40pc of mums drink while pregnant. So?

A friend on Facebook brought this story to my attention:

The Australian Institute of Family Studies has found almost 40 per cent of Australian women drink while they are pregnant.

The study examined more than 10,000 children born between 1999-00 and 2003-04.

In the second group, 38 per cent of mothers reported drinking alcohol at some stage of their pregnancy, 10 percentage points higher than the first group.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the study on the Institute’s website so I was unable to take a closer look at it. I say ‘unfortunately’ because the news story omits the most relevant detail: how much they are drinking. The best designed study I’ve seen on the topic found that children “born to mothers who drank up to 1–2 drinks per week or per occasion during pregnancy were not at increased risk of clinically relevant behavioural difficulties or cognitive deficits”. Here is the summary from Discovery:

Final results of the study, published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, agreed with previous work that children born to heavy binge drinkers do worst on developmental tests, because excessive exposure to alcohol in the womb kills nerve cells and causes brain damage.

The kids of teetotalers did almost as poorly, however, reflecting the complicated phenomenon that people who never drink have poor outcomes on many measures of health.

But the study found no evidence that light drinking during pregnancy causes emotional or learning problems in children through the age of five. In some tests of vocabulary and pattern creation, boys actually did best if their moms drank a little while carrying them. The findings confirmed what the researchers had found when the kids were three years old.

So the fact that “40% of mums drink while pregnant” could be harmless or horrifying depending on whether they have one or two drinks every now and then or are putting Bacardi 151 in their cereal every morning. Leaving out this crucial detail renders the article virtually meaningless, though I have a hard time believing that this was reported for any other reason than giving Helen Lovejoy types something to tut tut about.

Another interesting tidbit came later in the story:

In 2001 Commonwealth guidelines advised it was safe to drink small amounts, but two years ago it was changed to recommend no alcohol consumption during pregnancy.

Since the study is–as Fred Bookstein, a statistician who studies fetal alcohol spectrum disorders put it–”such a good study that it should shut down this line of research”, this suggests Australia is moving backward from acknowledging the best scientific research to simply demonizing alcohol because, fuck it, why not? Ugh.

Good news out of Melbourne.

Out of all the stupid regulations floating around the world, minimum parking requirements shit me the most. The basic idea is that new developments should include an adequate amount of parking, which seems simple enough. Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhat more complex. Parking minimums are decided based on precise but wildly inaccurate methodology, with plenty of built in assumptions about what transport should look like. The result is sprawl and insidious feedback loops.

Progress on eliminating parking minimums has been slow, so it’s always heartening to see news stories like this:

The legal number of spaces per dwelling could be cut from two to zero in dozens of activity zones to accommodate Melbourne’s booming population.

And the carpark requirement is set to be halved in many residential, entertainment and business centres outside those zones.

Fingers crossed. Further down the article is a tidbit that adds more weight (as if it were needed) to the all-politicians-are-full-of-shit thesis. The proposal was finalised by the previous Labor government, but now that they are opposition it seems that their own (great) idea would now lead to “parking chaos”. The horror.

For the single best overview of the effects of bad parking regulations get amongst Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.

UPDATE: I totally forgot about the Exo building in The Docklands, a 12 story building that has 8(!) stories of parking. If anyone knows anything about why this building has such an absurd amount of parking please leave a note in the comments.

If I don’t find something to panic about, I’m going to start panicking.

A couple of weeks ago the World Health Organisation “announced that radio-frequency electromagnetic fields generated by mobiles are ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’”, prompting a fair bit of this kind of thing:

Kent Brockman: “So, professor: would you say it’s time for everyone to panic?”
Professor: “Yes I would, Kent.”

Fortunately for those of us who hate being without our phones and also hate getting incurable brain tumours that bring on a horrible premature death, the phone/cancer thing doesn’t really seem to be true:

‎”In May 2010, following a landmark, decade-long study undertaken by teams in 13 countries, the IARC reported that no adverse health effects could be associated with the use of mobile phones. Indeed, the group went so far as to highlight the biggest risk to mobile-phone users as being, not brain cancer, but road-traffic injuries caused by talking while driving. As for the heating effects of radio waves, the increase in temperature of the skin caused by holding a mobile phone close to the ear was found to be an order of magnitude less than that caused by being exposed to direct sunlight.

The Group 2B classification the IARC has now adopted for mobile phones refers to “possible”, not “probable” (Group 2A) nor “proven” (Group 1), carcinogens—and ranks the mobile phone’s health risk alongside the chance of getting cancer from coffee, petrol fumes and surgical implants such as stents and false teeth. In other words, pretty small and, even if such effects were ever detected, nothing to get hysterical about.”

And another one for good measure:

A number of points can help put the perplexing anxiety about the potentially dire consequences of using a cellphone in perspective. First, brain tumors are extremely rare, and their incidence has changed little in most advanced industrial countries over the past two decades. In Scandinavia, which has excellent registration of all cancer cases and where cellphone use was widespread early on, there is no evidence of an increase in different types of brain tumor.

Second, cellphone technology makes use of radio frequency energy, which is millions of times less powerful than ionizing radiation, such as X-rays and gamma rays that can damage DNA and other molecules in a cell and potentially initiate cancer. There is no known mechanism whereby radio frequency energy can induce or promote cancer.

Now that that’s settled, can we all please move on and find some other perfectly safe thing to panic about?

Campaign finance reform

Andrew Norton has a very good new report out on campaign finance reform. It gives an overview of proposed changes to campaign finance legislation, both at the state and federal level, and presents the (correct, in my opinion) case for a relatively unregulated approach to the rules around campaign financing.

The whole report is worth reading, but I want to highlight one small part I thought was interesting. I get the impression that a good number of people think of “campaign finance” and a euphemism for cigar-chomping billionaires playing Anton Aicher with the political system. And it is this kind of thought that elicits a gut reaction in favour of campaign finance reform. Get the money out of politics, and all that. What is overlooked is that a lot of groups have myriad interests they want to see protected: unions, advocacy groups, various other NGOs, etc. So banning “third party” donations affects these groups too, not all of whom are particularly self interested.

Furthermore, of all these special interests the most self interested tend to be large companies and unions — both of which generate income from their own activities. This is important. One of the more popular proposals, endorsed by Barry O’Farrell, is to limit campaign contributions to individuals only. However, due to the aforementioned incomes, the practical effect of this is to further entrench the power of the traditional vested interests over other, often more public minded or ideological, groups.

The failure of the War on Drugs

Just a quick note to point out that The Global Commission on Drug Policy has released a report on the failure of the War on Drugs. From the executive summary:

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.

‘Nuff said, really. The commission boasts some big names, so this report will (hopefully) make a noticeable impact in convincing leaders to adopt a more liberal approach to drug legislation. Do read the whole thing.

Related: Here is Glenn Greenwald on drug decriminalisation in Portugal, a must read. And here is an old Milton Friedman video on why drugs should be legal.

HT: Marginal Revolution
 

Melbourne’s bike share program and mandatory helmet laws.

This story popped up in my Facebook feed yesterday:

One year since its launch the Melbourne bike share scheme has failed to gain traction with rider numbers falling short of expectations.

Which is kind of a shame but not really a surprise. What caught my eye, however, was this passage:

Compulsory helmet laws added to the project’s woes with riders forced to bring a helmet or buy one before hiring a bike.

There is evidence that cyclist safety has a lot to do with the number of cyclists in a given area. It makes sense. Motorists become used to driving around cyclists, cyclists are more visible in numbers than if they are ridin’ solo, etc. So if there is a trade off to be made between eliminating helmet laws[1] in order to increase the number of people cycling, it seems like a no-brainer.

[1] Assuming that helmet laws improve safety at all, a notion that is far from clear. It is probable that any safety increases gained by wearing a helmets could be offset by increased risk taking and indeed there seems to be some evidence suggesting that the presence of a helmet on a cyclist can even change the behaviour of passing motorists for the worse.

In which I take a link dump the size of a Christmas ham.

A few more interesting reads from around the place:

1. Tyler Cowen has a longish essay on income inequality that reestablishes exactly how great a thinker he is. Some brilliant and illuminating papers on income inequality that I’ve read recently are here, here and here. The Will Wilkinson one is the best I think. I’m come to think that frets about inequality are largely a red herring.

2. Steven Landsburg presents some data about what kinds of things correlate with sexual promiscuity. Spoiler:

The most promiscuous men are those who have paid for sex, been threatened with a gun, support abortion rights and know people with AIDS. The least promiscuous are those who spend time at church and report high satisfaction from family life. The most promiscuous women are those who have been punched, believe homosexuality is not wrong, and spend time in bars. The least promiscuous women are those who are patriotic and spend time in church.

How the media would report this: “Want more sex? Study says: ‘Befriend someone with AIDS!’”

3. Some Atheist-bait from Eric Barker:

“Participants subliminally primed with Christian words displayed more covert racial prejudice against African-Americans (Study 1) and more general negative affect toward African-Americans (Study 2) than did persons primed with neutral words.”

Anyone want to take a shot as to what’s going on there?

4. A few thoughts from Reihan Salam on Diane Ravitch. Typically good stuff from Reihan. Speaking of education policy, here’s some research claiming that competition from private schools boosts performance not only within the private schools themselves, but system wide. And here’s a good, long interview with Diance Ravitch.

Neat little speed camera idea.

Stockholm, Sweden has adopted a Volkswagon “Fun Theory” competition winning idea by Kevin Richardson that not only tickets speeding drivers, but photographs drivers that are going under the speed limit, entering them into a lottery that uses the speeding fines as its prizes. More proof, as if it were needed, that incentives matter.

Radley Balko on speed cameras, statistical tomfoolery and perverse incentives here.

Pictures from the Queanbeyan flood.

A few pictures I snapped around town, as of 10.30am. All from the east side.

The McDonalds roundabout, completely submerged:

The car dealership next to McDonalds:

The block of flats just before the main bridge. The park next to it was also flooded:

Carport from the block of flats on the corner of Mowatt and Trinculo. There were a lot of cars submerged in that area:

The river from Mowatt Street. You can just see a sign that sits on the side of Trinculo Place. Trinculo seems to be completely under:

Another shot of Trinculo Place:

This is the park next to/behind Hungry Jacks:

The same park. Unfortunately it looks like the art centre has been completely swamped:

UPDATE: More photos available here.

Photo of the day: Vanuatu.

A beautiful and fascinating country.