AlchemyToday

So ACORN is evil because the people that provide tax help there are idiots or something?  I mean, really, do these people think they were fooling anyone?  Have they ever seen a prostitute or a pimp in Baltimore?  This video makes you stupid.  I really don’t get the point other than proving that there are many idiots in the world; some of them work for ACORN and some of them are undercover conservative activists.

Here’s K-Lo questioning Tom Ridge’s claimed concern over discussions about raising the terror threat level a few days before the Presidential election in November 2004:

I wasn’t in the room. But how can someone whose title is director of homeland security not resign if he believes the security of the homeland is being compromised in some way by the White House? How do you wait all these years before saying something?

Here’s the second paragraph of the NY Times article that she links in her post:

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

He resigned three weeks later.  I don’t know what to say.  As far as not making this public before now, there are two obvious reasons.  First, it would have completely undermined the public’s trust of Bush on national security; Ridge could be very concerned about this but unwilling to cause havoc.  More cynically, he filed it away under “memoirs” to have something to use in the press releases for his book.  My guess is that he was actually quite torn about including this information in the book … normally these sort of gotcha tidbits in memoirs are promoted several weeks ahead of publication to generate interest and orders for books.  It looks like Ridge only agreed at the last minute to publish this, so we’re finding out about it less than two weeks before the book hits the street.

Over at the Corner, Jim Manzi back up his colleague Mark Steyn’s appraisal that, “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”  What he’s saying is that if you are 29 you graduated in 1998 and that if you are graduating high school you were starting 1st grade in 1998–which was warmer than average (the second warmest year ever); there has been only one warmer year since and last year was not it.  Ergo, look at these two endpoints and there’s been no global warming for a decade!  Fortunately, we have many more than two data points.  If you look at all of the available data and subject it to a linear fit, you’ll find the following rates of global warming:

1999-2009: 1.52 degrees C/century

1960-2008: 1.34 degrees C/century

Jim Manzi looks at these graphs and says, “The funny thing is that if you zoom in on about the last ten years, you see this: There has not been a lot of measured warming for the last ten years.”  In fact, global warming has been faster over the past 10 years than it has over the past half century; in other words, the best evidence that we have shows that global warming is happening and is accelerating.  If you fit the 1960-2008 data to a second order polynomial, the rate of global warming is increasing by 0.02 degrees/century every year.

The only way to look at the data and come to the conclusion shared by Mark Steyn, George Will, and Jim Manzi is to be ignorant or knowingly deceitful.

Tonight Obama fielded two questions that should be a cinch to answer.  First, from Steve Koff at the Plain Dealer:

One, can you guarantee that this legislation will lock in and say the government will never deny any services, that that’s going to be decided by the doctor and the patient, and the government will not deny any coverage?

Then from Jake Tapper at ABC:

But experts say that in addition to the benefits that you’re pushing, there is going to have to be some sacrifice in order for there to be true cost-cutting measures, such as Americans giving up tests, referrals, choice, end-of-life care.

When you describe health care reform, you don’t — understandably, you don’t talk about the sacrifices that Americans might have to make. Do you think — do you accept the premise that other than some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, the American people are going to have to give anything up in order for this to happen?

The answer here is obvious: Do you and your doctor get everything you want and everything that’s best for your care in the current system?  Do you really have choice?  No.  Your insurance company will decline claims all the time for questionable medical reasons.  A public plan will ensure that doctors will make these decisions based on effectiveness and not profitability.  On top of that, millions of Americans don’t get to make these decisions at all because they aren’t insured and they will be with insurance reform.  And the plans on the table now require preventative care and early detection testing that aren’t always covered by insurance.  It’s not about what will be taken away but about what’ll be gained.

Bernd Beber has responded to my (and others’) criticisms of his article on suspected Iranian election fraud authored with Alexandra Scacco.  An annotated and updated version of the article is available.

A key criticism leveled against Alex Scacco’s and my Washington Post op-ed on the election in Iran is that we argue that a fair election is unlikely to produce a lot of variation in last-digit frequencies, but then use an inappropriate test in evaluating the data from Iran against this claim. We should have reported the results from a chi-square test, not the probability of particular digits occurring more or less often than expected.

Is a chi-square test the most appropriate statistic for this type of data? Yes. That’s exactly why we report the result in the annotated version of our op-ed. (We initially reported only a nearly equivalent test statistic involving the standard deviation of last-digit frequencies, but since then we’ve clarified that this is the same result one obtains from a chi-square test.)

But is this test the most appropriate one for a general audience? Only if there isn’t a more transparent alternative that captures the same intuition and gives the same substantive result. In our view, the test statistic we report is precisely such an alternative.

Read the rest of this entry »

Driving into work, I looked out the window and saw water spurting 30 feet into the air out of a manhole thanks to flash flooding and grabbed a video.  Pretty amazing.  I didn’t get much of the lightning, but that was something else, too.

You know, I’ve only spent a little bit of time in Paris, but you have to harbor some serious francophobia to come away with this impression:

The French do not much like children [off with a bang]. Restaurant meals are available at very limited hours. You want lunch — it had better be between 12 and 2 [aka lunchtime]. Miss that and you can have a snack — but only if you are in a place big enough to have a range of restaurant types [and/or street vendors, bakeries, groceries, etc, etc which are ubiquitous in any "place" in France]. Dinner starts at 7 [aka dinnertime], no matter that you missed lunch and want a burger or a salad at 5, not ice cream or a beer. And meals take forever. I like the leisurely lunch as much as any journalist, of course. But not with my kids, every day — which leaves us with grilled-cheese sandwiches, hold the ham. Oh, you can’t hold the ham? Thanks [clearly this anecdote is relevant].

Finally, there is a lot of bad food in France — especially around tourist sites, including the great museums [the prepared food in the Met and the Smithsonian is fantastic and cheap, right?]. I will not say what I paid for two sandwiches and two salads [ignoring who's responsible for the weak dollar; food in Paris was astonishingly cheap in 2001] — all premade so unwanted ingredients could not be removed in advance — and a few soft drinks at the Louvre, after braving the crowds to see the Mona Lisa (which attracts tour buses full of people eager to take group pictures of themselves in front of the picture [doesn't failing to visit the Liberty Bell disqualify one for employment at the National Review?]). There is much excellent food, of course. But who wants really excellent food every day [everyone]? Sometimes you just want to get everyone fed and get on with your activities. Fast food exists because a mediocre, entirely predictable burger from McDonald’s is no worse than what you would get a certain percentage of the time at individual places that might not be as clean and certainly won’t be as quick [I love McDonald's... but clean?]. There is an obvious open niche for a service-oriented place that downplays the drama and provides reasonably healthy food in a clean setting. And as for the health claim — I don’t personally buy it [Buy what?  That it's a good idea to have a healthy diet?]. But I am currently in a region where every farmers’ market, farm stand, and café sells foie gras, duck confit, and excellent high-fat cheeses, and what passes for a vegetable in restaurants is potatoes sautéed in duck fat [Who claimed French cuisine was healthy?]. A few carrot sticks and an apple and Mickey D wins that one — so no surprise that it’s doing well.

I really hope her kids enjoy their sabotaged McVacation.

Now that the Court’s actually ruled in favor of this stupid argument (White people discriminating against White people … clearly what the Civil Rights Act is meant to ameliorate), will this mean more or fewer absurd complaints about reverse racism and reverse discrimination?

I just noticed that I added this little box to the sidebar of the blog in early 2008:

HOT, CURRENTLY.

Trellises. Trading dollars for risky mortgages, so long as I’m not doing it. The rapidly approaching annual lapse in winter vegetables’ exclusive appeal.

Seems like it would’ve been smart to act on that hunch.  I also wanted to buy NVIDIA stock in early 2000 and I think it posted one of the biggest gains in the market over the next two years in the middle of the tech crash.  I think this goes to show, more than anything else, that it’s easy to see what will likely happen in the economy but impossible to predict when it will happen.

Following up on the last post, here’s an exercise in applying Beber and Scacco’s analysis to random numbers.  I’m going to generate 10 sets of 116 random numbers and see how many contain similarly suspicious patterns.  Here is the code and output from MATLAB:

freqs = [];
for i = 1:10
    a = ceil(10.*rand(116,1)) - 1;
    aFreq = [];
    for i = 0:9
        aFreq = [aFreq length(find(a==i))];
    end
    freqs = [freqs; aFreq];
end

freqs =
     9    14    13    14     8    10     7    16    12    13
    11    12    11    10     9    16    10    13    12    12
    20    11     6     9    15    13    11    15     9     7
    12    13     6    13    14    12     6    16    15     9
    16    10    15    12     7    11    14    14     9     8
    10    12    11    11    10    12    11    13    16    10
    16    11    14    10    14     7    11    10     9    14
    10    11    12    10    18    12    10     9     9    15
     8    10    12    11    24    10     9     9    10    13
    13     7    13     4    11    16    12    16    17     7

Each row is the frequency of the digits 0 through 9 in a set of 116 random numbers.  Beber and Scacco identify fraud based on the premise that “humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.”  In the Iranian example, they see 20 sevens and 5 fives in last digit of 116 vote counts from Iranian elections.  How often can we identify an equivalent phenomenon in random numbers?

I’ll simulate the number of times each event happens in 10,000 simulations using this code:

ct = 0;
for sim = 1:10000
    a = ceil(10.*rand(116,1)) - 1;
    aFreq = [];
    for i = 0:9
        aFreq = [aFreq; length(find(a==i))];
    end
    if length(find(aFreq(2:4)>=13))==3
        ct = ct+1;
    end
end

Here, the condition I’m looking for is an overabundance of the numbers 1, 2, and 3, which is what Beber and Scacco identify as indicative of human manipulation in their work on Nigerian elections.  Seeing the numbers 1-3 each 13 times or more occurs in only 365 of 10,000 simulations – it is as rare as the phenomenon observed in Iran, and fits better with experimental observations of fraudulent random numbers.

Let’s look at all of these numbers and see which ones show unexpected rare phenomena:

Row Times Condition
1   365   1,2,3>=13 (too many low #s)
2   284   N>=9 9<=X<=13 (too little variation)
3   227   N>=3 X>=15 & N>=1 X>=20 (3 high, 1 very high)
4   573   N>=2 X>=15 & N>=2 X<=6 (2 high, 2 low)
5
6   50    N>=8 10<=X<=12 (too little variation)
7
8   228   N>=8 9<=X<=12  (too little variation)
9   53    N>=1 X>=24 (too many 4s)
10  97    N>=3 X>=16 & N>=1 X<=4 (too many 5s,7s,8s and too few 3s)

So for 10 random sets of numbers it’s pretty easy to find phenomena in 8 of them as or more rare than what happened in Iran.  Samples 5 and 7 are now suspicious because they don’t display any obvious rare pattern… was the person faking this data onto my game?