Sad, no good, very bad, depressing reality reported by the Houston Chronicle:

Over a decade ago, the officials arbitrarily decided what percentage of students should get special education services — 8.5 percent — and since then they have forced school districts to comply by strictly auditing those serving too many kids.

Their efforts, which started in 2004 but have never been publicly announced or explained, have saved the Texas Education Agency billions of dollars but denied vital supports to children with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, epilepsy, mental illnesses, speech impediments, traumatic brain injuries, even blindness and deafness.

Special education rates have fallen to the lowest levels in big cities, where the needs are greatest. Houston ISD and Dallas ISD provide special ed services to just 7.4 percent Tweet this link and 6.9 percent of students, respectively. By comparison, about 19 percent of kids in New York City get services. In all, among the 100 largest school districts in the U.S., only 10 serve fewer than 8.5 percent of their students. All 10 are in Texas.

An embarrassing and frankly sadistic cover up.

When asked about the drop at a 2010 state Senate Education Committee hearing, [special education director Eugene] Lenz did not mention the target.

“We fundamentally believe it has a lot to do with improving general education,” he said.

Fundamental beliefs sound a lot of like lies and crazy talk.

Also, I thought everyone actually involved in teaching children agrees that the increased emphasis on teaching toward standardized tests/metrics in young children while simultaneously cutting budgets for anything remotely enjoyable was making “general education” worse.

Very long but excellent journalism in Mother Jones from Shane Bauer, who spent 4 months working undercover in a Louisiana private prison. Hint: it’s terrible. Here’s one terrible facet from an almost endless number of ways in which this system is failing:

If [an inmate] were sent to the hospital, CCA would be contractually obligated to pay for his stay. For a for-profit company, this presents a dilemma. Even a short hospital stay is a major expense for an inmate who brings the company about $34 per day. And that’s aside from the cost of having two guards keep watch over him. […]

One day, I meet a man with no legs in a wheelchair. His name is Robert Scott. (He consented to having his real name used.) He’s been at Winn 12 years. “I was walking when I got here,” he tells me. “I was walking, had all my fingers.” I notice he is wearing fingerless gloves with nothing poking out of them. “They took my legs off in January and my fingers in June. Gangrene don’t play. I kept going to the infirmary, saying, ‘My feet hurt. My feet hurt.’ They said, ‘Ain’t nothin’ wrong wicha. I don’t see nothin’ wrong wicha.’ They didn’t believe me, or they talk bad to me—’I can’t believe you comin’ up here!'”

His medical records show that in the space of four months he made at least nine requests to see a doctor. He complained of sore spots on his feet, swelling, oozing pus, and pain so severe he couldn’t sleep. When he visited the infirmary, medical staff offered him sole pads, corn removal strips, and Motrin. He says he once showed his swollen foot, dripping with pus, to the warden. On one of these occasions, Scott alleges in a federal lawsuit against CCA, a nurse told him, “Ain’t nothing wrong with you. If you make another medical emergency you will receive a disciplinary write-up for malingering.” He filed a written request to be taken to a hospital for a second opinion, but it was denied.

Eventually, numbness spread to his hands, but the infirmary refused to treat him. His fingertips and toes turned black and wept pus. Inmates began to fear his condition was contagious. When Scott’s sleeplessness kept another inmate awake, the inmate threatened to kill him if he was not moved to another tier. A resulting altercation drew the attention of staff, who finally sent him to the local hospital.

Just gruesome.

Capitalism is pretty great if you want to drive down the price of electronics. It does less well in industries without meaningful competition that traffic in human rights and services. If you can make more money by denying service, then it’s in a company’s best interest to provide the barest minimum possible and stop slashing just before losing business.

Sad thing is, despite how scummy the CCA prisons clearly are, the parallels with the US healthcare system are pretty easy to make.

Two great longish weekend reads:

Vox’s The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists:

Scientists need more carrots to entice them to pursue replication in the first place. As it stands, researchers are encouraged to publish new and positive results and to allow negative results to linger in their laptops or file drawers.

This has plagued science with a problem called “publication bias” — not all studies that are conducted actually get published in journals, and the ones that do tend to have positive and dramatic conclusions.

And David McRaney’s fun discussion of survivorship bias.

The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy territory. They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage. Over and over again, they saw that the bullet holes tended to accumulate along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body. Wings. Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you put the extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision. Putting the armor there wouldn’t improve their chances at all.

Embedded in both:

You can’t just look at success (or successful people) to achieve meaningful success or become successful (corollary: data is not the plural of anecdote). Arguably more important is looking at the failures to see why they fail. And if both groups do things the same, then it’s not the method.1It’s the madness.

Also, this applies to every self-help/self-improvement personal story you hear (entertaining, potentially inspiring, and scientifically without merit).

Maciej Cegłowski runs pinboard, a fantastic and fantastically simple bookmarking site (it’s what I use to power the interesting links sidebar section of this site). He’s also a level-headed, funny, and cogent writer on software and technology. From the transcript of his recent talk on the moral economy of tech:

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.

This hubris reminds me of many of the physicians, especially those described in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of Maladies (which I finally got around to reading and is excellent). William Halstead was a brilliant surgeon who tried and unabashedly failed to treat metastatic cancer with ever more radical surgery, sure, but then you have Ben Carson going from talented surgeon to laughable failed politician.

Intellectual and technical gifts are wonderful, but then it becomes easy for people to not only overstate their own prowess but to mistakenly believe that their competency applies undiminished to disparate fields. (Of course this doesn’t apply to me, only other people).

Great read.

Less than a year after ruining the flavor of diet Pepsi by switching from aspartame to sucralose due to “customer demand,” Pepsi plans to bring back the original formulation.

When PepsiCo removed aspartame from Diet Pepsi in August, it said the change was the No. 1 request by customers. Industry executives have blamed the declining sale of diet sodas on concerns people have about the ingredient.

All the fanfare around the change belied the fact that if you think “health” concerns are the most actionable criteria for soda drinkers over something like taste, then you’re terrible at running a company. I drink a ton of diet soda, but I’m not going to pretend it’s the healthy beverage choice. People are leaving soda predominantly to drink water as an overall healthier choice, not just because aspartame is uniquely abhorrent as an artificial sweetener (even if people loudly say it is), but because artificial sweeteners are not natural/organic/magical/goodforyou. And is water is obviously the best beverage choice (other than coffee in excess and alcohol in moderation, both of which can make you nearly immortal).

The old version is going to be an additional offering in the Pepsi lineup and not a return for the flagship product (which is probably still a mistake). The new formulation is terrible: I noticed the change before I’d even heard the news. In a can (without tons of ice), it’s almost completely unpalatable.

From FiveThirtyEight’s article, What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?, discussing the results of the MINCOME experiment in Canada in the 1970s where families received a basic income, no strings attached:

Families receiving MINCOME had fewer hospitalizations, accidents and injuries, Forget found. Mental health hospitalizations fell dramatically. And the high school completion rate ticked up during the years of the experiment, with 16-to-18-year-old boys, in particular, more likely to finish school. Younger adolescent girls were less likely to give birth before age 25, and when they did, they had fewer kids.

The program brought most recipients above Canada’s poverty line. And the employment effects in Dauphin were modest. “For primary earners — those with full-time jobs — there was virtually no decline” in work, Forget said. “Nobody was quitting their jobs.” Cash from the government eased families’ economic anxiety, allowing them to invest in their health and plan over a longer horizon.

The idea of a basic income (instead of means tested “welfare”) is gaining traction. Several countries (Canada, Finland, Switzerland, Kenya, etc) are planning modern experiments of their own. Politics and logistics aside, how else will our economies function when much of the conventional labor force is inevitably replaced by machines?

The popular press has been all over a new study out of McMaster University in PLOS One that demonstrated that 1 minute of intense exercise in the midst of 10 minutes of lesser activity had similar cardiovascular benefits to 45 minutes of moderate exercise (in otherwise sedentary men).

The major novel finding from the present study was that 12 weeks of SIT in previously inactive men improved insulin sensitivity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and skeletal muscle mitochondrial content to the same extent as MICT, despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and training time commitment. SIT involved 1 minute of intense intermittent exercise, within a time commitment of 10 minutes per session, whereas MICT consisted of 50 minutes of continuous exercise at a moderate pace.

Which is neat, but the press headlines are all about the 1 minute part. Sadly. I would love to be convinced that exactly 1 minute of high knees could assuage my guilt of being sedentary and loving Cinnabon. But it’s not a 1-minute workout. It’s a ten-minute workout of which 1 minute hurts. That’s actually longer than the 7-min workout (app) that made the circuit a couple years ago.

This does dovetail nicely with this rundown in Vox summarizing the research demonstrating that, overall, exercise doesn’t help you lose much weight. This comes up all the time, and people are wrong about this all the time. Exercise is fantastic for you in so many ways, but its benefits aren’t primarily related to weight loss.

One 2009 study shows that people seemed to increase their food intake after exercise — either because they thought they burned off a lot of calories or because they were hungrier. Another review of studies from 2012 found people generally overestimated how much energy exercise burned and ate more when they worked out.

The popularization of nutritional science in general has led to a number of pervasive myths due to a conflation of correlation and causation (as well as bad science), like how millions of people still think that eating breakfast will magically make you skinnier.2As opposed to the findings of the actual observational study, which noted that people who ate breakfast tended to be of lower weight

The overestimation of weight loss due to exercise is so pervasive in part because it’s so ostensibly logical. Exercise burns calories, therefore I should lose weight if I exercise. But even ignoring the hormonal and behavior/consumption reactions to exercise that can erase the calorie losses, I always just tell people the same thing when it comes to weight loss in the real world:

What you eat matters more. Which takes longer, eating the Cinnabon, or working it off?

The “Shrink” episode of Radiolab was fascinating: we thought viruses were all small, but that was a consequence of the method we used to first discover them. But now we know better, and there are some giant viruses out there, some even bigger than bacteria and large enough to get their own viruses.

From Bloomberg, an interactive infographic that looks at interprofessional marriage from the 2014 US Census.

Female doctors, whether gay or straight, tend to marry other doctors.

Straight male doctors also marry doctors, but they’re almost as likely to marry nurses or schoolteachers. According to the census data, gay male doctors most commonly marry nurses.