Posts

Note: Presidents of both parties have been complaining about his “hold” policy for years. Yes, I thought it was dumb even when President Bush was in office. There might be some breakthrough in reaching an agreement to at least amend some of these procedures.

I don’t have the data on Senate holds but I do know that the Republicans have used the filibuster at an unprecedented rate.

Newt Gingrich and his Super Pac “Winning our Future”
Here is a Gingrich ad:

(note: Mr. Huckabee said that he was taken out of context and did NOT endorse the ad)

Winning Our Future’s ad

Notice how slick this ad is and how is very quickly slips in the appropriate disclaimers; Mitt Romney is never exactly accused of any direct wrongdoing. In fact, this ad presents what is old news in Massachusetts. But the tone is designed to scare the voters rather than to inform them. Very devious…:)

So how well are the candidates themselves doing on truthfulness? Here Nate Silver makes an analysis; one should read Mr. Silver’s cautions though.

Mormon Practice: Baptizing the Dead
I was a bit surprised to see atheists being upset over this:

Gawker’s substantial Mormon readership has come through for us: Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney’s militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as “hogwash.”

Just to set the record straight: this is NOT lying about a “death bed conversion”; no one is claiming that this man DID anything. And no, this isn’t desecrating a burial place as nothing physical was done. (I said these two things right off of the bat because I got remarks such as these).

My question: why does any atheist care who does what ceremony in whose name? Sure, right now, I’d be a bit concerned if some religious leader condemned me to death in some spiritual sense but ONLY because some whack job might attack me. But aside from direct physical acts, who cares? Really…those nut jobs who baptized the dead are DOING NOTHING AT ALL. It is the same as some kid pretending to cast a spell or something. Really….

They didn’t say that
Though I sometimes talk politics, I don’t like it when people repeat stuff that isn’t true. One of the favorite memes of the polyester pants set is that Al Gore said that he “invented the internet”. He never said that. He was clearly talking about policy and legislation and while you might argue that he took too much credit, he clearly was not talking about “inventing it”.

But this is not a left-right issue.
Dan Quayle never intimated that people in Latin America speak Latin; this meme came from a comedian’s joke.

And no, Spandex Sarah (Sarah Palin) never said that “she could see Russia from her house” though she did (correctly) say that you can see a part of Russia from a part of Alaska. The “seeing Russia from her house” was a Tina Fey joke.
This is what she really did say (which was bad enough):

Living in a Bubble
Joe Paterno died recently. My view: he was a good coach who did a lot right (gave back to community, got his players to graduate, etc.) but what he did wrong (NOT calling the police) was inexcusable; he should have been fired IMHO. It appeared to me that he was more concerned with his job and legacy than stopping a horrendous wrong.

Nevertheless, at the funeral, you are seeing much sentiment at how Paterno was giving a raw deal (example, example)

The pro-Paterno people are living in some bubble, I think. My guess is that this will hurt them in the long run; note that this year the got the Big Ten 7′th pick (8′th if you count the Michigan Sugar Bowl team) despite their fine on the field record. Some of that was the scandal, but this type of blind loyalty to Paterno isn’t helping.

But here was a funny part:

I had to laugh; right now I am “debating” who would win that ride. Surely Mr. Romney could afford the best bike.
But though I don’t like her politically, Ms. Palin would beat all of them easily and not even break a sweat.

Topics
This is just a FAIL on so many levels:

Mitt Romney’s problem with evangelical Christian voters has been well documented.

But as the Republican presidential nomination fight heats up in Florida, a Mormon rite that leaves many Jews seething could prove awkward for the candidate in a state that’s home to more Jewish people than any other besides New York and California.

The religious rite is proxy baptism for the dead. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church, these posthumous “blessings” are intended to “save” ancestors and others who weren’t baptized in life or were baptized “without proper authority.”

Any Mormon may baptize any person posthumously. [...]

Let’s see: some members of one religion are upset with what some other people are doing in a ritual for “dead people”…in private. Ahem: no one is is really doing anything other than magic and hocus-pocus.

Tell you what: I said a prayer that would automatically baptize you in the name of the Great Frog God if you have read this far.

Politics

Social
This article is a bit interesting; it contrasts the French way of raising a kid with the English/US model:

Every so often a new parenting book triggers the sort of conflicting passions most recently associated with the Arab Spring. Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, is just such an incendiary work. We mothers are a notoriously touchy lot at the best of times, so when another woman dares to suggest there might be a better way of rearing our offspring than muddling through, bribery, intemperate amounts of wine, empty threats and inconsistency, forgive us for digging in our heels. [...]

“In France, children are presented with a fait accompli and the phrase “C’est moi, qui decide” – I make the decisions – is used a lot,” says Druckerman, who has a daughter aged five and twin boys of three. It’s this discipline that sets us monarchist slackers apart from the rigorous republicans. French parents believe that saying “Non” is a responsibility and “rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires”.

Also, their authority derives from a consensus about how children should be brought up. While we pick and mix our attitudes, in France boundaries are reinforced by society. Couples are in charge, the children are not. C’est tout. It may be old-fashioned, but it appears to work.

“Children are an important part of the family, but family life doesn’t revolve round them,” points out Druckerman. “In America and Britain, there’s a belief that having children must entail self- sacrifice and that we must push them to succeed. The French are more patient and allow their children far more freedom. You never see French mothers hovering anxiously round their children in a park.”

French women don’t dedicate themselves selflessly to motherhood. French fathers aren’t enslaved at weekends, driving children to activities. And babies are seldom breast-fed for long – the emphasis instead being on the mother’s sex life returning to normal as soon as possible.

Of course this article ends with a paragraph about how this mom has…wait for it…wonderful kids (surprised?) and how she likes them just as they are.

Social/Political
Paul Krugman shares a snippet about our current lack of economic class mobility (he is quoting John Quiggin):

For years, opinion leaders have told us that it’s all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

Politicfact
Paul Krugman takes politifact to task for saying “half true” (upgraded to “mostly true”) by politifact and then makes a larger point:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.

This is deeply wrong on two levels. First, fact-checking should be about checking facts — not about trying to impose some sort of Marquess of Queensbury rules on how you’re allowed to use facts. Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective — notice that Politifact wasn’t even analyzing what Obama said, they were analyzing their impression about what he might have been trying to imply. Leave that for the talking heads!

Second, in practice this turns into a partisan affair. The simple fact is that in today’s US political scene, Republicans make a lot more factual howlers than Democrats. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Yet Politifact wants to be seen as nonpartisan.

I take a slightly different view; this is how and why:

Ok, here is a dissenting opinion (sort of): yes, a fact checker should check to see if the statement is factual or not, but there is some duty, IMHO, to see if the fact is being used responsibly.

Remember the statements about the “lucky duckies” that pay no federal income taxes, as in “in year 200x, 4x percent of Americans paid no Federal Income taxes.” That statement is literally true. However it is deceptive because it cherry picks both a particular year (atypical) and it leaves off things like payroll tax, local taxes, etc.

Climate change deniers do this all the time; they say things like “hey, the average temperature of the planet went up from year X to year X 1″ which might be literally true…but irrelevant to the actual long term trend, especially if there was some other smaller cycle (El nino, La Nina) involved.

Of course, I agree that Politifact is not doing this responsibly; they sure appear to be bending to conservative pressure to be “balanced” because, well, the conservative are lying so much.

Note: this is from my comment.

Science/Evolution

Genes and evolution (by Jeremy Yoder )

Does evolutionary change happen in big jumps, or a series of small steps? The question may seem a little esoteric to non-scientists—how many mutations can dance on the head of a pin?—but it has direct implications for how we identify the genetic basis of human diseases, or desirable traits in domestic plants and animals.

That’s because the evolutionary path by which a particular phenotype, or visible trait, first evolved in a population is closely related to the genetics that underlie the trait in the present. Phenotypes that arose in a single mutational jump will probably remain connected to one or a few genes with large effects; phenotypes that evolved more gradually do so because they are created by the collective action of many genes. So what kind of evolutionary change is most common will determine which kind of gene-to-phenotype relationships we should expect to find.

In an excellent recent review article for the journal Evolution, Matthew Rockman, a biologist with the Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, makes the case that the era of genomics has, so far, been much too focused on finding genes of large effect. Fortunately, Rockman also sees the beginnings of a new movement towards acknowledging the importance of small-effect genes—one which may ultimately make genomic association studies more useful.

He goes on to talk about Genewise association study (GWAS). Here is the idea: some evolved traits are Mendelian (a mutation of only a few genes, possibly only one are involved). Some involve the mutation of many genes with all of these genes working together to get the given effect (ability to tolerate heat is one such trait). Since these genes didn’t mutate together, this track is far more difficult to find.

I recommend surfing to the blog and reading the rest.

If you believe that capital gains taxes should be low, make the argument and show your data and give evidence of why it helps the economy. If you want to cry about “double taxation” because of corporate taxes…do you REALLY want to go there? That implies that corporations aren’t “people” but rather exist to make the shareholders rich.

You’ll have to answer questions like this one, and you’ll have to admit that capital gains were not always low.

Note the Republican attempt to refute his argument: it is basically that many people make money off of capital gains.

That doesn’t mean that Krugman is wrong; Krugman points out that the FACT that most of the capital gains go to the very wealthy, not all of it. Note that this “rebuttal” is thin on actual data and it basically unsubstantiated ranting.

Today started with lots of rocks…ok pebbles, ok…grains of sand…in the shoes.
The weight room was crowded by 6:15 am thanks to our ROTC unit (some of them are fit…others….well…). I managed to work it all in anyway: 3 sets of rows, 3 sets of curls, 3 sets of pull downs, full rotator cuff sets, 8 x 20 sit ups, 7, 7, 6, 6 pull ups, 2 sets of incline bench (7 x 135, 5 x 135), regular bench (10 x 135, 3 x 175, 4 x 170), one set of military dumbbell presses.

Then the pool was crowded again; there was one gaggle of guys doing the “do one 25 with your head out of the water every 4-5 minutes or so” and a few women in bikinis doing…not sure what. These types will be gone in 2 weeks or less.

Me: 10 x 100 on the 2:10; did a few on the 2 but couldn’t do many of these. Goal: next week 1300, 1600 the week after that, then 2000 per workout the next week, then back to my usual 2200.

Politics
The President did well last night, at least politically speaking. The R’s are trying to paint him as some kind of American hating socialist, and that speech was about as “All American” as it gets. I have expected him to pull out a hot dog and some apple pie.

Of course, the public remains, for the most part, very uninformed. Someone tried to tell me that “Obama doubled” unemployment.

My response was this:

Unemployment didn’t double under his administration: it was 7.8 when he got sworn in and was at 8.7 when he got his stimulus bill passed. The hard data:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

His response:

Ollie, it was 4.4% in January 2007. Was up to 10% in 2009 and is was at 8.6% two months ago.

Yes….and who was President from 2007 to the start of 2009?
(psst: not Obama).
Now if they want to blame CONGRESS that is another thing (and I’d point out that the conditions for this bubble happened before the D’s took over) but that isn’t what he is saying. He is blaming OBAMA for what happened when BUSH was President.

These people are idiots.

Helicopter Parents
Via NPR

HR specialists say boomer parents are advocating on behalf of young adult children, calling up to negotiate better benefits, protest a poor evaluation, etc. NPR seeks to interview people about this. Employers – have you experienced it? Parents – if you’ve done this, why? 20-something employees — if your parent has done this, did you appreciate it, or resent it?

Yep. Sigh…sign of the times; this is mostly the fault of MY generation. It is pathetic.

Education

It does sort of gall me that so many work so hard to try to get some sort of religion into school. Why? Obviously a kid can read whatever holy book/text they want to on breaks; they can pray or do whatever. Why do so many want the schools to sanction such things in one form or another?

Civil Liberties
I found this ruling to be interesting:

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.

Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21–or face the consequences including contempt of court.

Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination.

“I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well.

Ramona Fricosu, who is accused of being involved in a mortgage scam, has declined to decrypt a laptop encrypted with Symantec’s PGP Desktop that the FBI found in her bedroom during a raid of a home she shared with her mother and children (and whether she’s even able to do so is not yet clear).

Interesting: encryption can be all but impossible for even a professional to break; this situation is seen as something like requiring someone to open a safe with documents in it.

Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds? Recent economic data have been a bit better, but we’ve already had several false dawns on that front. More important, there’s evidence that the two great problems at the root of our slump — the housing bust and excessive private debt — are finally easing. [...]

But the economy is depressed, in large part, because of the housing bust, which immediately suggests the possibility of a virtuous circle: an improving economy leads to a surge in home purchases, which leads to more construction, which strengthens the economy further, and so on. And if you squint hard at recent data, it looks as if something like that may be starting: home sales are up, unemployment claims are down, and builders’ confidence is rising.

Furthermore, the chances for a virtuous circle have been rising, because we’ve made significant progress on the debt front.

That’s not what you hear in public debate, of course, where all the focus is on rising government debt. But anyone who has looked seriously at how we got into this slump knows that private debt, especially household debt, was the real culprit: it was the explosion of household debt during the Bush years that set the stage for the crisis. And the good news is that this private debt has declined in dollar terms, and declined substantially as a percentage of G.D.P., since the end of 2008.

There are, of course, still big risks — above all, the risk that trouble in Europe could derail our own incipient recovery.

That is a bit of good news; keep in mind that Paul Krugman is no cheerleader.

Business I remember talking to a business professor and saying something about the low wages of overseas workers helps drives manufacturing overseas. I was told that was NOT the case and was a bit surprised.

Well, the New York Times has an interesting article about Apple Computer and how it manufactures its products in China. I was surprised at what I learned, and no, this isn’t some “of course they did that; the workers are mistreated over there” type of article. It takes a while to read, but it talks about some of the complexities involved (e. g. if you want to tweak something in your product, you have to adjust your manufacturing process, and it is MUCH easier to do in China than in the US, and it is easier for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons: the industries that feed into one another (say the one that makes glass for view screens and the one that makes small screws) are close together and have a quick line of communication. I highly recommend reading the article, though it is a long one.

Science and Academia
No dear student: professors do not lie awake thinking of ways to make your life harder. No, I don’t go for all of the “invisible man” talk, but most of the article is pretty good. Yes, this is a short, non-technical article. Here is a snippet:

consider this: the fact that you “don’t understand” why you didn’t earn full points for a particular question might itself help explain why you didn’t earn full points. Don’t take this personally or interpret it as a sneer. See it as a learning opportunity. If you understood the material–and do note that there is a large difference between really understanding the material and being able to reproduce a graph or definition you might remember from class–you would have answered the question flawlessly. I recommend (as I have recommended to many others) that you go back, take another crack at it, and see if you can find where you have gone wrong. Then bring it by my office, and we will talk.

Of course, what the student will do is call his/her parents who will call to school to complain; after all THEIR kid is REAL SMART.

That leads me to one of my wish lists for college teaching. My wish list is:
1. Students would be objectively aware of their abilities and their knowledge of the prerequisite material and
2. Parents would be objectively aware of the intelligence and ability of their offspring.

Of course this isn’t going to happen. From the conversations I’ve had (or overheard in person or read on social media), no kid on the lower half of the IQ curve has a parent. ALL kids are smart (think their parents).

Science
The entire article is NOT available free online, but you can find it in the February 2012 Scientific American. Here is the lead in:

Last fall the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force dropped a bombshell, arguing that healthy men should stop undergoing a routine blood test as a screen for prostate cancer. An analysis of the best available evidence, it argued, had shown little or no long-term benefit from the measure—called the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test—for most men with no symptoms of the disease. Use of the screening was not saving lives. In fact, it was needlessly exposing hundreds of thousands of men who were tested and found to have prostate cancer to such common complications as impotence and urinary incontinence (from surgical removal of the prostate) and rectal bleeding (from radiation treatment). Indeed, the task force estimated that more than one million men have been treated because of PSA testing who otherwise would not have been since 1985. At least 5,000 of them died soon after treatment, and another 300,000 men suffered impotence or incontinence, or both.

The upshot: there are some false positives. BUT the bigger “problem” is that many types of prostate cancer is extremely slow acting and many simply will never cause someone trouble; in fact often the cure causes more problems than the cancer does.

I recommend reading the article.

Human Evolution
This is a very interesting article by Christopher Stringer. Here is what it is about: of course, Homo Sapiens came “out of Africa” and then evolved a bit along the way. But what struck me as extra interesting was the revelation is that Homo Sapiens in fact mixed with other Homos (Neanderthals and another type) since leaving Africa and this mixing left a small but significant signature in our genome; similar things happened in Africa after the “out of Africa” migration. In short: it is more complicated than many of us amateurs realize.

I’ll have to reread this one.