Think Progress contrasts Laura Bush’s recent argument that the media are failing to report all of the good things that are happening to this excerpt from the Iraq Study Group:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

This excerpt is discussed in this separate Think Progress post, which is based on this article from the Washington Post.

You’ll never find anyone who writes more clearly about mathematics than John Paulos.  Exhibit A is Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1990). 

Paulos doesn’t limit his inquiries and writings to pure mathematics, however.  Mathematics permeates numerous social issues, and Paulos is happy to jump into the fray whereever that is the case.  In this article, he points out how odd it is:  

that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution - for example, many fundamentalist Christians - are among the most ardent supporters of the free market.

I’ve certainly seen fundamentalists repeatedly and proudly announced that all aspects of an economy “just happen,” without an omniscient and omnipotent Planner.  I’ve heard this so often, that I’ve sardonically termed the free market as “The Fourth Person in God.”  Paulos has heard these claims too:

[Those who reject biological evolution] would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges which are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.

Paulos thus raises the question of why those who reject evolution don’t require an “all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver” to make certain that the vast and complex economies of cities and nations continue to run with the apparent precision with which they appear to run. 

Good question.

Check out the many other offerings on the web site of John Paulos. 

Bill Moyers wrote that “it has been said that the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics.” To the extent that this is true, go hither and understand the world through the statistics presented by “Worldometers.”  Lots of thought-provoking statistics kept up to the second (through extrapolation). 

I see that 28,125 people have died of hunger so far today.  Enough people to fill a big stadium, many of them children, dying of something entirely preventable . . .

Very much worth a visit, if you are capable of being “deeply moved by statistics.”

Why is the White House afraid to show Bush’s 2003 aircraft carrier “Mission Accomplished speech” in its full glory?  Why has the video available on the White House site been so obviously hacked?

Maybe the answer is best shown through statistics:

                 At Mission Accomplished    Since Mission Accomplished

U.S. Troops wounded          542                            21,077

U.S. Troops killed                139                              2,700

And don’t forget the Iraqi civilians.   According to Lancet,  even back in 2004, “the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq [was] 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.”  Some sources now place the civilian toll at 654,000 Iraqi civilians killed and 1,178,937 Iraqi civilians seriously injured.

I suppose that the White House response would be something like this:  sometimes you have to kill 1/2 million civilians and allow another one million be seriously injured in order to “help” them. 

I just finally got around to reading my June 2006 Communications of the ACM (an academic computer journal) and spotted a little news brief about Britannica trying to sue Nature magazine for this December 2005 Article that noted that the error rate in science entries of Wikipedia is comparable to that in Britannica.

Nature magazine is the premier peer-reviewed high-level publication for science in the world. For an article to get into this journal, it has to be rigorously supported. Their discussion of the controversy is here.

One point about the coverage I hadn’t seen was the different natures of how the information was put together in each of these encyclopedias.

• Britannica is Intelligently Designed. For a dozen decades they hired the best and brightest crafters of techinical prose to cover all the subjects that the intelligent editors can think of as being worthwhile. Yes, the design is always evolving. But it is limited by the need to have a designer watching and controlling its growth and changes.
• Wiki evolved from chaos. It provided an environment, and anyone was invited to add and edit entries. It covers millions of more subjects than Britannica can hope to. It cross references virally, with apparently absurd links to subjects that someone thought were related, and often do turn out to be relevant. People do go in and edit and even mark content to remove. There is some oversight to prevent ideology from trumping understanding. But basically, it is an example of pure evolution with no plan or guidance.

So my point is that over a hundred years of intelligent design has produced something that, in its limited intersecting subset, is slightly better than the half-decade of raw evolution produced.

Okay, the Britannica only consults experts, and Wiki entries are written by everyman. But usually knowledgeable amateurs or even parties to the discoveries themselves. It’s only a century or so since that difference was moot. Chas. Darwin had a degree in Divinity. R. Feynman made a study of the behavior of a Frisbee, and got a Nobel when he applied the math he worked out for flying disks to electron behavior. Interested amateurs often become closet experts in fields for which they have no papers. But, I digress. So here I’ll stop.

With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: “I don’t have time” and “I can’t afford it.” These justifications seem to work wonders, trimming responsibility and slimming guilt- we all have more important things to spend our money and time on than something as fleeting and vain as health, right?

I’ll cut the sarcasm for a second. In all fairness, the perception that healthy living comes at a high price has some root in reality. Take this study by Northern Ireland charity NCH, which demonstrated that poor families frequently cannot afford balanced diets, based on the higher pricing for healthful food. And with the steep price on gym memberships and exercise equipment, many also get the impression that an active lifestyle must come at a paltry sum. Or at least the excuse sounds plausible.

But some recent economic analysis tears this web of self deception apart. Healthy lifestyles in fact save a sizeable amount of money in the longrun. Smartmoney Magazine puts an estimate on the total payoff: $84,000. Prescription medications, quadruple bypasses, and other such health care expenses cost more than fresh produce and a workout routine, as it turns out:

“According to a [RAND Corporation] study, overweight people pay 10 to 36% more a year on hospital stays and ambulances, depending on the severity of their weight problem. Smokers pay 20% more. Fitness counts too. Aging couch potatoes who started exercising at least three times a week saved an average of $2,200 a year on medical expenses, according to a recent study by Bloomington, a Minn.-based HealthPartners Research Foundation.”

USA Today also recently wrote about the financial impact of health. A few more interesting tidbits:

• People with Diabetes pay 240% more per capita on health care costs.
• A walk a day can save a middle-aged adult $50-$100 per month by avoiding the cost of blood pressure and cholesterol medications.
• The average healthy 35-40 year old American doubles his wealth in ten years; those in poor health typically see a decline over the same period of time.

It doesn’t stop there. With retirement getting financially rockier by the second, physical wellbeing has become even more crucial (and its inverse more expensive). Fidelity Investments gives a couple’s retirement a $200,000 health care price tag, not including dental care, long-term treatments, over-the-counter medications, and assisted living (which costs around $70,000/year in its own right). Fortunately, exercise and healthful eating can greatly diminish rates of dementia and other taxing age-related conditions as well as its other myriad benefits.

I believe that settles the cost-of-healthy-living dispute, to what extent the conflict even existed. As for the “I don’t have time” excuse, I have yet to find a water-tight response. I suppose one could argue that if you take the time to live well now, you’ll have more time alive to enjoy it, of course. It all comes down to what you’ll willingly invest.

Here’s a Question I Like To Ask when arguing biblical accuracy versus scientific discovery:

Postulating an omnipotent God and his potent yet subordinate nemesis: Which has the power to influence the minds of a few men to compose a persuasive text and create a regional following, and which to deposit billions of consistent clues about creation into the ground, the seas, and the heavens, from the scale of muons to the size of galactic superclusters?

It really comes down to whether one chooses to believe in an interpretation of a translation of a much edited anthology of ancient scraps of text (”truth”), or in physical evidence that anyone can see and measure, with some training (”just a theory”).

How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was.

Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004 presidential election. He shows the typical lower 48 red-blue map, and then one warped to show it as though each county were sized by population, then a flat map in purples, and then the purples map twisted to match the population of each county:

Much more good cartographic stuff all “licensed under a Creative Commons License. Text and images may be freely distributed.”

Scientists studying honeybees have learned a lot about how a swarm decides where to locate its hive.  The decision is critical, because a wrong decision can leave the hive exposed to deadly winter weather; therefore, bees need an effective voting system that reliably and efficiently yields their optimal hive location.  Fortunately for bees, millions of years of evolution have given them one.  In fact, their voting system is better than the voting system Americans use to elect their public officials.

It’s called range voting, and it’s very simple:  instead of choosing one candidate, voters give each candidate a numerical score (e.g., 0-9).  That’s it.  After everyone has voted, the candidate with the highest average score wins.

Turns out, this simple change makes a big difference.  In computer simulations, range voting greatly reduced many of the well-known problems with America’s two-party system.  Problems such as gerrymandering and the silencing of third-party views, for example. 

This website explains how range voting works and this website describes how bees do it.

The conservative right loves to use the term “family values” as a token cover for their backward bigotry. Used in opposition to abortion, gay rights, or even the increase of women in the workplace, “family values” summons a particular image of the conservatives’ imaginary era of perfection and bliss.

Many people refer to this image as a real time, probably somewhere in the 1950’s; “the good old days” when men worked to support their families, women stayed happily in the home with the children, no one divorced, and no children ran off to live renegade alternative lifestyles tainted with wanton sodomy, teen pregnancy, or drug abuse.

We may have even heard older people reminisce about “the good old days” in terms that make the time seem authentically wonderful: “no one locked their doors”; “neighbors looked after each other”; “marriage meant something back then”; “it was a simpler time”, and so on.

Even if we don’t buy into the conservative agenda against basic equal rights, we may concede that the world has become a much more frightening, complicated place, and that a time period such as the allusive 1950’s seems preferable, even tantalizing.

Unfortunately, no amount of regressive activism on the part of Republicans can return us to a grander time, because those “good old days” simply never existed. I like comedian Lewis Black’s take on the shiny 1950’s ideal:

“It was called the ‘50s. The wife cooked and raised the kids and sent the husband off to work, where he sat every day behind that desk, day in and day out, his soul being sucked from his body; while his wife, stuck at home and so sick of her daily chores that she slowly became addicted to primitive antidepressants, sat hoping against hope Jim wasn’t drunk again when he came home. It almost seems too good to be true.[italics added]”

Of course, the rantings of a comedian hardly prove my point. But as sociologist Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Black has fairly accurate assertions.

Let’s begin with the notion that marriage had sanctity in the 1950’s. Coontz writes that the percentage of women over 18 who find themselves not currently married hovers around 20%, a percentage which has held since 1900. In truth, single parenthood has increased, but this hasn’t led to generations of renegade youth that engage in unsafe sex, drugs, and crime: teen pregnancies and violent crime have both dropped to the lowest records since the Justice Department began keeping tabs on such figures in the early 1970’s. (more…)

Our designer, nicksmithdesign.com, has added a few new features.   On each post contained on our homepage, you can see the number of “views.”  This feature refers only to the number of times that someone has clicked on the permalink of that specific post.  It thus vastly underestimates the number of views for each post, though it can give you an idea of relative popularity of that post.  

Nick has also inserted a rating system (of up to five stars).  If you want to quickly weigh-in on your reaction to a post, feel free.  No obligation, of course.

We’ve been up and running for about five months now.  We are really happy with our traffic at this point.  The average day now brings us about 450 visits and 1,800 page views. 

If you like the kinds of commentary and links we bring you, please think about sharing the link to our homepage ( http://dangerousintersection.org/ ) with others who might be interested.   

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In a political climate drenched with debate as well as petty fighting, many people embrace bipartisan cooperation when it makes one of its rare appearances. A no-brainer of a bill feels like a relief, and it indicates that Congress actually has the ability to conduct business in a productive way. The uncontested passage of a bill feels particularly sweet when the bill deals with an emotionally gratifying issue, like the recent creation of a national sex offender registry.

No one urged President Bush to veto this bill. Named for the America’s Most Wanted host’s kidnapped son, Adam Walsh, this bill had all the trappings of legislative gem: widespread bipartisan support, quick, painless passage, and the emotional pull that only arresting child molesters for 25 years can elicit.

The law establishes a national-level database of past sex offenders’ names and locations. Many states have implemented databases of this kind before, but this law penalizes past offenders more harshly for not providing current information, and increases criminal penalties for child predators as well. It certainly sounds like a Congressional slam-dunk, providing all Americans with more access to information, and better protecting the nation’s children from proven sex criminals. Most people would support such a piece of legislation without a moment’s thought.

But any issue that prompts you to think with your heart rather than your head can have disastrous results. Botched legislation has enjoyed widespread gut-reaction support before, after all. And sex offender registries have not had a shining history.

This April, a vigilante in Maine used a sex offender registry to track down and kill six convicted sex offenders. The victims included the rapist of a 13-year-old girl. But the vigilante’s prey also included an entirely harmless adult man who ended up on the state registry just for having sex with his girlfriend before she turned 16.

Vengeance-minded maniacs don’t go on sex offender registry killing-sprees that often, but the registries nonetheless come with a deep flaw: they don’t differentiate between potentially dangerous rapists and child molesters, and more innocuous offenders who have merely committed consensual statutory rape. Yet all offenders face the same treatment once they have served their time in prison: sex offenders can’t live near public schools or parks, and wherever they do move, a long line of harassing phone calls, neighborhood flyers, and police inspections tend to follow. This story on NPR follows a man who has received numerous death threats from community members who have found his name on a local sex offender registry. His crime? At age 20, he had sex with a 16-year-old, now his wife. (more…)

The Founding Fathers of the United States feared the effects of a largely uninformed populous. In the 1700s, Democracy still struck many people as a dangerous proposition, reliant on the education and devotion of the masses. With an unaware voting public, the logic went, Republic could turn to tyranny. We cannot idly expect the government to afford us our basic rights; we instead must always fight to retain them. Thomas Jefferson said it succinctly: “If the nation expects to be ignorant and free…it expects what never was and never will be.” Fellow Virginian James Madison explained it this way:

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy or perhaps both. A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

How ironic that Virginia voters have some of the worst access to candidates’ positions of any state in the nation.  Public ignorance doesn’t get the blame this time, though. The majority of Virginian candidates up for election this November have neglected to fill out the nation’s foremost position survey, Project Votesmart’s National Political Awareness Test (NPAT).

Project Votesmart launched nationally in 1992. The nonpartisan organization, created by the diverse likes of George McGovern, John McCain, Bill Frist, Michael Dukakis, and Jimmy Carter, aims to create the most comprehensive database of information on candidates bidding for office. Project Votesmart’s website features background information and incumbents’ voting records, vast collections of public statements, and the ratings of hundred of interest groups. But the organization’s crown gem, the NPAT survey on political positions, has seen a steady decline in responses over the last several elections.

Unfortunately, the problem just begins in Virginia. Fewer and fewer candidates have chosen to respond to surveys all over the nation. In Montana, only 16 legislative candidates returned NPAT surveys, out of an estimated 250. Gubernatorial candidates in Kentucky and Indiana have refused the survey several times. Californian politicians, like Virginians, have reached an all-time low in response.

Both bewildered and curious, I went to Project Votesmart’s database and looked up the candidates in my state, Ohio. Look at what I found. Dismal results across the board. (more…)

Like so many other complex issues, Americans don’t seem to understand global warming. In a Gallup poll conducted in March, respondents ranked their level of concern regarding several environmental issues. When asked to rank their level of concern over global warming, 36% of Americans claimed that it worried them “a great deal”.

Global warming, one of the most imminent environmental problems, ranked lower on people’s priorities than pollution of drinking water, pollution of lakes and rivers, maintenance of the nation’s supply of fresh water, and the hole in the ozone layer.

Clearly some people haven’t paid much attention to environmental problems over the years. Sure, the hole in the ozone layer still presents a problem, but since the global ban on its main cause, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the severity of that particular situation has lessened greatly. Meanwhile, the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming continue to grow unchecked in the nations that emit the most, including of course the US.

And what of this water purity concern? How kind of Americans, who enjoy tap water more pure and safe than bottled, to fret over the water purity of the less privileged countries around the world. Yet somehow I suspect that the water purity of Third World countries doesn’t come to mind when Americans say that water purity and supply worries them. I can’t say for certain, but I imagine that Americans perceive their water purity as less than its (relatively) pristine reality. Perhaps the marketing of bottled waters, using crisp graphics of clean mountain streams and untainted ice drifts, has led me to this conclusion.

In another fit of environmental naiveté, Americans claim that they would happily take measures to better the world around them by walking, biking, and using mass transit more often, or by turning down the thermostat a few degrees and washing clothes in cold water (70% and 80%, respectively). These small sacrifices sound like a great step toward responsibility. But Americans don’t actually take these steps, for reasons unclear. Unless they expect some kind of national movement to initiate the use of mass transit, for example, people could begin to take the bus whenever they please. Shouldn’t the next step after declaring willingness to do something involve actually doing that something?

Conditions do not look optimistic, but hopefully An Inconvenient Truth and any media chatter it inspires will get Americans to actually think about global warming, and even more challenging, will get them to actually do something about it.

My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America.  Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names?  Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music?  Allow me to explain.

First, the magnitude.  Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”  Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man.  Imagine this hypothetical: 

President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk.  In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.”  While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.

It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous.  Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former ambassador.

“Such unforgivable lying,” the American people would immediately conclude. George W. Bush can no longer be trusted to be the President. He made up a story and needlessly caused a soldier to die.”

Perhaps this example seems outlandish, but how can it be any less outlandish than what has actually occurred in Iraq?  There, the deception of this Administration has so far caused the deaths of 2,500 U.S. soldiers and 100,000 Iraqi adults and children.  Yet to many, the deaths of these thousands seems less horrible than the death of one.  When we read of one child drowning or one adult killed by a carjacker, we wince.  When we hear that another 50 people were killed in Iraq each day, we simply throw it on a ethereal pile of statistics in our minds. Though Stalin’s idea seems counter-intuitive, I have no better explanation.

Is it possible that music is also to blame?  “That’s absurd,” many would say.  How could that be?  (more…)

According to the Associated press,

Tobacco alone is predicted to kill a billion people this century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century, if current trends hold.

This humongous number begs for a morbid illustration.  If you lined up the dead bodies of one billion dead smokers end to end, they would stretch from the Earth to the moon (which is 240,000 miles from the Earth) four times.

These statistics are worth keeping in mind for those times when someone argues that something must be OK because lots of other people are doing it.

Earlier, I wrote about the tendency of suburbanites to feel they have limited options, and how such a life can seem unfulfilling or failed. At the time, I inspected the personal shortcomings that have a hand in this, as well as the human predisposition to discontentment. But it appears that yet another factor contributes to the often portrayed suburban dread: the structure of the suburbs themselves.

Prior to the Second World War, most suburbs had what architects and city planners call a “traditional” or “mixed-use” structure. Towns of this type have closely arranged, small city blocks intermittent with other amenities such as shops, restaurants, churches, and public buildings such as schools and post offices. To get a better idea of a town of this type, picture the typical conception of a small New England village or city. This traditional structure made pedestrian activity both easy and inviting, claims Andres Duany, one of the authors of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.

In the 1950’s and beyond, building codes began to prevent such a seamless blend of commerce, public activity, and personal residence from organizing. Most American towns now have much more rigid building codes the divide all the realms of society into isolated sections: a housing district, a shopping center-like area, and government buildings shoved somewhere else. Duany describes the trend this way:

“It’s an architectural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Our neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless alien substitutes. Instead of corner stores, we have Quick Marts. Instead of Main Streets, we have Mega Malls. Fast-food architecture –”McMansions” — sit forlornly along monotonous cul-de-sacs.”

This layout has made the classic “American Dream” all the more difficult. Isolated housing areas breed the sloping, Byzantine neighborhood structures where every house looks the same and the nearest shop lies nearly a mile away down a busy five-lane road. See the the following pictures, which compare a “traditional” neighborhood to a modern suburb (all from Suburban Nation): (more…)

Let’s do a thought experiment.  Imagine there is a salad bowl sitting (upright) on your kitchen table.  Imagine, also, there is a marble resting in the bottom of the salad bowl.  If you slightly disturb the marble with your finger, the marble will roll around the bottom of the bowl.  If you disturb the marble a bit more, the marble will roll up the side of the bowl and then roll back down to the bottom.  In this situation, the marble is said to be in a “stable equilibrium,” because the marble remains inside the bowl (equilibrium) despite reasonable-sized disturbances.

Now, imagine removing the marble from the bowl, turning the bowl upside-down, and resting the marble on the flat base of the bowl.  Although the marble will remain within the boundary of the flat base (equilibrium), even a relatively small disturbance will roll the marble off the base, down the side of the bowl, across the kitchen table and onto the floor.  In this situation, the marble is said to be in “unstable equilibrium,” because of the tendency of the marble to roll (far) out of position with even a small disturbance.  Once on the floor, the marble is again in equilibrium:  it will stay on the floor unless some force lifts it back to the tabletop.

Now, let us consider global warming.  For tens of thousands of years (and perhaps much longer), our planet has maintained roughly the same average temperature.  Yes, there were a few ice ages, but the planet’s temperature eventually returned to the more moderate level that we have today.  Thus, despite disturbances toward cooler temperatures, our planet’s temperature has been in a “stable equilibrium.”

Global warming, however, represents a new challenge to our planet’s temperature-regulating system.  As our planet warms, glaciers (both on mountains and on the polar ice caps) melt.  As they melt, they shrink, exposing more of the earth’s dark surface.  As more of the earth’s dark surface is exposed, the planet absorbs more of the sun’s energy (because white glaciers reflected much of the sun’s energy, whereas the dark ground absorbs more of the sun’s energy).  As the planet absorbs more of the sun’s energy, it warms up…which, in turn, melts more glaciers…which, in turn, raises the temperature…which in turn melts more glaciers…. (more…)

We are all descended from kings, according to a recent MSNBC article about experts who have combined computer science and genealogy. 

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

“Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,” said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. “The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.”

By the same token, for every king in a person’s family tree there are thousands and thousands of nobodies whose births, deaths and lives went completely unrecorded by history. We’ll never know about them, because until recently vital records were a rarity for all but the noble classes.

So just maybe . . . we should all start trying to treat everyone else like descendants of kings and queens.  If nothing else works, perhaps this is something else for our legislators to think about when they cut off medicaid for the working poor.  They should consider that they are cutting off medicaid to the descendants of royalty.

Islam probably runs in the family, too.

Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.

Let this be a word of caution for Christian fundamentalists who slam Islam in knee jerk fashion.

Yesterday’s coverage of the 2006 midterm elections on NPR’s All Things Considered immediately grabbed my interest. Like the major Democratic upset of 1994, polls show that the public feels extremely disillusioned with those currently running our government. This could lead to a decisive shift in the composition of the House, just as when the Republicans took control 12 years ago. This year’s election parallels the 1994 election in many other ways: voters that identify with the minority party feel more energized than those of the party in control, and independent voters claim they prefer the opposing party to the current majority.

That part doesn’t really surprise many people at this point, though it does invigorate me a bit to see Americans have actually paid enough attention to the legislature’s behavior in recent years to find it disturbing. The real surprise in this story lies in what makes this year’s election different from the one in 1994: voters don’t just dislike Republicans, they dislike Democrats too.

In 1994, dissatisfaction with the Democrats drove many to vote for the then-better-regarded GOP. But this year, polls by the Wall Street Journal and the Pew Research Center show that Americans have a marked distaste for both parties:

“The proportion saying the current Congress has achieved less than previous ones has climbed to 45%, double the number who said this in the 2002 or 1998 midterms, and higher than the number who expressed frustration with Congress in 1994 (38%). Republican leaders in Congress are blamed for this failure, but Democratic leaders in Congress are not benefiting from this criticism. More Americans disapprove than approve of the job GOP leaders are doing by a 53% to 30% margin; dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders is nearly as high (50% disapprove, 32% approve.)”-Pew Research Center, June 27, 2006

The current political climate also features a concentrated anti-incumbent sentiment, with 57% of voters claiming that they don’t want to see most incumbents make it back this time around. It seems that something very interesting will happen this November, though the mixed responses cannot tell us conclusively what. Americans seem to hate most of their candidates, yet they feel energized to get out and vote anyway. We haven’t seen this level of confused, almost stubborn contempt for political office ever before.

(more…)

Once regarded as a Generation-X anomaly, social scientists and news publications around the world now observe a frightening trend in young adults: a marked failure to leave home, find a career, attain what most regard as “adulthood”. The reported lack of maturity manifests itself not just in observation, but in real-world statistics: the percentage of 26-year-olds that live with their parents has nearly doubled since 1970, from 11% to 20% according to a University of Michigan study. The average college experience now takes five years, not four. This new agegroup of immature adults has a variety of names around the world- boomerang kids(Canada), nest-squatter(Germany), adultescents (a few US social scientists), and so on. Japan’s parliament even staged a debate on the disturbing reliance of today’s 20-somethings on their parents. But in some ways, this trend follows historical example.

Before the Renaissance, children did not exist. Of course, the age group did not fail to appear, but pre-Renaissance peoples thought of children as miniature adults more than their own stage in human development. Accordingly, children of the pre-Renaissance had to undertake much higher responsibilities, and enjoyed less education and emotional feedback than their modern equivalents.

Then, some time around the Renaissance, childhood came into existence. Society began to see its younger members as less than fully molded, emotionally delicate and needy. At the same time they receive more coddling, longer educational lives, and more parental patience with less physical punishment. In time it became psychologically clear that children did not posses the same mental and emotional strength as adults, just as they did not possess the same physical development.
(more…)

The “One Percent Doctrine” is the title of a new book by Ron Suskind about the so-called “strategic thinking” of our current presidential administration. In case you are still wondering why we attacked Iraq, and you don’t buy any of the president’s ever-changing explanations, you might want to check out Mr. Suskind’s book.

In the interests of full disclosure, let me state that I haven’t read the book yet, but Mr. Suskind’s previous books have been excellent, and this one got positive reviews in The New York Times and The Washington Post. My interest in this post is just to examine the phrase itself. More disclosure: I’m a PhD statistician and sometimes amuse myself by picking statistical-sounding phrases out of the news media.

As cited in Ruskin, and quoted in the NYT, shortly after 9/11 Dick Cheney said: “if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” What I would like to know is:

1. Can I see the calculations that produced the “1 percent” estimate?
2. What is the confidence interval of this estimate?
3. What are the effect sizes for improving port security versus torturing innocent people of Middle Eastern heritage?
4. How often do you recalculate this estimate? What was it in the week before 9/11?
5. Since there’s a “small probability” of almost anything happening, including President Bush taking up the study of Mathematical Statistics, exactly how low does that probability need to be to prevent the United States from attacking sovereign nations?