On Twitter, a reader notes that black homicides tend to be more seasonal than white homicides:

This more or less checks out: blacks died by homicide according to the CDC death certificate database about 22% more in June to August over the years 1999-2020 than in December to February.

For whites, the seasonal gap was only 7%; for Hispanics 18%.

The gap between July-September versus January-March is 27% for blacks, 16% for whites, and 23% for Hispanics.

But all September figures are inflated by 9/11 in 2001.

For whites, about 20% of all homicide victims in September over that 22 year span died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

My impression from local news coverage is that a lot of blacks get murdered at outdoor parties or on the sidewalks outside clubs, so the current temperature matters more.

Here’s the New York Times’ #3 article on its online frontpage:

Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds

The research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.

The differences in brain activity were modest, and it remains to be seen if changes in brain patterns will translate to higher skills.

By Jason DeParle
Jan. 24, 2022

WASHINGTON — A study that provided poor mothers with cash stipends for the first year of their children’s lives appears to have changed the babies’ brain activity in ways associated with stronger cognitive development, a finding with potential implications for safety net policy.

The differences were modest — researchers likened them in statistical magnitude to moving to the 75th position in a line of 100 from the 81st

I.e., from the 19th to 25th percentile.

— and it remains to be seen if changes in brain patterns will translate to higher skills, as other research offers reason to expect.

Still, evidence that a single year of subsidies could alter something as profound as brain functioning highlights the role that money may play in child development and comes as President Biden is pushing for a much larger program of subsidies for families with children.

“This is a big scientific finding,” said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. “It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development.”

Another researcher, Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard, reacted more cautiously, noting the full effect of the payments — \$333 a month — would not be clear until the children took cognitive tests. While the brain patterns documented in the study are often associated with higher cognitive skills, he said, that is not always the case.

… Evidence abounds that poor children on average start school with weaker cognitive skills, and neuroscientists have shown that the differences extend to brain structure and function. But it has not been clear if those differences come directly from the shortage of money or from related factors like parental education or neighborhood influences.

It could be something that happens in the 8 months and 29 days before birth. But not a day sooner!

The study released on Monday offers evidence that poverty itself holds children back from their earliest moments.

“This is the first study to show that money, in and of itself, has a causal impact on brain development,” said Dr. Kimberly G. Noble, a physician and neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who helped lead the study.

Dr. Noble and colleagues from six universities recruited a thousand mother-infant pairs within days of the babies’ birth and randomly divided the families into two groups. One group received a nominal \$20 a month and another received \$333.

Using electroencephalograms, or EEG tests, to evaluate the children at age 1, the researchers found that those in the high-cash group had more of the fast brain activity other research has linked to cognitive development than those in the low-cash group. The differences were statistically significant by most, but not all, measures and were greatest in parts of the brain most associated with cognitive advancement.

I’ll post below the researchers’ rather tortured efforts to reach statistical significance:

… While the size of the recorded differences are modest (about a fifth of a standard deviation), the researchers said they were comparable to those produced by the average school experiment, like giving children tutors. While those services are often hard to administer, they added, cash can be distributed on a mass scale.

A general pattern found in studies over the last 60 years is that it’s not too hard to juice results for very young children, but hard to have much long-term impact after puberty.

From the actual study:

In the case of absolute power, the high-cash gift group showed higher power in the three mid- to high-frequency bands (alpha, beta, and gamma) but not in the low-frequency theta-band (top rows of Table 2). When ranked by effect sizes, group differences in EEG power in the beta-band were largest (effect size = 0.26, beta = 0.414, P = 0.02, for the model with covariates and site fixed effects), followed by the gamma-band (effect size = 0.23, beta = 0.221, P = 0.04). Both P levels were below the 0.05 threshold when treated as independent measures, but not after Westfall–Young (44) multiple-testing adjustments. Group power differences in the alpha-band (effect size = 0.17, beta = 0.720, P = 0.07) were smaller and at the margins of statistical significance. Small and statistically nonsignificant differences in absolute power were found in the theta-band (effect size = 0.02, beta = 0.396, P = 0.83). (See SI Appendix, SI5 for a similar pattern in weighted analyses that adjust for demographic differences between the n = 435 EEG sample and the n = 931 full sample of BFY mother/infant dyads interviewed at age 1.)

Differences in relative power were qualitatively similar but uniformly smaller than those observed for absolute power, with the high-cash gift group showing greater mid- to high-frequency relative power in the alpha-, beta-, and gamma-bands. These differences did not reach conventional levels of statistical significance (bottom rows of Table 2; for a more complete discussion of absolute and relative power, see SI Appendix, SI3). In contrast, relative theta-power was greater in the low-cash gift group with an effect size of 0.21, with the difference at the margins of statistical significance (SI Appendix, SI4). …

Given our hypotheses of positive differences across all mid- to high-frequency portions of the power spectrum, we aggregated power across all three of our preregistered mid- to high-frequency power bands. Such a summary index approach is a commonly used data-reduction technique in the social sciences (45, 46), and serves as a post hoc complement to our preregistered Westfall–Young multiple comparison adjustment.

In other words, they didn’t think of this statistical ploy when they pre-registered their study. (I’m actually sympathetic to researchers who come up with new ideas when they finally get their hands on the real results, but pre-registration purists are not.)

While this approach ignores the biological and functional significance of the EEG bands, it has the benefit of enabling us to statistically estimate ITT differences for a single aggregated mid- to high-frequency index score (SI Appendix, SI7). Consistent with our band-based results, we find that the infants in the high-cash gift group had more mid- to high-frequency band absolute power than infants in the low-cash gift group (effect size = 0.25, beta = 13.35, P = 0.02) (SI Appendix, Table SI7.1). Thus, the direction and approximate size of intervention effects on mid- to high-frequency absolute power are similar when power is analyzed in preregistered bands, disaggregated into single-hertz bins, examined within regions or aggregated across bands.

I look forward to the press conference at which Joe and Kamala try to explain this study.

The normalization of mask-wearing likely contributes to rising homicide and car-jacking rates.

When I was a kid watching 1960s cowboy TV shows, the term “masked man” was a synonym for “criminal.”

(To be precise, bad guy masked men such as horse thieves wore bandana masks over their noses and mouths, while good guy masked men like the Lone Ranger and Zorro wore masks over their eye region.)

From TV Tropes:

Malevolent Masked Men

A group of people wearing masks is never a good sign. …

This varies by mask:

… A Domino Mask, one that covers only the eyes, is a traditionally heroic mask. The Ghost Who Walks and The Spirit being two classic examples.

… If the mask covers the top half of the face, it emphasizes the mouth, aka gluttony: Never a good sign. Unless of course, it’s to show a Lantern Jaw of Justice instead.

… Masks that cover the lower half of the face are likelier to be worn by the cannibalistic, or someone whose lower face is likely very damaged (as in, no jaw). They’re also frequently worn by bandits in the Old West (possibly to keep out dust), as well as by ninjas who don’t do full masks, and Gangbangers to conceal their identities and/or broadcast what gang they’re with.

Granted, East Asians tend to wear masks on the streets every flu season, but they don’t have crime rates like we do.

Steven Hayward of Powerline hosts a discussion between Charles Murray and myself here.

The return of Black Lives Matter on May 25, 2020 coincided with a historic surge in black homicide fatalities and traffic fatalities.

Black homicide victimization data is from the CDC and traffic fatality data from the NHTSA.

Here is my graph of the CDC’s count of homicide victims by race by month since 1999:

Is the Floyd Effect the most obvious phenomenon in the history of American social sciences?

From the New York Times opinion section:

Amanda Gorman: Why I Almost Didn’t Read My Poem at the Inauguration

Jan. 20, 2022

By Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman is a poet and the author of “The Hill We Climb” and “Call Us What We Carry.”

It’s told like this: Amanda Gorman performed at the inauguration, and the rest is history.

The truth is I almost declined to be the inaugural poet. Why?

I was terrified.

I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn’t get vaccinated yet. Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite. I didn’t know then that I’d become famous, but I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you’re Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service.

It didn’t help that I was getting DMs from friends telling me not so jokingly to buy a bulletproof vest. My mom had us crouch in our living room so that she could practice shielding my body from bullets. A loved one warned me to “be ready to die” if I went to the Capitol, telling me, “It’s just not worth it.” I had insomnia and nightmares, barely ate or drank for days. I finally wrote to some close friends and family, telling them that I was most likely going to pull out of the ceremony.

I got some texts praising the Lord. I got called pathologically insane. But I knew only I could answer the question for myself: Was this poem worth it?

The night before I was to give the Inaugural Committee my final decision felt like the longest of my life. My neighborhood was eerily quiet in that early morning dark, though I strained my ears for noise to distract me from the choice that lay ahead. It felt like my little world stood still. And then it struck me: Maybe being brave enough doesn’t mean lessening my fear, but listening to it. I closed my eyes in bed and let myself utter all the leviathans that scared me, both monstrous and minuscule. What stood out most of all was the worry that I’d spend the rest of my life wondering what this poem could have achieved. There was only one way to find out.

By the time the sun rose, I knew one thing for sure: I was going to be the 2021 inaugural poet. I can’t say I was completely confident in my choice, but I was completely committed to it.

I’m a firm believer that often terror is trying to tell us of a force far greater than despair. In this way, I look at fear not as cowardice but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear. And now more than ever, we have every right to be affected, afflicted, affronted. If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention. The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we’ve lost, whom and what we love.

On the morning of Inauguration Day, I went through the motions of getting ready on autopilot, mindless and mechanical, doing my hair and makeup even as I anxiously practiced my poem. On the way to the Capitol, I recited the mantra I say before any performance: I am the daughter of Black writers. We’re descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains, and they changed the world. They call me.

… If nothing else, this must be known: Even as we’ve grieved, we’ve grown; even fatigued, we’ve found that this hill we climb is one we must mount together. We are battered but bolder, worn but wiser. I’m not telling you to not be tired or afraid. If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means …

And yes, I still am terrified every day. Yet fear can be love trying its best in the dark. So do not fear your fear. …

And the rest is history.

And she changed the world … forever.

This was sad—a Harvard-educated young women swanning about in Oprah's private jet…

Convinced white-supremacist domestic terrorists would shoot her in cold blood for—reading poems.

Who's the last black (non-rapper) shot for being poetically "outspoken"?https://t.co/okZlorE1p5 pic.twitter.com/3akkvXtOwP

— 𝙴𝚍𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝙺. 𝙿𝚢𝚛𝚘𝚜 (@EdKPyros) January 22, 2022

When white policeman Kyle Rittenhouse shot George Floyd and Emmett Till on January 6th, 1619, it was not just the white supremacist murder of two more black men, it was a lynching of *all* black bodies, which built our democracy, but were redlined out of generational home equity.

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) January 22, 2022

Within 280 characters, what else can you fit in that Today’s Youth know about American history?

Here’s an updated version to work with:

When white supremacist cop Kyle Rittenhouse crossed a state line to shoot George Floyd and Emmett Till on January 6, 1619, it was yet another lynching of all Black bodies, who built our democracy and invented the lightbulb but were redlined by FDR out of generational home equity.

To paraphrase what singer David Allan Coe told songwriter Steve Goodman after Goodman claimed “You Never Even Called Me By Name” is the perfect country song: It’s not bad, but where is “lived experience,” “emotional labor,” “intersectionality,” “exhaustion,” and “touched my hair”?

Handel’s Messiah is a rare work of high art that most people enjoy and a large number have actually performed in. Not surprisingly, Canadians are worked up over what Handel’s Messiah has to do with George Floyd in the same way that Canadians decided that the topic of “Rembrandt in Amsterdam” required repeated references to Turtle Island.

From MSN:

Handel’s ‘Messiah’ today: How classical music is contending with its colonial past and present

Nina Penner, Assistant Professor of Music, Brock University and Caryl Clark, Professor of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto 2021-12-23

No work of western classical music is more closely associated with the Christmas season than German-born composer George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, which premiered in 1742. …

Even before the global Black Lives Matter protests, a 2018 report written for the non-profit Orchestras Canada by writer and arts consultant Soraya Peerbaye and violinist and ethnomusicologist Parmela Attariwala documents “systemic inequity and coloniality in Canadian orchestras,” ranging from orchestras’ leadership and governance structures to their repertoire and working methods. Music scholars have also been grappling with the colonial legacy of classical music, including Handel’s investments in the slave trade. …

How these two Canadian companies chose to respond to our contemporary context of anti-racist calls when interpreting Messiah provides an opportunity to have a conversation about how performers and audiences of western classical music can engage more fully in anti-colonial and anti-racist work.

To these questions, we, two white settler scholars

To claim the identity of a white settler scholar, should you have to have personally busted sod? For example, the closest I ever came to settling the American West was growing up in ranch house (on a culdesac).

, bring our combined research expertise in music of the 18th century and how indie opera companies in Canada are helping works from the past speak to contemporary issues. One of us (Nina) is involved in a project, “Exploring New Collaborative Models in Indigenous-led Opera in Canada.” …

Against the Grain Theatre’s new interpretation of Messiah, Messiah/Complex, hoped to support Indigenous and underrepresented voices within their mandate of presenting familiar pieces “in innovative ways and in unusual venues.” They decided to present Handel’s orchestral music as originally written, to be performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, but they hired all Indigenous, Black or racialized singer soloists, 12 in total.

Joel Ivany, AtG’s founder and artistic director, partnered with Reneltta Arluk, director of Akpik Theatre and of Indigenous Arts at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to co-direct the production. Ivany has relayed that artists were invited to choose the interpretive frame and language for their performances. The film features segments in Arabic, Dene, English, Inuktitut, Inuttitut, French and Southern Tutchone.

… a New York Times headline on writer Dan Bilefsky’s story declared Handel’s work “freed from history’s bonds.”

Another production based on Handel’s work, Electric Messiah by Soundstreams was billed as “a full-length music video that reimagines Handel’s classic for today’s world” and “brings the past to life in a fresh way that reflects the city we live in.”

In keeping with Soundstreams’s mandate to showcase the work of living composers, the company made minimal changes to the texts. Instead, the artists fit these texts with new music with influences from electronic dance music, pop, and hip hop.

We’ll keep Handel’s words but replace Handel’s music! What could go wrong? Are you saying we can’t come up with just as good music as Handel? But we’re diverse!

… Classical music’s colonial legacy
In Peerbaye and Attariwala’s Orchestras Canada report, they call on Canadian orchestras “to create non-hierarchical environments where the artistic inquiries of Indigenous artists and artists of colour can take place.” Engaging in “wider conversations about the experiences of Indigenous people, people of colour, and other equity-seeking communities” will enable orchestras to “cultivate equal and reciprocal relationships that meaningfully support current artistic inquiries.”

These recommendations are echoed in Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, a recent book by Stó:lō scholar and artist Dylan Robinson. He notes that the problem with including more diverse artists and traditions, without altering existing ways of working, is that even the “best intentions of integration continue to reinforce and maintain the hierarchical dominance of art music as the genre to which other music must conform.”

Equitable collaborations with musicians in other traditions are going to involve working in new ways. Robinson also recommends foregrounding the irreconcilable nature of different musical traditions. Allowing these differences to be heard might foster greater openness to the notion that reconciliation cannot be achieved through Indigenous “inclusion” in existing colonial models.

… Nêhiyaw-Michif (Cree-Métis) baritone Jonathon Adams described their performance as a “commentary on what it means to be Two-Spirit and Indigenous in Alberta.” The performance juxtaposed shots of an oil refinery with the surrounding lands and waters of their homeland.

AtG featured singers outside of the western classical tradition, several of whom are also songwriters or composers. However, their compositional skills were not showcased. AtG’s decision to have the Toronto Symphony Orchestra supply the backing tracks may suggest that, in addressing the industry’s prevailing whiteness, nothing about the sound of western classical music need change — that all that is required is to employ more Indigenous, Black and racialized artists. But this approach ignores critiques of how the sounds and values of classical music can “constitute a structural barrier to diversification,” as noted by Chris Jenkins, violist, musicologist and associate dean at Oberlin Conservatory.

Agency to singers and musicians
Soundstreams gave singers and musicians more agency with respect to the music. Adam Scime, composer and music director for the 2020 edition of Electric Messiah, notes that they invite the musicians involved in each iteration to “bring their own voice to sculpt the project” and that they “give everyone equal collaborative footing.”

Equal collaborative footing with Handel.

In keeping with Robinson’s recommendations, individual artists in Electric Messiah maintained sovereignty over their segments. Meanwhile viewers are encouraged to appreciate the differences between, for example, SlowPitchSound’s turntablism, Métis and French-Canadian composer Ian Cusson’s O Death, O Grave, and Scime’s “Hallelujah” chorus reimagined as a beach dance party. In so doing, Soundstreams not only explored new, more equitable ways of working together but the sonic results questioned the hegemony of the western classical tradition. …

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

I can’t say this is 100% legit, but it looks plausible:

Sketches used by the Soviet police to identify suspects based on ethnicity, 1960s

Everybody is drawn to look like a character actor, except the Gypsy who is portrayed as a leading man.

From the Daily Mail:

Library security guard is viciously attacked by pit bull after approaching passed-out owner to administer Narcan as overdoses and crimes surge out of control in San Francisco