1576. On Bayesian and Classical Statistics

By F. D. Flam, The New York Times, September 29, 2914

Statistics may not sound like the most heroic of pursuits. But if not for statisticians, a Long Island fisherman might have died in the Atlantic Ocean after falling off his boat early one morning last summer.

The man owes his life to a once obscure field known as Bayesian statistics — a set of mathematical rules for using new data to continuously update beliefs or existing knowledge.

The method was invented in the 18th century by an English Presbyterian minister named Thomas Bayes — by some accounts to calculate the probability of God’s existence. In this century, Bayesian statistics has grown vastly more useful because of the kind of advanced computing power that didn’t exist even 20 years ago.

It is proving especially useful in approaching complex problems, including searches like the one the Coast Guard used in 2013 to find the missing fisherman, John Aldridge (though not, so far, in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370).

Now Bayesian statistics are rippling through everything from physics to cancer research, ecology to psychology. Enthusiasts say they are allowing scientists to solve problems that would have been considered impossible just 20 years ago. And lately, they have been thrust into an intense debate over the reliability of research results.

When people think of statistics, they may imagine lists of numbers — batting averages or life-insurance tables. But the current debate is about how scientists turn data into knowledge, evidence and predictions. Concern has been growing in recent years that some fields are not doing a very good job at this sort of inference. In 2012, for example, a team at the biotech company Amgen announced that they’d analyzed 53 cancer studies and found it could not replicate 47 of them.

Similar follow-up analyses have cast doubt on so many findings in fields such as neuroscience and social science that researchers talk about a “replication crisis”

Some statisticians and scientists are optimistic that Bayesian methods can improve the reliability of research by allowing scientists to crosscheck work done with the more traditional or “classical” approach, known as frequentist statistics. The two methods approach the same problems from different angles.

The essence of the frequentist technique is to apply probability to data. If you suspect your friend has a weighted coin, for example, and you observe that it came up heads nine times out of 10, a frequentist would calculate the probability of getting such a result with an unweighted coin. The answer (about 1 percent) is not a direct measure of the probability that the coin is weighted; it’s a measure of how improbable the nine-in-10 result is — a piece of information that can be useful in investigating your suspicion.

By contrast, Bayesian calculations go straight for the probability of the hypothesis, factoring in not just the data from the coin-toss experiment but any other relevant information — including whether you’ve previously seen your friend use a weighted coin.

Scientists who have learned Bayesian statistics often marvel that it propels them through a different kind of scientific reasoning than they’d experienced using classical methods.

“Statistics sounds like this dry, technical subject, but it draws on deep philosophical debates about the nature of reality,” said the Princeton University astrophysicist Edwin Turner, who has witnessed a widespread conversion to Bayesian thinking in his field over the last 15 years.

Countering Pure Objectivity

Frequentist statistics became the standard of the 20th century by promising just-the-facts objectivity, unsullied by beliefs or biases. In the 2003 statistics primer “Dicing With Death,”Stephen Senn traces the technique’s roots to 18th-century England, when a physician named John Arbuthnot set out to calculate the ratio of male to female births.

Arbuthnot gathered christening records from 1629 to 1710 and found that in London, a few more boys were recorded every year. He then calculated the odds that such an 82-year run could occur simply by chance, and found that it was one in trillions. This frequentist calculation can’t tell them what’s causing the sex ratio to be skewed. Arbuthnot proposed that God skewed the birthrates to balance the higher mortality that had been observed among boys, but scientists today favor a biological explanation over a theological one.

Later in the 1700s, the mathematician and astronomer Daniel Bernoulli used a similar technique to investigate the curious geometry of the solar system, in which planets orbit the sun in a flat, pancake-shaped plane. If the orbital angles were purely random — with Earth, say, at zero degrees, Venus at 45 and Mars at 90 — the solar system would look more like a sphere than a pancake. But Bernoulli calculated that all the planets known at the time orbited within seven degrees of the plane, known as the ecliptic.

What were the odds of that? Bernoulli’s calculations put them at about one in 13 million. Today, this kind of number is called a p-value, the probability that an observed phenomenon or one more extreme could have occurred by chance. Results are usually considered “statistically significant” if the p-value is less than 5 percent.

But there’s a danger in this tradition, said Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia. Even if scientists always did the calculations correctly — and they don’t, he argues — accepting everything with a p-value of 5 percent means that one in 20 “statistically significant” results are nothing but random noise.

The proportion of wrong results published in prominent journals is probably even higher, he said, because such findings are often surprising and appealingly counterintuitive, said Dr. Gelman, an occasional contributor to Science Times.

Looking at Other Factors

Take, for instance, a study concluding that single women who were ovulating were 20 percent more likely to vote for President Obama in 2012 than those who were not. (In married women, the effect was reversed.)

Dr. Gelman re-evaluated the study using Bayesian statistics. That allowed him to look at probability not simply as a matter of results and sample sizes, but in the light of other information that could affect those results.

He factored in data showing that people rarely change their voting preference over an election cycle, let alone a menstrual cycle. When he did, the study’s statistical significance evaporated. (The paper’s lead author, Kristina M. Durante of the University of Texas, San Antonio, said she stood by the finding.)

Dr. Gelman said the results would not have been considered statistically significant had the researchers used the frequentist method properly. He suggests using Bayesian calculations not necessarily to replace classical statistics but to flag spurious results.

A famously counterintuitive puzzle that lends itself to a Bayesian approach is the Monty Hall problem, in which Mr. Hall, longtime host of the game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” hides a car behind one of three doors and a goat behind each of the other two. The contestant picks Door No. 1, but before opening it, Mr. Hall opens Door No. 2 to reveal a goat. Should the contestant stick with No. 1 or switch to No. 3, or does it matter?

A Bayesian calculation would start with one-third odds that any given door hides the car, then update that knowledge with the new data: Door No. 2 had a goat. The odds that the contestant guessed right — that the car is behind No. 1 — remain one in three. Thus, the odds that she guessed wrong are two in three. And if she guessed wrong, the car must be behind Door No. 3. So she should indeed switch.

In other fields, researchers are using Bayesian statistics to tackle problems of formidable complexity. The New York University astrophysicist David Hogg credits Bayesian statistics with narrowing down the age of the universe. As recently as the late 1990s, astronomers could say only that it was eight billion to 15 billion years; now, factoring in supernova explosions, the distribution of galaxies and patterns seen in radiation left over from the Big Bang, they have concluded with some confidence that the number is 13.8 billion years.

Bayesian reasoning combined with advanced computing power has also revolutionized the search for planets orbiting distant stars, said Dr. Turner, the Princeton astrophysicist.

In most cases, astronomers can’t see these planets; their light is drowned out by the much brighter stars they orbit. What the scientists can see are slight variations in starlight; from these glimmers, they can judge whether planets are passing in front of a star or causing it to wobble from their gravitational tug.

Making matters more complicated, the size of the apparent wobbles depends on whether astronomers are observing a planet’s orbit edge-on or from some other angle. But by factoring in data from a growing list of known planets, the scientists can deduce the most probable properties of new planets.

One downside of Bayesian statistics is that it requires prior information — and often scientists need to start with a guess or estimate. Assigning numbers to subjective judgments is “like fingernails on a chalkboard,” said physicist Kyle Cranmer, who helped develop a frequentist technique to identify the latest new subatomic particle — the Higgs boson.

Others say that in confronting the so-called replication crisis, the best cure for misleading findings is not Bayesian statistics, but good frequentist ones. It was frequentist statistics that allowed people to uncover all the problems with irreproducible research in the first place, said Deborah Mayo, a philosopher of science at Virginia Tech. The technique was developed to distinguish real effects from chance, and to prevent scientists from fooling themselves.

Uri Simonsohn, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Several years ago, he published a paper that exposed common statistical shenanigans in his field — logical leaps, unjustified conclusions, and various forms of unconscious and conscious cheating.

He said he had looked into Bayesian statistics and concluded that if people misused or misunderstood one system, they would do just as badly with the other. Bayesian statistics, in short, can’t save us from bad science.

At Times a Lifesaver

Despite its 18th-century origins, the technique is only now beginning to reveal its power with the advent of 21st-century computing speed.

Some historians say Bayes developed his technique to counter the philosopher David Hume’s contention that most so-called miracles were likely to be fakes or illusions. Bayes didn’t make much headway in that debate — at least not directly.

But even Hume might have been impressed last year, when the Coast Guard used Bayesian statistics to search for Mr. Aldridge, its computers continually updating and narrowing down his most probable locations.

The Coast Guard has been using Bayesian analysis since the 1970s. The approach lends itself well to problems like searches, which involve a single incident and many different kinds of relevant data, said Lawrence Stone, a statistician for Metron, a scientific consulting firm in Reston, Va., that works with the Coast Guard.

At first, all the Coast Guard knew about the fisherman was that he fell off his boat sometime from 9 p.m. on July 24 to 6 the next morning. The sparse information went into a program called Sarops, for Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Over the next few hours, searchers added new information — on prevailing currents, places the search helicopters had already flown and some additional clues found by the boat’s captain.

The system couldn’t deduce exactly where Mr. Aldridge was drifting, but with more information, it continued to narrow down the most promising places to search.

Just before turning back to refuel, a searcher in a helicopter spotted a man clinging to two buoys he had tied together. He had been in the water for 12 hours; he was hypothermic and sunburned but alive.

Even in the jaded 21st century, it was considered something of a miracle.

1575. How the Re-Introduction of Wolves Improved the Ecosystem in Yellowstone National Park

By Sustainable Human, February 13, 2014 

1574. The Real Reason It's Nearly Impossible to End the Cuba Embargo

By Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande, The Atlantic, October 3, 2014

“I think we should—we should advocate for the end of the embargo” on Cuba, Hillary Clinton said in an interview this summer at the Council on Foreign Relations. “My husband tried,” she declared, “and remember, there were [behind-the-scenes] talks going on.” The way the pre-candidate for president recounts this history, Fidel Castro sabotaged that process because “the embargo is Castro’s best friend,” providing him “with an excuse for everything.” Her husband’s efforts, she said, were answered with the February 1996 shoot-down of two U.S. civilian planes by the Cuban air force, “ensuring there would be a reaction in the Congress that would make it very difficult for any president to lift the embargo alone.”  

The history of this dramatic episode is far more complicated than Hillary Clinton portrays it. But she is correct about one thing: Should she become president, it will be far harder for her to lift the 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba than it would have been when her husband first assumed the office. The person most responsible for that, however, is Bill Clinton.

* * *

The beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency marked a change in tone on Cuba policy. Personally, Clinton understood the folly of a hostile U.S. posture toward the island. “Anybody with half a brain could see the embargo was counterproductive,” he later told a confidante in the Oval Office. “It defied wiser policies of engagement that we had pursued with some Communist countries even at the height of the Cold War.”

The Clinton administration’s early initiatives included public assurances that the United States posed no military threat to Cuba—to reinforce the point, U.S. officials began alerting Cuban authorities in advance of routine naval maneuvers near the island and opened low-level discussions on cooperation against narcotics trafficking. U.S. officials also dialed back the anti-Castro rhetoric. In Havana, the Cubans recognized and appreciated the change in tone. “There is less verbal aggression this year in the White House than in the last 12 years,” Raúl Castro told a Mexican reporter. Still, the administration worked overtime to assure the exile community and congressional Republicans that no opening to Cuba would be forthcoming. U.S. policy, stated Richard Nuccio, the Clinton administration’s special advisor on Cuba, was to "maintain the existing embargo, the most comprehensive we have toward any country."

Hard-liners in Congress were not reassured. Senate majority leader and Republican presidential hopeful Robert Dole declared that "all signs point to normalization and secret negotiations with Castro." In September 1995, the House passed legislation co-sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Dan Burton that prohibited U.S. assistance to Cuba until the advent of democracy and imposed sanctions against foreign countries and corporations that did business on the island. "It is time to tighten the screws," Senator Helms announced when he first presented the bill to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Congressman Burton predicted that passage would be "the last nail in [Castro's] coffin."

Helms-Burton became a bitter battleground between the executive and the legislative branches. Not only did the bill "attack the President's constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy," according to a White House legislative-strategy memorandum for Clinton, "Helms-Burton actually damages the prospects of a democratic transition in Cuba, and could conflict with broader U.S. interests, including compliance with major international trade agreements ... and our commitment to respect international law." Secretary of State Warren Christopher threatened a presidential veto.

* * *

As the Helms-Burton legislation dominated public debate on Cuba policy in the latter half of 1995, a veritable Greek tragedy played out in the skies over Cuba's coast—a tragedy set in motion by repeated incursions into Cuban airspace by a group of Cuban-American pilots known as Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR). Since 1991, the Brothers had been flying search missions for distressed Cuban rafters who had begun to flee Cuba for the U.S. by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, notifying the U.S. Coast Guard whenever a small boat or raft needed rescue.

But despite its humanitarian mission, BTTR's founder and director, José Basulto, had a history of anti-Castro violence. In April 1961, Basulto had, along with some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA, participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion aimed at overthrowing Castro. In August 1962, he had positioned a boat with a 20mm cannon on its bow just off the coast of Havana and shelled the Hornedo de Rosita hotel, where he and his co-conspirators believed Castro would be dining. "I was trained as a terrorist by the United States, in the use of violence to attain goals," Basulto said in an interview with a documentary filmmaker, but he claimed to have converted to nonviolence. "When I was young, my Hollywood hero was John Wayne. Now I'm like Luke Skywalker. I believe the force is with us."

After secret back-channel diplomacy ended the rafters crisis in the fall of 1994, Basulto shifted BTTR's mission from rescue to provocation. On November 10, Basulto dropped Brothers to the Rescue bumper stickers over the Cuban countryside. Repeatedly over the next eight months, BTTR planes violated Cuban airspace. Their most provocative act in 1995 came on July 13, when Basulto's Cessna Skymaster buzzed Havana, raining down thousands of religious medallions and leaflets reading "Brothers, Not Comrades" along the Malecón, Havana's broad seaside avenue. "We are proud of what we did," Basulto exalted on local TV after landing back in Miami. "We want confrontation," Basulto declared, boasting that his bold incursion served "as a message to the Cuban people. ... The regime is not invulnerable."

The overflights constituted a direct challenge to Cuba's national security and a flagrant affront to its sovereignty. "It was so humiliating," Castro later told Time magazine. "The U.S. would not have tolerated it if Washington's airspace had been violated by small airplanes." Castro and his generals had long memories of the early years of the revolution when little planes would take off from Florida and drop incendiary devices over the Cuban countryside as part of the CIA's covert war of sabotage.

Given that dark history, Cuban officials made it clear to the Clinton administration that the incursions could not and would not be tolerated. The Cubans filed one diplomatic protest after another, warning in a note after the July 13 incursion that Cuban security forces had a "firm determination to adopt whatever positions are necessary to avoid acts of provocation," and "any boat from abroad can be sunk and any airplane downed." In Miami, U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials met face-to-face with Basulto to warn him to stay away from Cuba. State Department officials meanwhile used diplomatic notes to request that the Cuban government exercise "the utmost discretion and restraint and avoid the use of excessive force" in dealing with the incursions.

But BTTR and Basulto continued their provocations. Between August 1995 and February 1996, the Cuban government filed four more diplomatic notes protesting violations of its airspace—only to have the FAA request additional evidence, since the agency had determined Basulto could not be grounded until it had fully completed an enforcement investigative report. Emboldened by his seeming impunity, on January 13, 1996, Basulto again flew his planes over Havana, this time dropping a half a million leaflets exhorting the Cuban people to "Change Things Now." His ability to penetrate Cuban airspace, Basulto bragged on the radio back in Miami, demonstrated that "Castro isn't impenetrable, that many things are within our reach to be done.”

The Cuban military tried to send a warning through private channels. At one point Cuban Air Force Brigadier General Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez briefed a visiting delegation of retired U.S. officers on the BTTR overflights, warning that Cuba had the capability "to bring them down at any moment.” Tamayo explained: “We haven't done so precisely because we do not want to overheat the situation, because then, of course, Cuba will be presented as a culprit, and the violators and those who stimulate these acts of piracy against us will get off scot free." Castro, he told two of the delegates in a side conversation, had given a standing order to the air force to take all necessary steps to prevent another violation of Cuban airspace. "Are you going to wait until they drop a bomb on me before you take action?" Castro had asked his commanders in frustration.

"What would be the reaction of your military if we shot down one of those planes?" Tamayo asked the visiting Americans, who were stunned by the question.

* * *

The highest-level effort at secret diplomacy was undertaken by Fidel Castro himself. The Cuban leader seized the opportunity of a January 1996 visit by Bill Richardson to propose an unusual quid pro quo: political prisoners in exchange for grounding Basulto. Then a relatively unknown congressman from New Mexico with close ties to President Clinton, Richardson had developed a reputation for humanitarian missions abroad, having previously succeeded in talking Saddam Hussein into turning over two Americans Iraq had been holding on suspicion of espionage.

On arriving in Cuba, Richardson found Castro to be a "personable guy, engaging and humorous," as he wrote in his memoir. Fidel gave Richardson the red-carpet treatment, taking him to a baseball game, holding a lengthy nighttime meeting to discuss U.S.-Cuban relations, and giving him a box of premium Cuban cigars as a gift for President Clinton. (They were confiscated by the Secret Service before the president ever knew about the gift.) He also, according to Castro biographer and former Carter White House official Peter Bourne, told Richardson he would release some political prisoners if the congressman could secure Clinton’s assurance that the Brothers to the Rescue flights would be stopped.

Richardson returned to Washington and purportedly raised the issue with the president, who instructed Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña to put an end to the flights. When Richardson came back to Havana on February 9 to ferry three prisoners back to the United States, Castro felt he came with a promise that Clinton would halt the violations of Cuban airspace. Castro, according to Bourne, had told Richardson he was releasing the prisoners in the belief that "he had a clear commitment from one head of state to another that the flights would be stopped."

But as he returned to Florida with the released prisoners, Richardson told CNN reporters that Castro had asked for nothing in exchange; he denied the existence of a quid pro quo to a New Yorker reporter two years later. Revisiting this episode in 2011, however, Richardson acknowledged that he had, in fact, approached the White House about the BTTR flights, although he could not recall to whom he had spoken.

Years later, after stepping down from power, Castro recalled that Richardson had "very earnestly told me, to the best of my recollection, the following: 'That will not happen again; the president has ordered those flights stopped.'" When BTTR once again violated Cuban airspace only two weeks later, Bourne reported, "Castro was outraged and fuming over Clinton's behavior which, he felt, showed his word meant nothing."

* * *

In the weeks, days, and hours before the final confrontation in the skies off Cuba's coast, some U.S. officials sensed a calamity was coming. In January, U.S. military radar picked up evidence that the Cuban air force was practicing intercepting and firing on slow-moving aircraft. Alarmed State Department officials peppered the FAA with requests for action. "State is increasingly concerned about Cuban reactions to these flagrant violations," wrote Cecilia Capestany, an official at the FAA's international-aviation division, on January 22, 1996. "Worst-case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes ...”

Cecilia Capestany's email of January 22, 1996 (National Security Archive)

At the White House on the evening of February 23, Richard Nuccio received an alert that BTTR would be flying the next day. He fired off an urgent email to Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. "Previous overflights by José Basulto of the Brothers have been met with restraint by Cuban authorities. Tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba, however, that we fear this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the plane," Nuccio warned.

Nuccio instructed FAA officials in Miami to halt the flight, but to his surprise, they refused; they would agree only to "warn Basulto again about violating Cuban airspace." The best Nuccio could do was try to alert the Cuban government. Told that an approach through semi-official channels “may actually make things worse,” Nuccio grasped at his one remaining opportunity to alert the Cubans: the ballet.

By coincidence, that very evening Nuccio was scheduled to attend the performance of Cuba's Ballet Folklórico—a major cultural event made possible by a people-to-people initiative Clinton had initiated. Aware that Fernando Remírez, the new chief of Cuba’s de facto diplomatic arm in Washington, the Cuban Interest Section, would also be attending, Nuccio hoped to meet him there, casually, for the first time, since he was not allowed to meet formally with Cuban diplomats. But an informal, accidental introduction could be useful in a future crisis. "I really just wanted to open a dialogue with Remírez," Nuccio told the authors. "I visualized someday having to be on the phone saying harsh things to this guy and I wanted him to know something about me."

As the troupe danced its way through the rich history of Cuban music, Nuccio was in a "state of anxiety" over the BTTR flights. But when the chance came to meet Remírez at the post-performance reception, the two engaged in only perfunctory small talk. The most substantive exchange came as Remírez commented on the difficult state of U.S.-Cuban relations. Nuccio's Mexican-born wife, Angelina, then reminded him of a famous saying in her country: "So far from God, so close to the United States."

"Yes, that's it," Remírez replied. "You understand us exactly."

As the pleasantries concluded, Nuccio faced a critical decision: whether to warn the Cuban official about the impending incursion. "I recall looking at Remírez as he moved toward the door and fighting with my impulse to pull him aside," Nuccio later wrote in an unpublished memoir. "I struggled with a gut instinct to appeal to the Cubans to exercise restraint in reacting to the flight and the worry that my remark would be misinterpreted if something tragic did occur." The security of silence prevailed. "As Remírez exited, I turned back to the bar and said nothing."

* * *

At 1:15 p.m. the next day, Basulto's plane took off from Opa-Locka airport in Miami, accompanied by two other BTTR Cessnas. They filed a false flight plan with the FAA to patrol off the northern coast of Cuba in search of rafters. In reality, their mission was to again penetrate Cuban airspace as an act of solidarity with a Cuban dissident group called Concilio Cubano. In a crackdown on opponents, Castro's police had arrested dozens of Concilio members a few days before.

"Good afternoon, Havana Center," Basulto radioed Cuban flight controllers as the planes headed toward the island. "A cordial greeting from Brothers to the Rescue and its President José Basulto."

The Cuban controllers immediately warned him not to cross into their airspace. "I inform you that the zone north of Havana is active. You run danger by penetrating that side of North 24."

"We are ready to do it," Basulto responded with bravado. "It is our right as free Cubans."

Acting on Castro's standing orders to prevent another penetration of Cuban airspace, two MiG-29 jets scrambled from their base at San Antonio de los Baños. The Cuban pilots followed none of the international protocols for warning, intercepting, and escorting unarmed civilian planes. Instead, at 3:19 p.m., a heat-seeking missile obliterated the first BTTR Cessna; at 3:26, the second was shot down. The attack took the lives of four young Cuban-Americans: Mario de la Peña, Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, and Pablo Morales. Only Basulto and his three crew members escaped back to Miami.

Cuban exiles scream "Death to Castro" following the shoot-down of Brothers to the Rescue planes in February 1996. (Reuters)

In Washington, the shoot-down generated a full-scale crisis. Within minutes, Nuccio received a call to report immediately to Sandy Berger's office; there he was tasked to draw up "tough" options, including "military responses," for President Clinton's consideration. Nuccio cautioned against an overreaction. BTTR had "been playing with fire," he told Berger. "They got exactly what they were hoping to produce. If we respond militarily, they will have succeeded in producing the crisis they've been looking for." But the blatantly provocative nature of the BTTR flights no longer mattered. The United States, Berger told him, could simply not "stand by and let Castro kill American citizens."

When President Clinton convened his top national-security team two days later, he considered a surgical airstrike or cruise-missile attack on Cuba's MiG base but decided against it. Instead Clinton ordered that a private warning be sent to Castro: "The next such action would meet a military response directly from the United States." In addition, Clinton ordered a new ban on commercial flights between Cuba and the United States, restricted Cuban diplomats from traveling outside of their posts in New York and Washington, and authorized compensation for the families of the four BTTR victims from frozen Cuban bank accounts.

More importantly, the president declared that he would "move promptly" to reach an agreement with Congress to pass the Helms-Burton legislation. Emboldened and empowered, anti-Castro forces in the Congress added a dramatic new clause to the bill—the codification of the embargo into law. No longer would it be a presidential prerogative to lift sanctions against Cuba; now it would take majority votes in Congress. The Clinton team put up no objections.

Nuccio tried to argue against this wholesale capitulation on Helms-Burton, only to be overruled. "Forget it," Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff told him. "The decision's been made. It's over." That verdict was about more than just Helms-Burton, Nuccio knew. "He was saying that our gambit to improve relations was over, done." Shortly thereafter, Nuccio stepped down as White House special advisor on Cuba.

On March 12, 1996, with the families of the four BTTR pilots standing behind him, President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton bill into law as a "powerful, unified message to Havana." Clinton understood what he had done. He felt "backed into a policy of proven failure," he lamented to a confidante in the Oval Office, "closing off political engagement toward a peaceful transition in Cuba" for the sake of electoral expediency. "Supporting the bill was good election-year politics in Florida," Clinton conceded in his autobiography, "but it undermined whatever chance I might have had if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes within Cuba."

With that political calculus, Clinton gave up his presidential authority to make policy toward Cuba, and the authority of the presidents who would succeed him. That includes his wife, should she win the presidency in 2016.

This article has been adapted from Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande's new book Back Channel to Cuba.

1573. In the Medical Response to Ebola, Cuba Leads the World Governments

By Adam Taylor, The Washington Post, October 4, 2014

Cuban health workers leaving for Sierra Leone to help fight ebola epidemic

While the international community has been accused of dragging its feet on the Ebola crisis, Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that still enjoys a fraught relationship with the United States, has emerged as a crucial provider of medical expertise in the West African nations hit by Ebola.

On Thursday, 165 health professionals from the country arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to join the fight against Ebola – the largest medical team of any single foreign nation, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). And after being trained to deal with Ebola, a further 296 Cuban doctors and nurses will go to Liberia and Guinea, the other two countries worst hit by the crisis.

Cuba is, by any measure, not a wealthy country. It had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of slightly more than $68 billion in 2011, according to the World Bank, putting it a few places higher than Belarus. At $6,051, its GDP per capita was less than one-sixth of Britain's. However, its official response to Ebola seems far more robust than many countries far wealthier than it – and serves as further proof that health-care professionals are up there with rum and cigars in terms of Cuban exports.

Cuba's universal health-care system enables such an export. The country nationalized its health care shortly after its revolution, ending private health care and guaranteeing free health care in its constitution. The results have been widely praised. In 2008, evaluating 30 years of Cuba's "primary health care revolution," the Bulletin of the World Health Organization pointed to impressive strides that the country had made in certain health indicators. "These indicators – which are close or equal to those in developed countries – speak for themselves," Gail Reed noted, pointing to a huge reduction in number of deaths for children under five years old and Cuba's high life expectancy of 77 years.

Cuba's health-care success is built upon its medical training. After the Cuban revolution, half of the country's 6,000 doctors fled and the country was forced to rebuild its work force. The training system grew so much that by 2008, it was training 20,000 foreigners a year to be doctors, nurses and dentists, largely free of charge.

Ebola isn't the first time that Cuban health workers have been sent to deal with a global disaster. Even back in 1960, immediately after the revolution, Cuba sent doctors to Chile to help in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, and the practice has continued for decades since. In 2005, Cuba even offered to send medical workers to the United States after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (they were apparently rebuffed).

Reuters reports that Cuba currently has around 50,000 health workers working in 66 countries. Despite the high-profile acts of charity, the medical diplomacy more often seemed to serve more practical purposes – an estimated 30,000 health workers are currently in Venezuela as a partial payment for oil, for example. Exported medical expertise is predicted to net Cuba $8.2 billion in 2014, according to a recent report in state newspaper Granma. There are hopes that medical tourism and exported medical technology could one day provide similar figures.

It's not a simple picture. Critics have complained that Cuba has begun to sacrifice the health of its citizens at home to make money sending medical workers abroad, and the conditions for these medical workers themselves have been criticized – The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year that a significant number of Cuban health-care workers in Venezuela have fled the country to escape "crushing" workloads.

Even so, Cuba's oversized response to Ebola seems to have brushed aside these criticisms, for now at least. The number of Cuban medical staff in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea looks set to be more than those sent from far-larger countries like China. Israel, a wealthier country with a similar population, caused controversy this week when its Defense Minister rejected requests to send medical workers to Ebola-struck countries, though the Foreign Ministry has since announced it would in fact send medical crews.

“Money and materials are important, but those two things alone cannot stop Ebola virus transmission,” Dr Margaret Chan, director-general at the World Health Organization, said last month. “Human resources are clearly our most important need."

1572. Cuba Has the Best Education System in Latin America and the Caribbean, World Bank Reports

By Salim Lamrani, Huffington Post, October 3, 2014 

According to the World Bank, Cuba is the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean to have a high quality education system.

The World Bank recently published a revealing report on the status of education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Entitled Great Teachers: How to Raise Student Learning in Latin America and the Caribbean, the study focuses on the continent's public education systems and the major challenges they face. [1]

In Latin America, kindergarten, primary and secondary teachers constitute, in human terms, a resource of 7 million people, or 4 percent of the region's workforce and more than 20 percent of all technical and professional workers. Their salaries absorb 4 percent of the continent's GDP. Their working conditions vary from one region to another, even within national borders. Teachers, mostly women -- 75 percent on average -- are poorly paid and tend to be of lower socioeconomic status. In addition, the average age of teachers is more than 40. Thus they constitute a workforce considered to be "aging." [2]

The World Bank notes that all world governments scrutinize carefully "the quality and practices of teachers," particularly at a time when the objectives of education systems are required to adapt to new realities. The emphasis is now on skills and not merely on the accumulation of knowledge.

The report's findings are final. The World Bank emphasizes "the poor quality of Latin American and the Caribbean teachers," a condition that constitutes the main obstacle to the advancement of education across the continent. Further, academic content is inadequate and educational practices ineffective. Insufficiently or poorly trained teachers devote only 65 percent of their time to classroom instruction, "the equivalent of wasting an entire day of instruction per week." In addition, available instructional materials are under utilized, especially those that deal with new information technologies and communication. Finally, teachers struggle to assert their authority, keep their students engaged and retain their attention. [3]

According to the financial institution, with the notable exception of Cuba, "no teaching faculty in the region can be considered to be of high quality when compared to global parameters." The World Bank also notes that "today, no Latin American school system, with the possible exception of that of Cuba, has the high standards, strong academic talent, high or at least adequate salaries and high degree of professional autonomy that characterizes the world's most effective educational systems, such as those of Finland, Singapore, Shanghai (China), the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada." [4]

Indeed, only Cuba, where education has been the top priority since 1959, has a truly efficient education system and high-quality teachers. In terms of education, this Caribbean country has no cause to be envious of even the most developed nations. The Caribbean island is also the nation in the world that allocates the highest share of its national budget, 13 percent, to education.[5]

This is not the first time that the World Bank has praised the education system of Cuba. In a previous report, the organization characterized the excellence of the island's social system:

Cuba is internationally recognized for its success in the fields of education and health, with social services that exceeds those of most developing countries and, in certain sectors, are comparable to those of the developed nations. Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the establishment of a communist one-party government, the country has created a social system that ensures universal access to education and health services, provided by the state. This model has helped Cuba to achieve universal literacy, eradicate certain diseases and provide universal access to safe drinking water and basic public sanitation. Cuba now has one of the region's lowest infant mortality rates and longest life expectancies. A review of social indicators in Cuba reveals an almost continuous improvement from 1960 to 1980. Several major indices, such as life expectancy and infant mortality rates, have continued to improve even during the country's economic crisis of the 1990s [...]. Today, the social performance of Cuba is one of the best in the developing world, a fact well documented by many international bodies including the World Health Organization, the United Nations Program for Development and other UN agencies as well as the World Bank. [...] Cuba outperforms both Latin American and Caribbean as well as many other middle-income countries in the most important indices of education, public health and hygiene. [6]

The World Bank points out that the development of good education systems is vital to the future of Latin America and the Caribbean. It highlights the example of Cuba, which has achieved excellence in this field, as being the only country on the continent to have a high-level teaching faculty. These results reflect the political will of the Cuban leadership that places young people at the center of the social project and allocates the resources necessary for their acquisition of requisite knowledge and skills. Despite its limited resources as a Third World nation and a state of economic siege imposed by the United States for more than half a century, based on the maxim of José Martí, its Apostle and national hero, "to be cultured is to be free," Cuba demonstrates that quality education is within the reach of all nations.

References:

[1] Barbara Brown & Javier Luque, Great Teachers: How to Raise Student Learning in Latin America and the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., World Bank Group, 2014. (Accessed August 30, 2014). http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/LAC/Great_Teachers-How_to_Raise_Student_Learning-Barbara-Bruns-Advance%20Edition.pdf
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Salim Lamrani, Cuba : les médias face au défi de l'impartrialité, Paris, Estrella, 2013, p. 40.
[6] Ibid., P. 87-88.

Salim Lamrani is a lecturer at the University of La Réunion, and a journalist specializing in relations between Cuba and the United States.

1571. Half the World Non-Human Animals Have Been Killed Since 1970

By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post, September 30, 2014

Golden frog is one of frog species that went extinct

The new Living Planet Index report from the World Wildlife Fund opens with a jaw-dropping statistic: we've killed roughly half of the world's non-human vertebrate animal population since 1970.

World Wildlife Fund

The main culprits? Exploitation (i.e., overfishing and overhunting), and habitat degradation.

World Wildlife Fund

The WWF data show that the species declines vary by habitat and geographic area. Tropical areas saw greater declines, while temperate regions - like North America - saw lesser drops. Habitat-wise, land and saltwater species saw declines of roughly 39 percent. But freshwater animals - frogs, fish, salamanders and the like - saw a considerably sharper 76 percent drop. Habitat fragmentation and pollution (think algae blooms) were the main killers of freshwater species.

The declines are almost exclusively caused by humans' ever-increasing footprint on planet earth. "Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year," according to the report. The only reason we're able to run above max capacity - for now - is that we're stripping away resources faster than we can replenish them.

Carbon consumption - the burning of fossil fuels - represents a huge and growing chunk of the demand we put on the earth. "In 1961, carbon was 36 per cent of our total footprint, but by 2010 (the year for which the most complete dataset is available), it comprised 53 per cent."

World Wildlife Fund

At the country level, China is now the leading drain on the earth's resources. China accounts for nearly 20 percent of the overall demand, with the U.S. a distant second at 13.7 percent.

There are compelling reasons why we should consider the fate of the world's non-human species an urgent issue. For starters, many are economically valuable in their own right. Bees, for instance, are crucial to agriculture in the U.S.

We're also set to add another 2.4 billion humans to the world's population by 2050. Those people are all going to need water to drink, places to live and food to eat. Many of them will be born in poorer, more rural regions of the world, regions where people are more dependent on the land and its resources to survive.

Closer to home, we're already starting to see the effects of water shortages out West. Smarter water use will lead to less freshwater habitat degradation, which in turn will hopefully lead to a slowing of the decreases in freshwater species populations.

In short, you may be inclined to see species loss as a problem worth addressing on its own merits. Or, you may prefer to consider it as a symptom of larger environmental problems that are already starting to affect our lifestyles and our pocketbooks. Regardless, the WWF report presents a compelling case that it's something we should be paying closer attention to.

1570. Evolution: Survival of the Fittest Group in Spiders Observed in Nature

By Science Daily, October 1, 2014

Tiny Anelosimus spiders may have a huge story to tell about evolution. Photo: Judy Gallagher

Along rivers in Tennessee and Georgia, scientists have been studying brownish-orange spiders, called Anelosimus studiosus, that make cobwebby nests "anywhere from the size of a golf ball to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle," researcher Jonathan Pruitt says. The individual spiders are only the size of a pencil eraser, but they form organized groups that can catch prey ranging from fruit flies to small vertebrates. "We have found carcasses of rats and birds inside their colonies," Pruitt says. Unlike most spiders, which are solitary, these social spiders work together in groups.

Now new research shows that they evolve together in groups, too.

Say "group selection" among some groups of evolutionary biologists and you won't be invited back to the party. But Jonathan Pruitt, at the University of Pittsburgh, and Charles Goodnight, at the University of Vermont, have been studying generations of these Anelosimus spiders -- and have gathered the first-ever experimental evidence that group selection can fundamentally shape collective traits in wild populations.

Their results are presented in the Oct. 1 online edition of the journal Nature.

"Biologists have never shown an adaptation in nature which is clearly attributable to group selection," Goodnight said. "Our paper is that demonstration."

Darwin's questions
In his 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin puzzled over how ants could -- generation after generation -- produce workers that would serve the colony -- but were sterile. Evolution by natural selection has often been understood to work at the level of the organism: the traits of an individual determine whether it will survive and reproduce. How could these sterile ants persist in nature, he wondered, if they didn't reproduce?
"This difficulty, though appearing insuperable, is lessened, or, as I believe disappears, when it is remembered that selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual." In other words, evolution by natural selection, Darwin thought, could operate at numerous levels, including groups: "A tribe including many members," Darwin wrote in Descent of Man, who were able to "sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection."

But the idea that natural selection can operate on groups, and can produce group-level adaptations, has been under siege in a philosophical and semantic war among biologists since the 1960s. Though group selection has been fraught with controversy and confusion for decades, the fundamental idea is plain: in groups of plants or societies of animals where an individual's fitness is tightly tied to the performance of its group, evolution will favor traits that help increase the group's success. These traits, in turn, will increase the individual's long-term evolutionary success.

On farms, group selection has been clearly observed to succeed. There, breeders are more successful when they select among entire cages for groups of hens that produce the most eggs -- rather than selecting individually productive birds. All the birds in cages that produce lots of eggs -- regardless of which individuals are doing the egg-laying -- get to reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation. Those in low-producing cages, even if there are a few star birds in the mix, go to the slaughterhouse.

Still, a prominent group of biologists has long argued that "the conditions enabling group selection to be a potent evolutionary force essentially never occur in nature," notes an essay that accompanies the new Nature study.

Spider personalities
Pruitt and Goodnight's study of spiders shows that a group-level adaptation -- a critical ratio of two types of females -- is, in fact, a potent evolutionary force in nature. Female spiders in Anelosimus colonies fall into one of two categories of behavior: "aggressive" or "docile." In places with lots of resources for these spiders, the scientists observe that small colonies are dominated by docile females. As the colonies grow bigger, so does the frequency of aggressive females. In these places, as the colony grows, social parasites may be the biggest threat to their long-term survival, and aggressive females prove useful.

But in places with limited resources, the opposite happens: small colonies are dominated by aggressive females and the docile variety appears more frequently as the colonies grow. In these places, egg cannibalism by aggressive females may be a primary threat to survival.
In any case, what the scientists show in their study is that this shifting ratio -- a collective trait of a whole colony -- is adapted to specific locations. "Certain ratios yield high survivorship at some sites, but not others," the new study notes. So, when native colonies were perturbed -- their docile-to-aggressive ratios thrown out of whack -- they, somehow, sensed this as an extinction risk, and, over several generations, readjusted their ratio back to normal. Remarkably, when artificially assembled colonies were placed in new locations, the spiders -- over two generations -- attempted to recreate the composition of docile-to-aggressive spiders that would be ideal in their home conditions -- where the colony evolved -- even if the environmental conditions at the new location were different.

"They're continuing to make the phenotypes, the trait at a group level, that would have been advantageous if they had stayed home," Pruitt says, "But they seem to have no idea that they're at a new site and that what they're doing is going to doom the whole colony. All the friends die."

"Our observation that groups matched their compositions to the one optimal at their site of origin (regardless of their current habitat) is particularly important," Pruitt and Goodnight write, "given that many respected researchers have argued that group selection cannot lead to group adaptation except in clonal groups and that group selection theory is inefficient and bankrupt."

Wild evidence
"Group selection has become a scientific dust bunny, a hairy blob in which anything having to do with 'groups' clings to anything having to do with 'selection,'" famed Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in a 2012 attack on group selection. And clearly, the naïve 1960s view that, say, a bird could choose to not reproduce for the good of its fellow birds, or that lemmings toss themselves suicidally off cliffs to alleviate overcrowding, has been wholly discredited. "Biology doesn't work that way," Charles Goodnight says.
Yet, a flock of birds turns together. Ants build bridges with their bodies. Monkeys organize into treetop societies warning each other of approaching foes. Social animals succeed in nature because they have unique and powerful group traits that individual organisms can't have. Organisms' relatedness is part of the explanation for these social and cooperative behaviors. That is, because kin have shared genes, it can mean that helping your sisters is helping yourself. The empirical evidence that Jonathan Pruitt and Charles Goodnight have gathered and analyzed about Anelosimus spiders points to a mechanism that complements, but extends beyond, the scientific orthodoxy of "kin selection." Their field study shows natural selection working on a collective trait -- the docile-to-aggressive ratio, known to pass down from generation to generation -- that has led to an adaptation that determines whether whole colonies survive or die. In other words: group selection observed in the wild.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Vermont. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Jonathan N. Pruitt, Charles J. Goodnight. Site-specific group selection drives locally adapted group compositions. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13811