Quickly From other blogs

Workout notes taught a yoga class (or lead it), walked 10 miles (1 mile indoors and 9 outside), which included the Bob Michael Bridge, Gooseloop and the Springdale Cemetery. It was cool and windy.

Humor: Clinton actually leads Obama. Well, Obama has a lead in pledged delegates, overall delegates, popular vote and number of states. But try looking at it this way:

Total number of “New” States

CLINTON: 4

OBAMA:0

Hilllary Clinton has won New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York. By contrast, Obama has failed to win a single state with the word “New” in its name. Obama’s failure among self-proclaimed new states, raises serious questions about his supposed strength among young voters (new people) and his supposed message of change (new policies).

Average Highest Elevation

CLINTON: 6135 Feet

OBAMA: 6097 Feet

Frankly, I’m surprised that more attention hasn’t been drawn to this. Obama claims to want to elevate the level of discourse, but he has failed in states with the highest elevations. Clinton has won on Mount Whitney (California), Humphreys Peak (Arizona), Boundary Peak (Nevada), and Wheeler Peak (New Mexico). Perhaps more significantly, there are so few peaks left that despite the close margins, Obama has no hope of regaining the altitude vote. Clinton also leads among states with the highest average mean elevation: (Clinton: 1908.8 feet Obama: 1457.7 feet).

Go to the article to see three other ways in which Obama trails.

From the Billy Jack Blog: an interesting moral dilemma:

[...]Judy is now 55 years old and has been driving the car ever since. In fact, she has reconditioned the car, had the engine rebuilt two different times, put a new paint job on it, and has driven it over 300,000 miles. She never suspected her prized possession was actually stolen. But according to KNBC in Los Angeles, she made that discovery recently while reconditioning the car and finding it had two different 1dentification numbers–one on the firewall and the other on the driver’s side door. Now living in San Diego, Ms. Smongesky called the San Diego police department and gave them the vin numbers. They ran them and determined the car had been stolen 38 year ago from Eugene Brakke. [...]

Go to the blog and see how she resolved the issue.

Over the top spoof anti-atheist posters: Go to Friendly Atheist to see some of these

I like this one:

There are many more here.

From Rate Your Students: Letter from a helicopter parent and a professor’s dream response.

Dear Professor X,

I know that you have an exam scheduled for the day before spring break, and my daughter Gina requested that she take that exam earlier. You said “no” because you didn’t think her family vacation to Jamaica was a good enough reason. I think you’re being unfair, and now Gina is going to get an F for the midterm because you refuse to consider her situation. Therefore, I’m asking you to think this over again and get back to me as soon as possible.

Signed,
Gina’s Mom
[...]

Dear Gina’s Mom,

Where do I begin? I didn’t just refuse her request because she is going on vacation; I refused her request because I have a class of 250 students. If I offered her an alternate time, then I would have to offer an alternate time for all students. This means reserving a room through the scheduling office, finding TAs to invigilate this extra sitting, creating a completely new midterm, and generally taking up my personal time that I don’t get paid for just to make your daughter’s already pampered life a little more convenient. She won’t receive a zero on the test because I refuse to allow her to write it early, she’ll receive a zero because she decided 10 days of vacation just wasn’t enough for her and that extra day of vacation was worth getting a big fat zero on my midterm.[...]

Note: I often have given students early exams for such things, BUT I teach classes of 20-30 students, so I am in a very different situation than this person. But there was a time when I wasn’t.

Life Expectancy Between Rich and Poor: The bad news is that it is growing. The good news: it is going up for all social classes. What I don’t know: what about quality of life issues? Are the rich getting, say, 1-2 more years, but on life support?

One of the interesting issues is how the data is presented: these graphs are a bit unusual.

Politics:

Hillary Clinton’s Sniper Fire Story:

This rally was on February 29, 2008!

Oh wait, “she misspoke”. That’s the claim. Misspoke so many times?

Ok, let’s be charitable here. False memories are sometimes created and reinforced.

About one-third of the people who were exposed to a fake print ad describing a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny said later they remembered or knew the event happened to them.

The scenario described in the ad never occurred because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character and wouldn’t be featured in any Walt Disney Co. property, according to University of Washington memory researchers Jacquie Pickrell and Elizabeth Loftus.

Pickrell will make two presentations on the topic at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society (APS) on Sunday (June 17) in Toronto and at a satellite session of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition in Kingston, Ontario, on Wednesday.

“The frightening thing about this study is that it suggests how easily a false memory can be created,” said Pickrell, UW psychology doctoral student.

“It’s not only people who go to a therapist who might implant a false memory or those who witness an accident and whose memory can be distorted who can have a false memory. Memory is very vulnerable and malleable. People are not always aware of the choices they make. This study shows the power of subtle association changes on memory.”

The research is a follow-up to an unpublished study by Loftus, a UW psychology professor who is being honored by the APS this week with its William James Fellow Award for psychological research; Kathryn Braun, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School; and Rhiannon Ellis, a former UW undergraduate who is now a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh.

In the original study, 16 percent of the people exposed to a Disneyland ad featuring Bugs Bunny later thought they had really seen and met the cartoon rabbit.

Stephen J. Gould wrote some essays about this in Eight Little Piggies (see section 4)

So it may be true that she is not intentionally lying, but it is also true that you have to take her stories with a grain of salt.

Of course, you could say the same of Ronald Reagan.

But this is a big lesson on politics in the youtube era.