Mom scientists in the news

Although the story itself (concerning possible carcinogens in unnamed baby products) is interesting -- albeit the usual promotion of a university of its status as a major research center -- what suddenly caught my eye was what was in the the background as the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was interviewed about the results of this study.

Photos of her children (and a grandchild?) next to her two computer screens. [Guess confirmed via a bio turned up by Google.]

I thought "that was a hidden positive part of the story".

Then came the punch line, as we saw a second interview with the lead researcher. At home -- rather than in the classic p.r. laboratory shot used to lead the story -- with her new baby as she explained how she had made the decision to remove foam pads that she no longer trusted from her kid's room. Best of all, she discussed the trade off between fire safety and the risk of known carcinogens (in California, at least), suspected carcinogens, and other chemicals whose risk might not have been assessed because you don't have to prove something is safe vis-a-vis asthma or autism before using it in a product.

The sub text, successful women scientists with families, was there for some to see on the CBS Evening News. You can see the video here for yourself.

The safety issue remains an open one, as this was one of those classic preliminary studies. However, my comment would be that flame retardants are of greatest value if you have lit cigarettes, candles, or an open flame from a gas burner or fireplace near the child's bedding or car carrier. What are the odds of a fire starting in a crib if the parents and the baby don't smoke?

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Don't believe what the press is telling you!

Consider this news story (and accompanying video) from the BBC about radioactivity in the sea within 300 m of the Fukushima nuclear plant:

Levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are 1,250 times higher than the safety limit, officials say.

The readings were taken about 300m (984ft) offshore. It is feared the radiation could be seeping into groundwater from one of the reactors.

But the radiation will no longer be a risk after eight days, officials say. [Emphasis added]

There is no explicit by-line on this article, but the video contains an interview with BBC reporter Chris Hogg in Tokyo that repeats that a half life of 8 days means "that after 8 days the risk will have dissipated".

The reporter is WRONG. Twice, because that is also not what the officials said. His ignorance of basic physics, in this case a topic I always teach in a college general education class, led him to misinterpret what was actually said by a government spokesman and hence mislead the public.

The risk will not dissipate after 8 days.

First, what did the official say? The article reports that

"Generally speaking," spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama told a news conference, "radioactive material released into the sea will spread due to tides, so you need much more for seaweed and sea life to absorb it." He continued: "And, since [the iodine] has a half-life of eight days, by the time people eat the sea products its amount is likely to have diminished significantly."

This (emphasis added) is correct.

The most significant effect is dilution. Levels will be very high near the source, but get reduced significantly as the source gets mixed into a larger volume of water. (Like smoke when you are a long way from a fire.) It also matters what the ratio is of radioactive iodine to the iodine that is naturally in the water, since the seaweed can't tell the difference.

It is also correct because in 8 days the radiation level in the seawater will be half what it is today. Half. Not "dissipated", half. The radiation level of the iodine in that bay will only fall to 625 times the safe level, not zero, in those 8 days. The risk is reduced, but not gone.

But there are other factors. For example, I have no idea how long it takes from the time seaweed is harvested and when it shows up on shelves all nicely dried and packaged, but it is unlikely to be a few days. Only fresh items like milk and vegetables appear "just in time" in supermarkets. Radiation drops every day it sits in a warehouse. It falls to half after 8 days, one quarter after 16 days, one eighth after 24 days, and one sixteenth after about a month.

The obvious fact (pull out your calculator) is that what remains after a month is still 1250/16 = 78 times the safety limit if all of the iodine stayed in the ocean near the plant. This shows why dilution is so important.

Side comment 1:

The other contaminant in seafood, mercury, does not go away with time and is not as easy to detect and monitor as radiation from I-131. I-131 emits a gamma ray which can be detected through the usual plastic packaging used for seaweed, right on the shelf. Mercury requires a careful (and destructive) chemical test.

Side comment 2:

The reporter quite correctly puts attention on cesium, which has a 30 year half life. Isotopes with very short half lives are "hotter" but go away quickly, so you just have to keep your distance for a month or two. Gram for gram, cesium isn't as hot but you have to avoid it for a longer time. That can be hard to do.

However, this ignores the other significant factor, which is biological activity. Our body needs a regular supply of iodine, so it will go looking for it in anything you eat. (Naturally iodine deficient diets in the Ukraine contributed to the uptake of I-131 after Chernobyl.) Further, it gets concentrated in one place, the thyroid.

Cesium (Cs) is in the same chemical family as sodium (Na), in table salt, and potassium (K), in sports drinks and bananas, which are both essential to the operation of our body. However, since it is much heavier, I doubt if it can substitute for the many ionic processes the body uses Na and K for. Any biologist or chemist know if Cs is concentrated by the body?

By the way, one reason I knew this was a major incident was that Cs-137 could be detected above background in California. You see, it takes a significant release to see it above the Cs-137 that still remains from atmospheric nuclear testing. As big as Chernobyl was, its Cs-137 was barely detectable over the stuff left from weapons tests done decades earlier once it got diluted by one trip around the globe.

Side comment 3:

There has been no new I-131 made since fission was stopped on March 11, fifteen days ago. That means only one quarter of the original I-131 remains in the fuel rods inside the three reactors that had been operating at the time of the quake.

The most important thing in this article might be that the levels in sea water had increased by a factor of 8 in the past week. That means I-131 from inside fuel rods inside the reactor vessel is not only finding its way into the water, but a larger fraction of it has been released from the fuel rods. (There is less I-131 available to leak out, but more of what remains is getting out. Did I say that clearly enough?) This is further indication that the fuel rods have been damaged significantly, which we already knew, but might just result from the iodine -- already vented from the reactor vessel -- being washed out of the containment building as they can now pour more water onto and into the containment building.

Side comment 4:

That observation in the quotation at the top of this article, that radiation "might" be seeping into ground water, struck me as strange. There is I-131 in Tokyo drinking water. This is because Tokyo's water supply comes from surface water (mostly behind dams based on a city water department document I found), which will be contaminated by radioactive rain carrying I-131. But everyone should know that rain also soaks into the ground. Apart from geochemical processes that would capture iodine, it will go into the ground water.

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From ridiculous to sublime

Time to weigh in, quickly, on the nuclear crisis in Japan.

As I commented on a link dump at Uncertain Principles that points to a half decent article that has since been moved and corrected to some degree, the news reporting about the reactor problems was truly awful for the first day or two. What an abomination.

It has, however, improved a LOT. Tonight I was stunned at how well MSNBC covered the subject. And not just with the experts, who no longer need scare quotes around their titles, but also in a lengthy intro by Rachel Maddow on her show. Yeah, she was still a bit confused by the fact that rust is oxidation (of iron) but the oxidation of zircalloy is not rust, but the presentation was not wrong and well pitched to a (scientifically illiterate) audience.

It is worth watching on Hulu or wherever they archive it.

The real key, however, is that they have real experts. I missed the name of the guy from Sandia who was on an earlier show, but they had Frank von Hippel from Princeton on the Maddow show along with some others of similar quality but whose work is not personally known to me. Clearly a whole bunch of people were as horrified as I was by the junk that was being broadcast and had the pull to get the attention of the networks and change what is out there. It probably also helped the DOE Sec Chu can teach as well as do physics, and did a good teaching job in front of Congress.

The changes are dramatic.

The comparisons to Chernobyl are now rational, rather than nonsensical.

No idiot is out there saying that a scrammed boiling water reactor will go prompt critical if it melts down. The "expert" that didn't seem to know that the heat in the shut down plant comes from internal radioactive decay of fission products is long gone, replaced by one that knows spent fuel rods are also hot -- and "hot" with radioactive elements that live just long enough to be very dangerous if they were to be released.

OK, one Congressman (who as a physicist should know better) was out confusing a civilian nuclear power program that only uses fuel under IAEA supervision with a rogue state operating a clandestine enrichment program probably designed with help from North Korea and Pakistan, but let's ignore that one.

Actual facts, like the location of the spent fuel storage pools 40 feet in the air !! ????? !! above the containment structure in an earthquake zone, are now clearly featured in the stories. Ditto for giving radiation levels in Sv rather than in "chest x-rays" (which deliver much less radiation than they used to). Even Livermore managed to get out the fact that they have a nuclear weather forecasting program for this, and other purposes.

And I am particularly impressed that we are sending some of our specialized monitoring equipment (I'd guess it is the stuff developed to look for weapons or the result of a "dirty bomb" or an event just like this one) to Japan. I hope it works as well as advertised.

That is about all that I have time for tonight, but I will try to blog about some specific details when I get a chance.

I'll close with the most important point that hasn't been emphasized in the reporting so far, and might have confused people about the extent of the radioactive plume. Radiation detection is EXTREMELY sensitive. I heard of a case where the detectors outside of a nuclear plant were set off by the alpha radiation from the Thorium and Uranium in the smoke from a coal plant that had been pushed down to the ground by an inversion layer. A nuclear carrier would have similarly sensitive monitors on the ship, so we would need to be told the level that was detected -- not just the fact that radiation was detected -- to get a sense of what our carrier picked up off the coast of Japan. Further, it can be far more discriminating that a simple Geiger counter. You can tell what radioactive isotope is out there as well as how much, and the specific isotopes tell you where they came from. That is how people know fuel elements have been damaged without being able to see inside the plant.

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Laser fusion milestone

What better way to mark the 50th anniversary year of the laser than by producing a 669 kJ laser pulse (reported in Science), and then following that up with a 1 MJ pulse? (See BBC News article.)

Maybe getting it over the 1.2 MJ threshold and observing ignition of controlled thermonuclear fusion? This year?

They claim that it can be done this year, even though they did these initial experiments without the neutron shielding in place that is needed before doing that experiment because of the energetic neutrons that are produced by the d-t fusion reaction.

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Reason for a Liberal Arts Education

The news yesterday contained a horrifying story about how the US military leveled part of the ancient Babylon archaeological site. They apparently bulldozed mounds that were what remained of parts of guest palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's, damaged pottery that had cuneiform writing on it along with other items that date back over 2500 years, and carried on activities that damaged the reproduction of the Ishtar Gate at that site.

I am embarrassed that they did not know better, as one would expect from any decent humanities course or bible study in church school, but there is a precedent from World War II:

Kyoto.

Every time I happen to hear a story about Kyoto that mentions how it managed to survive the war, I wish they would tell the whole story. The people planning the bombing of Japan had no idea of its religious or historic significance, let alone the beauty of the temples that fill the city. The only reason it was not firebombed was that it had been put at the TOP of the list of places to use the first atom bomb! Hiroshima was number 2.

You see, in order to be sure we could see the effects of the bomb, we wanted to use the A bomb on a pristine city. The people in Hiroshima and several other cities were sure they had said a special prayer to have been spared the bombings, whereas the reality was they were in the cross hairs of something far worse than about 400 planes carrying explosives and incendiaries sufficient to burn tens of square miles.

But it happened that Secretary of War Stimson knew Kyoto well, and fought hard to get it off the list and to keep Gen. Lemay from bombing it with conventional weapons during the rest of the war. You can read the details in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Either Groves and others were ignorant of its cultural value to the world, or they wanted to destroy it for that very reason.

One would have hoped that today's generals would know something about Babylon's history and the nature of archaeological sites, if only because this city had an important role in the Bible, but apparently not. I'd hope that humanities teachers everywhere can draw on this as a teachable moment in their classes.

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Followup on Gates and the Cops

Late last week, I posted my thoughts about the Gates Arrest based on the content of the police report.

Since then, we have heard the actual content of the 911 call (or, at least, significant parts that the media consider relevant, but the transcript is available from a local paper) and it raises new questions about the approach taken by the Cambridge police, both the arresting officer and the dispatcher. Indeed, when you read the transcript, it sounds like the dispatcher was doing some profiling when asking "And what do the suitcases have to do with anything?". Not even listening, it would seem, as that got turned into "backpacks" by the time the cop reported it back to us.

So, what do I think now?

First, just because the caller says she was careful about giving the race of the two men does not mean race played no role in the call since she was not the initial witness. It was another woman who had been watching what took place. However, it is clear from the call that she never even saw one of the men - probably Gates, unless she thought Prof. Gates looked Hispanic - so his race was never an issue for her. Certainly it answers my question about what she "said", because she never said what the arresting officer claimed she told him.

The important thing now is that her statements make it very clear that the story in the police report, that she told the cop that she "observed what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the porch", was, shall we say, quite wide of the truth. She doesn't have to answer for that, but it was fun to read how the Cambridge Police Commissioner acknowledged that the police report contains a reference to race, but said the report is merely a summary of events. Wow, can you imagine a defense attorney using that to impeach the information in any report filed by that officer in the future?

But second, why was the elderly neighbor woman concerned? That was part of my earlier question, as she was the original witness, and it remains unanswered. Was she concerned because she saw dark skinned men pushing on the door? Would she have been concerned if it had been a 60 year old white man doing it with the assistance of a white Limo driver?

However, there is no question in my mind that I would want one of my neighbors to call the police if they saw something like that happening, but I think my actual neighbors (including ones who walk this area regularly) know what I look like! Similarly, I think they know that a black family lives next door and would never question a black person going into that house. (That might make my neighbors less well protected from black-on-black crime, just as it makes folks in the wealthy all-white suburbs less protected against their neighbor's kids robbing them.)

Third, there are now serious questions about the part of the police report related to the cause for the arrest. We have heard the transmissions from inside the house, and there was no indication at all that Prof. Gates was yelling loudly enough to interfere with communication. Quite the opposite. The premise given to get him out of the house was just that, a premise, based on what the police department released about the call.

Finally, the caller was pretty clear about the most likely possibility that the men lived in the house (said so more than once) and were just forcing a stuck door and that she was just calling to be on the safe side. The dispatcher made the suitcases sound ominous rather than an indication of a likely non-emergency situation, as intended by the caller.

That is something for everyone to remember: the officer responding to a request will likely be totally unaware of what was said to the 911 operator, either because it got filtered by the operator or was only partially heard while finding the way to the address in question. Assume the cop has incomplete or inaccurate information, and explain all details as if it was the first time.

So, to give a one-line answer to the question about whether an apology is in order, I think the cop owes her and the rest of us an apology.

Note added:
Forgot to include a link to this interesting analysis, which matches my view that this was about Power more than race, although I still think he was arrested for being "uppity" based on the officer's own description of his shock at not being treated as the Master and his stated concern about being shown up in front of his fellow officers.

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Uncle Walter is Dead

What an irony, Walter Cronkite dying in the middle of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of man's first trip to the surface of the moon - because our journey into space seemed to be his personal mission.

Those of you who are too young to remember his era can't appreciate how central he was to broadcast news in the late 60s and early 70s. No one today matches his combination of reporting skill and accuracy and straight speaking. It is not an exaggeration to say that we viewed him as "Uncle Walter". I certainly did.

I remember him most for three things:

A program series "The Twentieth Century" that he hosted and narrated. (The title was a bit ambitous, since it ended in 1966 and really only covered about 1/3 of the century - the part where we had newsreel footage.) It was like The History Channel, only without the alien psychics in Bermuda triangle shorts touching a Tesla coil on an ice road. I learned a tremendous amount of history from that program.

Coverage of the entire NASA program. Because CBS was the dominant station (meaning the only one with a good signal) in town for years, they were what we watched in the elementary school gym when launches were broadcast live. He made sure he knew what was going on, and explained it to us as he understood it. That made him both the consummate reporter and a great model for teaching.

I hadn't thought of that until just now. He taught us the news. And what I just wrote is how I approach teaching: articulating what I needed to know or see to understand something.

Speaking out on the facts that argued for ending our involvement in Vietnam. With opinion so rampant on cable "news" channels today (to the point where CNN stopped doing news at all and put it all on Headline News, only to interrupt that with hours of non-factual blather so you often don't find any news there either) it may be hard for any of you to imagine the impact on the nation when an objective newsman stated that we needed to get out of Vietnam. Sadly, more than half of the troops killed in Vietnam died after that point in time.

But I will also remember him for speaking at commencement, even though no one remembers what anyone says at graduation. And I will never, NEVER, forget the way he covered the assassination of JFK and the subsequent funeral. Partly because he not only knew what to say, but when to shut up. He was willing to let the images speak for themselves, not like the idiots who talked over a person singing their heart out - literally - at the Michael Jackson funeral, or put their logos and "crawl" over part of the content they were trying to show.

Cronkite could watch the funeral or a rocket launch or the moon landing and moon walk with us, without narrating it like it was a prize fight. That will be missed most of all.

Postscript:
CBS Coverage of Cronkite's Death

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Green Shoots?

Maybe, maybe not.

We have one REALLY BIG green shoot locally: one of the houses across the street finally sold - after nearly a year - and a young couple is moving in. (Oddly, the real estate agent never put up a "sold" sign despite all of the signs - survey stakes and inspections - that it was taken. That is either poor marketing of a successful agent or a serious case of not wanting to anger the sales gods.) The other one keeps getting lookers but no takers.

The other big news was the release of the June unemployment data, which allows us to add the first NEW data point to an infamous graph showing projected quarterly average unemployment rates. Below is an update of the graph I showed last month to correct some major misconceptions about what the economy was doing - and was going to keep doing - before Obama took office.

Click to get a full-size view.

Consistent with the flat trend in new jobless claims, we seem to have a second derivative consistent with zero. That is what the lower of the two pink lines tracks. That is an improvement over the large positive second derivative - indicating an acceleration into a depression - that was the case during the fall of last year before the initial steps were taken by the Fed and the Bush administration (drawing all sorts of grief for Bush and the lame-duck Congress) to turn it around.

Thank God that Bush didn't act like the Hoover wing of his party wanted.

So, is the slope of the "new jobless claims" data zero or negative? Is the break shown by the June unemployment data real or a statistical fluctuation? That we will not know for months, certainly not until we see if there are any significant changes in July once "stimulus" money starts to flow in the new fiscal year. Given all of the delays in getting the Stim Bill passed and then incorporated into state budgets, I didn't expect significant spending by states until well after July 1.

Locally, there are several "shovel ready" highway projects (plans and permits all in place) that are just going out to bid. One is drawing fire from idiots who think it is wasteful to build a particular project earlier than planned just to put people to work. (They must want a 4000 Dow and 15% unemployment.) In addition, most of the jobs that will be shed by local and state government were ended in June as the fiscal year drew to a close. If that sort of action was common nationwide, that may explain part of the bump up in the June job loss data (which had a big chunk from government layoffs) that has thrown the markets into a tizzy today.

This could be a good tizzy. If the Dow gets below 8000 or into the mid 7000s, it may be a great time to put some Roth IRA money into the market early. Even if we have a "stagnant" recovery like I have seen in the past (like the days of stagflation only without the inflation) we should see the GDP pick up. Remember, unemployment is a lagging indicator!

One thing is for sure: the second derivative wasn't negative back in December as the Obama economic transition team had assumed in constructing the blue graph. I wonder what the reaction of the economy would have been in January if they had shown the upper of the two pink lines as the "without" model. Actually, we don't need to wonder. It likely would have been much worse than the March collapse of the stock market as the situation became clearer to investors.

PS -
This new figure has a "credit" on it as well as a minor tweak of the green line described in my earlier article. This is the figure to borrow if you want to include my analysis showing the true starting point Obama had to work with.

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Flash from the past

From ancient history, we have the confirmation that the remains in the crypt under the altar the Basilica of St. Paul are old enough to be contemporary with Paul (nee' Saul). The assertion in the news story that this "proves" they are his remains is a bit of an exaggeration. It only proves they could be his.

The Vatican still hasn't figured out how science works ....

From the more recent past, we have a great story about giving a kid a Sony Walkman to use for the day at school. Makes a great read.

I still have mine somewhere. The headphones were the first part to die.

The Walkman was the second step toward personal music. Now I have to decide which was the first, the transistor radio we had when I was a kid (I sure wish my parents hadn't tossed the one they got way back when they were new) or a hand-crank portable Victrola (purely analog operation) that my mom had and that I now have. The latter would have been the first way you could take music on a picnic, and it was louder than a boombox.

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More - and Less - Humorous News

In the wake of the passing of two pop icons of my youth, here is something a bit different from what is dominating every news outlet.[*] Well, everyone except one. MTV broke in with the news of Michael Jackson's death, but then went right back to its regular programming. I can't believe they couldn't cue up an obit show, or just pull a set of videos out of the archive. He made them a fortune. I wonder how long it will be before TCM shows "The Wiz" or The History Channel shows his biography.

Now for the story that is truly a bit different:
Stoned wallabies make crop circles
The posted comments are as priceless as that story. Could have been from The Onion.

Anyway, back to the real news ...

I feel a bit disconnected from the intensity of the coverage. Even though she is older than I am, I was in college when Farrah Fawcett became a pin-up queen of kids much younger than I. And Michael Jackson came along with the 'bubble gum' hit "Rockin' Robin" when I had moved on from "Mony Mony" to "Sergeant Pepper". I view his work more intellectually than I do The Beatles, because it was really his performance and production sense in his rock videos - starting with "Thriller" - that . That won't be the case for some younger colleagues who grew up with his records on a portable stereo at a pool party like I did with The Beatles.

Farrah Fawcett, age 62.

I can't believe she was that old. Or that my mom gave me a copy of her poster as a birthday gift sometime in the mid-late 70s. Her fame is kind of odd because it seems based entirely on that poster! Her acting roles were pretty forgettable.

Michael Jackson, age 50.

I can't separate Michael Jackson from MTV. That's why I was so disappointed that they were showing some movie rather than showing the videos where he displayed his true brilliance. He created some memorable music, unique choreography, and the ability to be a movie director if he chose to move into longer format film.

The only thing I take exception to in the coverage I have seen is the characterization of his work as music that brought black and white together. To me, that happened with any number of artists in the 60s, but particularly The Supremes and The Temptations. What was once 'race music', banned from 'white' radio, would be played right along with every other band. There were any number of songs that I didn't realize were by black artists until I saw them on a TV show.

By the way, the photo sequence in the BBC "Life in Pictures" tribute is as surreal as the rest of Jackson's life. He was getting to the point where he looked older than Keith Richards, who somehow managed to outlive Jackson.

It is sad to say, but maybe now Michael can rest in peace, even if someone turns Neverland into Graceland.

Condolences to all of their family and friends. Parents, even one as controlling as his father reportedly was, should not have to bury their kids.

UPDATED:
Well, MTV finally woke up and smelled the stale roaches. They now have a tribute program on the "original" channel (where they used to show videos, just like CNN used to have news on CNN) and continuous Jackson videos on one or another of its other channels. I happened to catch the "Thriller" video, from the start, on a digital channel just by channel-surfing luck this morning. That made this event more real than any of the news coverage. I remember well when we put the debut of that video on our daily TV schedule. It was truly ground breaking, and in many ways it still is. It, and a few others, will be remembered in the same way some as the films that sprang from the genius of Gene Kelly.

And I take back a bit of what I said about his role in integrating music. The commentary that pointed out he integrated MTV was on the mark. In addition, my views of music integration might reflect the region I grew up in. I was remembering last night, when re-reading my post, that I heard a "Top 100 Rock Hits" program around 1980 in a southern state that did not include a single #1 Motown hit.



[*] Footnote:
The BBC is streaming their live BBC World News coverage onto a regular web news story. I've never seen that done, but it is interesting how much better their coverage is to the cable networks in the US - and it is after midnight there! I really can't believe that I was watching live video from Los Angeles of the helicopter carrying his body to morque by way of England over the Internet....

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Inflection Point ?

Unemployment is a lagging indicator.

This well-known and most basic of economic investment facts seems unknown to those on the anti-American right who are hoping for an economic disaster - hoping that the Bush-Obama effort fails to cut short the economic depression we are in - and are looking for a dark cloud (two examples) rather than green shoots [*] without offering anything other than the discredited Herbert Hoover alternative.

Unemployment does not peak and begin to fall until long after a recession, which is measured by GDP, is over. Similarly, unemployment did not start to rise in any significant way until well after this Great Recession got started about a year ago.

Last week's announcement of the latest weekly jobless claims data show continued evidence of a possible inflection point (details below the fold) in unemployment as well as the data that tell us exactly why the latest graph talked about by the bloggers above, and even on "Meet The Press" today, is utter nonsense.

Let's look at that graph to see what an inflection point is, and put our focus on the "initial value" point that represents the state of the economy before the new administration could pass, let alone implement, the stimulus plan in question. Click on the graph to see it with full resolution:


The blue curves are a report prepared by two members of the Obama transition team a few weeks before taking office. The large red dots show the quarterly average value of the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate based on phone surveys. The quarterly averages were used to construct the solid blue curve prior to Q1 2009. I also show, as smaller red dots, the monthly values. (When a monthly value falls on top of an average, I put a tiny pink dot over the red one, visible only in the full size image.) The green and pink lines are explained below in the "predictions" section.

UPDATED:
I have corrected a minor error in the green line (it should have been a bit steeper) when adding the June unemployment data to the graph. The new version, which was posted on July 2, should be used rather than this one if someone wants to use this graph or modify it further. The new graph also has an appropriate attribution on it.

It is EXTREMELY important that the Q1 2009 value of 8.07% is well above the guess of about 7.54% used in the transition team analysis, a point I highlight with a blue dot. I trust you can see that the guess they based their analysis on was really wrong, and that there is no quantitative value to the resulting predictions shown in blue. In fact, there never was any real value to those predictions.

At best, one might argue that they were only predicting that the recovery act would reduce the unemployment peak by about 1%, and do so about a year earlier than without it. At worst, one might argue that they were assuming the recovery had already started and were unaware that we are trying to fight off a depression. In between would be the position that they were hiding the true situation in an attempt to "jawbone" the economy, to avoid the sort of panic that played a major role in the development of the Great Depression.

THE DATA

It is important to realize that the unemployment data are the result of a phone survey. I was actually part of that process sometime back in the 1990s. Individuals are selected at random to join the survey population, contacted on a regular basis by phone to discern their employment status over a period of many months, and then replaced by someone new. Like any survey, those data are uncertain and fluctuate. Quarterly averages help smooth out those fluctuations.

Some data, such as weekly jobless claims, are collected from state unemployment offices and reflect a reasonably true count of what happened that week. However, in order to rush them out ASAP, the first number released is only an estimate. This past week's value will be revised next week when the new value appears.

The use of highly uncertain data in models that extrapolate into the future is extremely dangerous. A 10% error in the first point will expand into a 20% error in the next point when using equations as unstable as those in economics. This mathematics, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, is well known in the math and science community but rarely makes its way into the sort of Calculus Circus math taken by business majors - and is totally unknown to reporters and politicians.

INFLECTION POINT

An inflection point is a point were there is a change in curvature of a function like unemployment. It is a second derivative of the quantity we are looking at, which is quite different than what gets emphasized in the media.

The first derivative is the change in unemployment. If unemployment goes up, the derivative (the slope of the curve) is positive and the curve goes up. If unemployment goes down, the derivative is negative and the curve goes down.

ASIDE: The weekly jobless claims provide a window into the first derivative of unemployment *if* you know the rate of job creation and the rate at which people leave the unemployment rolls. As in late 2007, you can have 325,000 people apply for unemployment and still have almost no change in the unemployment rate.

The second derivative is the change in the change. If it is ZERO, unemployment will continue to increase every month if it was already increasing (say from 6.10% to 6.85% to 7.60% to 8.35%) - and it will stay the same if it wasn't changing (say from 4.50% to 4.50% to 4.50%) or continue to fall if it was falling. If it is POSITIVE, like it was in all of 2008, unemployment rate will curve upward - increasing in every bigger steps. If it is NEGATIVE, as shown by the light blue curve through all of 2010, the rate will curve downward - rising and then falling like a fly ball.

ASIDE: A regular rise in weekly jobs claims indicates a positive second derivative, predicting that the unemployment increase will be bigger next month than last month. A regular fall in the weekly jobs claims indicated a negative second derivative, suggesting that the unemployment increase next month will be less than the increase this month.

The green line I drew on the graph shows the unemployment curve extrapolated for ZERO curvature - a constant increase in the unemployment rate based on the two previous points. Notice that the blue point for Q1 2009 is below the green line, indicating they believed the curvature was becoming negative (recovery starting) even before the stimulus package was proposed.

The true value for Q1, pointed out with an arrow, is well above the green line. This indicates that the curvature was positive and the rate of job loss was increasing rather than increasing - indicating the acceleration of the recession into depression. [**] The higher of the two pink lines is a projection that assumes that acceleration continues unabated, while the lower of the two assumes a transition to zero curvature, where I think we are today.

THE PREDICTIONS

I think the mistake made in constructing the blue graphs shown above was in assuming that the sharp drop in new jobless claims in late December, obvious in the graph shown at the bottom of this report on new jobless claims, indicated an inflection point for unemployment. That input would lead their model to predict a Q1 2009 value that is below the straight line projection of the previous two quarters, what was shown as a green line on my diagram and discussed above.

Feeding these data into their model doesn't just change the initial point by a significant amount (it is off by more than 0.5%, a 7% error in the value), it changes the initial slope by a huge amount (from about 2.7% per year to 4.8% per year, an 80% error in the initial slope) and makes the curvature slightly negative rather than significantly positive.

I'd really like to see a re-run of their model with the true Q1 value instead of their estimate. Rather than bending at the start of 2009, the light blue "without" curve might have soared up into the low teens. For those who think this is unlikely, look at your local government and college budgets without the stimulus money. Ours are cutting jobs even with that money. It would not surprise me to learn that we would have to cut our faculty and staff by 5 to 10% starting July 1 without the stimulus money from the recovery plan.

Another Modeling Error

They also made totally unrealistic assumptions about how long it would take to pass the stimulus bill, and thus when the tax cut would show up in my paycheck, as well as when the money would show up as actual jobs. Apart from helping with staffing shortages in the unemployment offices, little of the money in our state will go to work before July 1 - which means the effects won't kick in until Q3 rather than in Q1 as they had assumed. (I think they assumed the bill would pass by the end of January.) In addition, a big chunk of the money is going to avoid layoffs rather than put unemployed people to work. The "no layoffs" happens right away, in public funded operations like our college, but the "new jobs" construction requires bids and contracts.

GOOD NEWS ?

As pointed out up at the top, the number of new claims for unemployment insurance fell again, by more than expected. Is it real? Who knows. However, the drop from the peak a few months ago suggests the rate of job loss is no longer growing, and might be falling. We really won't know for several months whether the curvature has become negative. But even if we are at an inflection point, unemployment will continue to grow until new jobless claims are balanced by those taking jobs.

If sustained, this would be a leading indicator of improvement in the economy.

But I'm not holding my breath because there are too many affordable houses sitting vacant at prices the owners think would be reasonable if it weren't for the properties heading for foreclosure. I'll let you know when I see a "sold" sign within a half mile of our house.

[*] Footnote

Anyone who watches CNBC has heard this phrase quite often, but might not know where it comes from. It is an allusion to a famous bit of dialog from the movie Being There, where the Peter Sellers character Chance (aka Chauncey Gardiner, a gardener who likes to watch TV that gets mistaken for an erudite philosopher) says "There will be growth in the spring!" - which gets (mis)interpreted as a prediction that the economy will turn around in the spring.

[**] Footnote

I use the term depression in the sense of the normal depressions that were common in the late 19th century as a result of bubbles not unlike the real-estate bubble that started this one, not in the sense of the Great Depression. I explained this in an earlier blog about the state of the economy in early January 2009.

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CNN was listening to me at breakfast?

Shortly after I said to my wife (concerning the missing A330) "it was probably hit by lightning", CNN said they had 'heard' via their global reporting network that it could have been caused by lightning. Were they listening at my kitchen table?

Oh, and happy 29th, CNN. They went on the air on 1 June 1980.

Seriously: The initial scatter-brained real-time journalism of the news networks included an NBC short list of possible causes that included "dare I say, terrorism" but did not include electrical failure. Then I saw a weather radar map on CNN (where they were pointing to the lack of storms in the Cape Verde Islands area, a hurricane breeding ground later in the hurricane season that started today, because the intertropical convergence zone was still well south of that area), and I thought "lightning". I know these newest aircraft are highly electronic, and I know what lightning did to the lightning protection system of a HAM that lives across the street from us, so 1 + 1 make 4 to me - particularly when the search area is in the area of the current convergence zone, where there are many storms developing.

By the way, as interviews go, I'd really rather hear my brother's thoughts about the possible effects of a massive electrical failure than those of some US Air captain interviewed on CNN.

I'm sure that a modern "glass" aircraft like this will do things the captain doesn't know about, particularly a new aircraft. He was going on about what would happen if the crew made a distress call, but the only reports are of some automatic BSOD 'panic' transmissions from the electronic control system itself. I', sure my brother knows lots more than any pilot does about what those systems do.

Yo, Bro, can you really fly one of these things if you lose all of the electrical systems? I've heard that the backup system for a modern fighter plane is the ejection seat, but do these latest commercial aircraft have direct mechanical connections to the flight controls and engines as well as a purely "classic" turn and bank indicator and compass? Can the engines operate if an electronic fuel management system (a successor to the one you worked on in your very first job) got toasted? Or do you have some equipment on the A330 that precludes your discussing the matter?

I believe them when they say they test these aircraft for lightning strikes, but so did the company that designed the highly sophisticated (and fully insured) arrestor system my neighbor had - yet everything from his computers to his electronic doorbell was destroyed. I have little doubt that there is 'lightning' and then there is LIGHTNING.

Finally, what really puzzles me is the vague nature of the search area. They must know exactly when they got the 'panic' messages from the control system, and they must have a very good idea where the plane was at the time and how far it could have traveled if were in a totally "dead stick" situation. But I would imagine the pessimism is due to the lack of any satellite emergency signals (they do have those on the life rafts of trans-oceanic airlines, don't they). And I would imagine that the very slow rate of information flow is a result of a State Owned airline not wanting to say anything bad about an aircraft built by a State Owned manufacturer.

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