio to text. Amazon uses the Turk platform for its iPhone app where potential shoppers take a photo of a product they see and want and receive a link to that product on Amazon. Computers are not that sophisticated (yet), just like the 18th century Turk could not really play chess. Instead, behind that Amazon link is a human being voluntarily matching that iPhone image with an Amazon product in exchange for pennies. Academics are now taking advantage of Turk, and, from my own experience with the difficulties of recruiting students to experiments, I suspect Turk’s use will only increase.

In the old days, psychology departments would trade undergraduates surveys for course credit or some other incentive. Then came the Internet and a lot of survey research moved online. Now, with Amazon Mechanical Turk, it seems the days of begging students to participate in surveys is over, as noted when a colleague of mine was about to present at a conference and only 6 graduate students had completed her survey. I told her about Turk, and by the next morning she had an additional 30 samples (and only because 30 is where she set her limit). This is one of the biggest pros of Turk: recruitment is entirely painless. Furthermore, you can exclude certain demographic profiles from taking the survey. Using their in-house survey platform is easiest, but scientists have successfully recruited workers to an external site.

On top of that, Turk labor is cheap. The average wage is $1.40 per hour (of course, you’ll get better work the more you pay). The cost of labor is a bit uncomfortable and I shiver at the idea of a warehouse of enslaved Amazon Turkers, but so far the participation in Turk appears entirely voluntarily. A requester (someone who asks for labor) can also refuse to pay if work is inaccurate, although workers obviously don’t like this (and can reciprocate by giving requesters negative press in the forums).

Turk also overcomes some of the concerns about the usual undergrad demographic. UBC psychologist Joe Henrich and colleagues have pointed out that Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) cultures, and particularly American undergraduates, can display psychologically unusual behavior, especially compared to the other 88% of the world’s population. Turk is subject to similar biases because the service, so far, is only available in English and to make job requests you have to have a U.S. address. However, there is a growing number of Indian workers, and the profile of U.S. subjects tends to be closer to the broader U.S. population than university students.

As with any survey, there is always the question whether people are paying attention. In the lab, it is easy to watch people (which means that answers can also differ due to the feeling of being watched). The recommendation is to plant questions in the survey that can be used to score attention and validate results. Paolacci et al. (2010) used as an example: “While watching the television, have you ever had a fatal heart attack?” If a worker answered ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’, they would discard the survey. Evidence suggests the rate of failing attention on Turk is no higher than other formats (e.g., lab, other internet survey).

So far, some indicators suggest Turk is a trustworthy source. Rand (2011) used IP address logging to verify subjects’ self-reported country of residence, and found that 97% of responses are accurate. He also compared the consistency of a range of demographic variables reported by the same subjects across two different studies, and found between 81% and 98% agreement, depending on the variable.

I wonder whether, as Turk grows, the wage will increase or decrease. Can we expect a Turk union? Will Amazon eventually instate a minimum wage? Will the system be as reliant? What will stop workers from opening multiple accounts with multiple different profiles so that they can maximize earnings? I also have questions about how Amazon Mechanical Turk can handle multi-player experimental games and how we can ensure players are not seeing or talking to one another.

For this reason, labs for human research, where the variables are easier to control, will remain necessary, for all sorts of reasons like 3+ participant interactions and experiments where the rewards are not monetary. But when it comes to research done with surveys that were traditionally administered in the lab or over a lab’s website, Turk is a great improvement and a promising tool. We can expect to see ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ as keywords in many academic papers to come.

References:
G. Paolacci, J. Chandler, & P.G. Ipeirotis. (2010) Running experiments on Amazon Mechanlical Turk. Judgment and Decision Making 5(5): 411-419. [available here]

D.G. Rand (2011) The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments. Journal of Theoretical Biology. [available here]

As for me, I am an American post-doc based at the University of British Columbia, where I also completed my Ph.D. (more about me here). This blog will explore my main interests: environmental sustainability, technology, and cooperation (specifically the roles of guilt, honor, and shame). Most of the time, these three topics will appear on the scene individually, but the interface is really intriguing, such as this neighborhood association in Leicester, England, which posts videos of litterbugs. If you’re interested, you could also check out some of our recent scientific work on honor and shame in the journal Biology Letters. Also, if you ever need to contact me, my email is guiltyplanet[at]gmail.com.