The Republican Anti-Poverty Program, in one photo!

Why can’t people like Paul Krugman think of this?

Up Early…

Strangely enough, I usually wake up very early the day after a long running or walking event. I sleep soundly, but for a shorter period of time.
Today I was wide awake at 3:30 AM.

I am sorer than expected. Not bad, and not as sore as after a good marathon; that is probably because what I did was really a glorified “hike” with a bit of jogging.

I’ll do an easy, slow paced weight session this morning.

Posts
This New York Times article is about a 16 year old runner who puts in 100-110 miles per week. She ran a 2:58 (good for 6′th among the women) at the Cleveland Marathon.

On one hand, I wonder if she is missing her teenage years; on the other hand: is it really that different from my putting in so much extra time in an effort (a failed effort) to become a football player?

Mathematics and Academia
Yitang Zhang was a bit of an unknown mathematician who managed to solve a very well known problem. It doesn’t happen often, but if you do good work, it will be acknowledged.

This article is a nice synopsis of what happened. Basically: he showed that there are an infinite collections of pairs of primes that are less than 70,000,000 units apart. Of course, the goal is “2″, but, until this, we didn’t have a proof that there was any finite number that worked. Now we have one.

On the other hand, cranky stuff doesn’t get acknowledged, nor should it.

An amusing cartoon:

Note: I very much care about providing a professional level effort in the classroom and in my own research.

Politics
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub provides some old photos of presidents and umbrellas. I wonder if the right wing has finally jumped the shark…ok it has done so a long time ago but I wonder if they are finally getting called out on their ridiculous BS.

One reason why I ignore conservatives

Oh noes, we now have the Obama “umbrella” scandal! (they say)

Really?

Fish, Residues and Pyromaniacs

Climate Change: yes, fish are swimming to cooler waters thereby hurting some in the fishing industry:

Fish and other sea life have been moving toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters, part of a worldwide, decades-long migration documented for the first time by a study released Wednesday.

The research, published in the journal Nature, provides more evidence of a rapidly warming planet and has broad repercussions for fish harvests around the globe.

University of British Columbia researchers found that significant numbers of 968 species of fish and invertebrates they examined moved to escape the warming waters of their original habitats.Previous studies had documented the same phenomenon in specific parts of the world’s oceans. But the new study is the first to assess the migration worldwide and to look back as far as 1970, according to its authors.

The research is more confirmation that “global change is real and has been real for a long time,” said Boris Worm, a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who was not part of the study. “It’s not something in the distant future. It is well underway.”

[...]

Politics
Robert Reich makes the case that at the moment, President Obama is letting the critics define him, instead of defining himself. He can’t expect the Republicans to cooperate:

Barack Obama is allowing the fires to dominate because he has not defined his core agenda. During the 2012 campaign it appeared to be restoring jobs, rebuilding the middle class, and reversing the scourge of widening inequality. Since then, though, the core has evaporated – leaving him and his administration vulnerable to every pyromaniac on the Potomac.

Math fun: yes, a poem in College Misery about ….residue integrals!

Couda-Wouda-Shouda

Workout notes 51:04 for my hilly 5.1 mile Cornstalk course; perfect weather; this is the best time of the year to be outside. But I was heavy legged from the start.

Posts
Monday Morning Quaterbacking
Some events are all but impossible to foresee, no matter how much data you gather: (via Bruce Schneier)

The FBI and the CIA are being criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the Boston Marathon bombings. How could they have ignored such a dangerous person? How do we reform the intelligence community to ensure this kind of failure doesn’t happen again?
It’s an old song by now, one we heard after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and after the Underwear Bomber’s failed attack in 2009. The problem is that connecting the dots is a bad metaphor, and focusing on it makes us more likely to implement useless reforms.
Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy and fun. They’re right there on the page, and they’re all numbered. All you have to do is move your pencil from one dot to the next, and when you’re done, you’ve drawn a sailboat. Or a tiger. It’s so simple that 5-year-olds can do it.
But in real life, the dots can only be numbered after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to draw lines from a Russian request for information to a foreign visit to some other piece of information that might have been collected.
In hindsight, we know who the bad guys are. Before the fact, there are an enormous number of potential bad guys. [...]

Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show Person of Interest is fiction, not fact.
There’s a name for this sort of logical fallacy: hindsight bias. First explained by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it’s surprisingly common. Since what actually happened is so obvious once it happens, we overestimate how obvious it was before it happened.
We actually misremember what we once thought, believing that we knew all along that what happened would happen. It’s a surprisingly strong tendency, one that has been observed in countless laboratory experiments and real-world examples of behavior. And it’s what all the post-Boston-Marathon bombing dot-connectors are doing.
Before we start blaming agencies for failing to stop the Boston bombers, and before we push “intelligence reforms” that will shred civil liberties without making us any safer, we need to stop seeing the past as a bunch of obvious dots that need connecting.

Schneier concludes: there will always be incidents; it is impossible to stop them all.

In statistics, one can often back fit key factors AFTER the fact and come up with a model that…well…might “make sense” but utterly fail the next time.

Politics and Economics
Paul Krugman reminds the Very Serious People that, yes, there was political bickering over the last stimulus fight, but the politics was mostly from the right wing. All too often Republicans turn economic policy debates into a morality play of sorts.

So, why hasn’t President Obama been as effective as, say, President Franklin Roosevelt? Hint: look at how Congress was made up during President Roosevelt’s time. Look at it during President Johnson’s time. The caveat is that during those eras, the president did have to compromise with southern Democrats (who are now Republicans)

Science
Yes, some scientists behave badly and fake data.

But most don’t. Here are two good articles:
1. This is one about human brain cells which were grown in the laboratory and then put into mice...where they functioned…AS MOUSE brain cells.

A key type of human brain cell developed in the laboratory grows seamlessly when transplanted into the brains of mice, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered, raising hope that these cells might one day be used to treat people with Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and possibly even Alzheimer’s disease, as well as and complications of spinal cord injury such as chronic pain and spasticity.
“We think this one type of cell may be useful in treating several types of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in a targeted way,” said Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF and co-lead author on the paper.
The researchers generated and transplanted a type of human nerve-cell progenitor called the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cell, in experiments described in the May 2 edition of Cell Stem Cell. Development of these human MGE cells within the mouse brain mimics what occurs in human development, they said.
Kriegstein sees MGE cells as a potential treatment to better control nerve circuits that become overactive in certain neurological disorders. Unlike other neural stem cells that can form many cell types — and that may potentially be less controllable as a consequence — most MGE cells are restricted to producing a type of cell called an interneuron. Interneurons integrate into the brain and provide controlled inhibition to balance the activity of nerve circuits.

Honey Bees and Pesticides
Yes, there is a bee die off and some have wondered if pesticides are to blame. Well, lots of things are to blame:

This week’s federally sponsored report about the mysterious disappearance of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, pointed to a complex combination of factors, ranging from parasitic mites to pesticides. But what are experts going to do about it? And what about the pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which are facing a ban in European countries?

In an email to NBC News, the Environmental Protection Agency says it’s speeding up its schedule for reviewing research on neonicotinoids and their potential effects on honeybees. It’s also fine-tuning existing regulatory practices and setting up new educational efforts to deal with colony collapse disorder. Here’s how the EPA responded to NBC News’ questions about the next steps to counter the honeybee die-off:
Are there any specific policy questions under consideration? Anything relating to the next steps in the wake of the report?

“EPA is working collaboratively with beekeepers, growers, pesticide manufacturers, seed manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, USDA and states to apply technologies to reduce pesticide dust drift, to advance best management practices, to improve enforcement guidance and to explore enhancing pesticide labeling in order to protect bees.
Specifically, EPA is:

Moving to change pesticide labels which will limit applications to protect bees and be more clear and precise.

Moving to add warning statements to each bag of pesticide-treated seed.

Issuing new enforcement guidance to federal, state and tribal enforcement officials to help them investigate bee kills.

Working with the equipment manufacturer and pesticide and seed industry and USDA to develop and apply technologies to reduce pesticide dust drift during planting seasons.

Working with USDA and other partners to promote Best Management Practices for growers and beekeeping via a new website, education and training modules for professional applicators, video, and other mechanisms

Finally, EPA is working on a range of national and international efforts to develop appropriate tests for evaluating both exposure to and effects of pesticides on insect pollinators. EPA is also requiring new lab and field studies to inform the risk assessment process to better understand pollinator risks.”

Some corrections to common misconceptions

Economics:
Some conservatives say “ok, I understand why you might want to TRY government economic stimulus during a recession and practice austerity during boom times. But do these stimulus plans ever really go away?”

Answer: yes, they do:

Start with stimulus programs. As it turns out, there have only been two significant spending stimulus programs in US history — by which I mean programs deliberately introduced to fight an economic downturn. One was FDR’s program, the WPA/CCC and all that; the other was the spending part of the Obama ARRA. So what happened to each of these programs? Why, not only did both go away; both went away too soon, with premature austerity hitting in 1937 and again in 2010. So much for stimulus that never ends.

OK, someone will reply, but what about aid programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps? Don’t they just ratchet up after each slump?

Um, no. Unemployment benefits as a percentage of GDP:

And yes, there is a chart showing debt (as percentage of GDP) going down during boom times.

Biology
You may have heard that a journeyman NBA player has “come out” as gay. It turns out that this player has a straight brother. So, some conservative thinks that this slams the door on there being a genetic factor in gayness:

There are some things that can be learned from Jason Collin’s stunt. For example, Mr. Collins’ announcement was a surprise to his former fiancé, Carolyn Moos, who played in the Women’s NBA. It was also a surprise to Jason’s twin brother, Jarron.
The media may mention Ms. Moos, but they may not want to mention Jason’s identical twin too often. Doing so may remind people that, unlike race, there is no genetic cause or “gay gene” driving homosexual behavior. If there were, Jason’s happily married, father of three, twin brother would also be involved in homosexuality, and he’s not.

1. “Identical twins” aren’t completely identical: there are a few differences and there are epigenetic factors as well. Proof: they don’t have identical fingerprints. And someone noted that his twin brother isn’t an NBA caliber athlete and there are genetic factors in athletic ability.

2. From the article:

It’s not, of course. The studies that have been done on identical twins are far from conclusive and the few that have been done have found that if one twin is gay, the probability that the other twin is gay ranges from a high end of just over 50% to a low end of around 20% or even lower (to be fair, all of those studies have shortcomings worth discussing). The point is that, while genes appear to play a role in one’s homosexuality, the exact nature of how and how much is still something scientists are trying to figure out.

Many people have trouble with probabilistic reasoning. Example: how many times have you heard someone dismissing the link of smoking to cancer saying “X smoked for 80 years and it didn’t harm him!”.

Social
Uh, people calling your ideas “dumb, “bigoted” or “hateful” does NOT mean that your group (religious or otherwise) is a “persecuted minority.” I just find it comical when Christians in the United States try to play the “victim card”. (now, it IS true that Christians are persecuted in other countries, but not in the US).

I think that many, including some Christians, think that they are entitled to be immune from scrutiny or criticism….while they provide plenty of it to others. I would shake my head and say “unbelievable”, but…well….I’ll just say it: I’ve NEVER, NEVER been a part of ANY group that didn’t take at least a bit of pleasure or comfort in saying “the rest of society doesn’t like us…doesn’t understand us…etc.”, though some groups do this more than others. It is probably a human thing to find excuses to “rally to the side”.

And to their credit, I haven’t seen Christians rioting because they didn’t like a book, cartoon or the way that Jesus was portrayed.

What is Attractive to Republicans

Republican Relativism and Something Good about Peoria

Something Good about Peoria, IL
We do have first rank science being done here:

PEORIA —
It began in South Korea with a baby girl born without a windpipe. Unable to eat, drink or swallow on her own, she breathed through a tube inserted into her esophagus. She was a prisoner of the neo-natal intensive care unit, her father said.

The next chapter moved to Peoria, where about three weeks ago doctors performed the experimental surgery that could change her life and upend traditional organ transplantation.

Her name is Hannah, she’s almost 3 and she tasted her first lollipop Friday.

With an artificial windpipe made of plastic fibers bathed in Hannah’s own living cells, surgeons at Children’s Hospital of Illinois at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center successfully performed the first bio-engineered transplant on a child in the United States and the first bio-engineered trachea transplant on a child in the world. It also was the first stem cell therapy at the Catholic hospital.

“I cannot express what it means to me as a scientist, a man, a father,” said Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, the expert in regenerative medicine and tracheal transplantation from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, who led the intricate 11-hour surgery on April 9.

Officials at Children’s Hospital and St. Francis announced the ground-breaking surgery Tuesday in a St. Francis conference room packed with media, either live or online, from throughout the world, plus the surgical team, researchers and businesses involved in building the expensive devices needed to regenerate human tissue into organs.

It doesn’t get more big-time than this folks!

Now in another “man-bites-dog” story, Paul Krugman points out something:

Brad DeLong directs me to a screed by Clive Crook, who sort of admits that I’ve been right about a lot of things but accuses me of being, well, shrill. Where have I heard that before?

But the Crook piece is actually useful, in an unintended way.

Brad points out, correctly, that Crook demands that I engage respectfully with reasonable people on the other side, but somehow fails to offer even one example of such a person. Not long ago Crook was offering Paul Ryan as an exemplar of serious, honest conservatism, while I was shrilly declaring Ryan a con man. But I suspect that even Crook now admits, at least to himself, that Ryan is indeed a con man.

But in a way the most revealing point here is Crook’s demand that I engage with

thoughtful, public-spirited Americans whose views on the proper scale and scope of government are different from his, yet worthy of respect.
Wait — is that what it’s about? If you read my original post, and Noah Smith’s KrugTron the Invincible post that inspired it, you’ll see that it’s all about macroeconomics — about questions like whether budget deficits in a depressed economy drive up interest rates and crowd out private investment, about whether printing money in a depressed economy is inflationary, about whether rising government debt has severe negative impacts on growth.

What do these questions have in common? They’re factual questions, with factual answers — and they have absolutely no necessary relationship to the “proper scale and scope of government”. You could, in principle, believe that we need a drastically downsized government, and at the same time believe that cutting government spending right now will increase unemployment. You could believe that discretionary policy of any kind is a mistake, and at the same time admit that the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet isn’t at all inflationary under current circumstances.

So where’s this stuff about the scale of government coming from? Well, in practice it turns out that many conservatives are unwilling to concede that Keynesian macro has any validity to it, or that you can sometimes run the printing presses without unleashing runaway inflation, because they fear that any such admission would open the doors to much wider government intervention. But that’s exactly my point! They’re letting their views about how the world works be dictated by their vision of the kind of society they want; they’re politicizing their economic analysis. And that’s why they keep getting everything wrong.

They do the same in science; after all creationists and intelligent design advocates say that standard science “is only a theory; only one point of view”.

Conservatives might bash liberals for “moral relativism” but they are happy to use “relativism” themselves when the facts don’t fit their world view.

Oh yes, liberals do that to, but liberals don’t accuse conservatives of being “relativists”. But in fact, we should, because they are!

Are Republican PACS and Super PACS fleecing their donors?

PRIOR to the 2012 general election, Paul Krugman wondered if people like Karl Rove were in it merely to make money for themselves:

The estimable Rick Perlstein has a fascinating essay about the seamless continuum from direct-mail marketing scams to direct-mail right-wing fundraising, and from there to the whole character of modern movement conservatism. Go read. I didn’t know, for example, that heroes of direct-mail fundraising like Richard Viguerie ended up delivering hardly any of the money to political causes; somehow it ended up swallowed by overhead, otherwise known as the fundraisers themselves.

And although Perlstein doesn’t make this point, I suspect that his analysis explains one of the great mysteries of 2012: the failure of the great Rove/Citizens United juggernaut to materialize.

Remember how Rove and others were supposed to raise vast sums from billionaires and corporations, then totally saturate the country with GOP messaging, drowning out Obama’s message? Well, they certainly raised a lot of money, and ran a lot of ads. But in terms of actual number of ads the battle has been, if anything, an Obama advantage. And while we don’t know what will happen on Tuesday, state-level polls suggest both that Obama is a strong favorite and, much more surprising, that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to hold the Senate in a year when the number of seats at risk was supposed to spell doom.

Some of this reflects the simple fact that money can’t help all that much when you have a lousy message. But it also looks as if the money was surprisingly badly spent. What happened?

Well, what if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing.

And while Rove the crusader is looking — provisionally, of course, until the votes are in — like a failure, Rove the businessman has just had an amazing, banner year.

Well, this blast from the past had Dick Morris POSSIBLY doing the same thing to small donors (who, frankly, have no business donating to PACs; it is better to give directly to the candidates instead)

Frankly, I wonder if the conservative punditry is really part of the scam.

Side note
This is a bit of economics. Paul Krugman explains the difference between the inflation rate that is announced on television (and used for cost of living calculations) and “core inflation” which is used by the Fed to help set monetary policy:

As I explained long ago, the idea behind core inflation is that not all prices behave the same. (In that post, I worried about deflation, which hasn’t happened; I’ve written a lot since about why). There are many “sticky” prices that are revised only occasionally; these prices cause inflation to have a lot of inertia, and are why disinflation can be so costly. But there are other prices that fluctuate a lot in the short run, and can cause overall inflation to jump around.

The idea of core inflation is to strip out the volatile prices to get a better measure of underlying trends. Core inflation is NOT used for things like cost of living adjustments, and it’s not the headline number in the news; so anyone who claims, with a knowing sneer, that the inflation number you hear is ignoring food and energy is just ignorant. Core is, however, what the Fed uses to assess monetary policy, because it believes that the headline number is too volatile, and it doesn’t want to overreact either to short-run inflation or short-run deflation.

You can see the two measures used side by side:

And here is a nice article that explains demand side economics:

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family.

Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.

And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day.

Why did spending plunge? Mainly because of a burst housing bubble and an overhang of private-sector debt — but if you ask me, people talk too much about what went wrong during the boom years and not enough about what we should be doing now. For no matter how lurid the excesses of the past, there’s no good reason that we should pay for them with year after year of mass unemployment.

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Now, just to be clear, this is not a case for more government spending and larger budget deficits under all circumstances — and the claim that people like me always want bigger deficits is just false. For the economy isn’t always like this — in fact, situations like the one we’re in are fairly rare. By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.

He then goes on to say: “ok, why should you believe me?” and show how those who prescribe austerity have been spectacularly wrong.

To my fellow Facebook liberal friends: it appears that you were right and I was wrong…maybe…

Interesting. The background check amendments failed in the Senate. I chalked it up to Senators pleasing their conservative constituencies in their home states.

My liberal friends tried to tell me that things like background checks were reasonably popular, even among Republicans.

I replied that sometimes policies were popular but the bills that contained said policies weren’t (President Clinton’s proposed health care plan was such a case).

I was skeptical that those who voted “no” would pay a political price.

Well…it turns out that some might be paying a price: (via Politics USA)

In a new poll by Public Policy Polling, five Senators in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio are feeling the wrath of the public after failing to support a background checks measure, in what PPP called “serious backlash”. According to the poll, Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mark Begich (D-AK), Rob Portman (R-OH), and Dean Heller (R-NV) face lowered approval ratings and a public less likely to support them in the next election.

Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling, concluded that the lowered approval ratings are a direct result of the failure to support the background check measure, “The background checks vote is a rare one that really is causing these Senators trouble back home. All five of these Senators, as well as Kelly Ayotte, have seen their approval numbers decline in the wake of this vote. And the numbers make it clear that their position on Manchin/Toomey is a major factor causing the downward spiral.”

In Arizona, Republican Senator Flake’s approval rating dropped to 32% with a 51% disapproval. He is now more unpopular than even Mitch McConnell. In Arizona, 70% of the public supports background checks. Fifty-two percent of voters say they’re less likely to support Flake in a future election because of this vote. To demonstrate just how extreme the rejection of background checks is, the poll determined that only 19% of the public say they will be more likely to support Flake in a future election due to his vote.

Contrast Flake’s lowered approval ratings with Pennsylvania Republican Senator Toomey’s, who saw an increase in approval after co-sponsoring the bipartisan background check measure (Manchin/Toomey).

In Ohio, Republican junior Senator Rob Portman plunged a net 18 points in approval, from 35% approval and 25% disapproval to just 26% approval with 34% disapproval (net -8). Portman lost support across the board. No one seems to approve of the Ohio Republican. Some of his loss in approval among Republicans is more likely tied to his support for gay marriage, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.

In Alaska, Democratic junior Senator Mark Begich lost approval from Democrats and Independents after failing to support background checks, with 41% approval rating and a 37% disapproval, down from 49% approval and 39% disapproval. Begich got no bounce from Republicans after his vote, so he basically alienated his base for nothing.

Popular Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has lost a net 16 points in approval due to her rejection of background checks. Forty-six percent of voters approve of her now, with 41% now disapproving of her. Prior to the vote, she enjoyed a 54% approval rating and only 33% disapproval. The bad news is that while Murkowski predictably lost Democratic support due to her vote, she also failed to gain Republican support by voting with the NRA.[...]

If I am wrong, and it appears that I might be, it will make me very happy. I’ll gladly endure some “I told you so”s.