The Science of Gaydar

The gay reporter David France writes in NY Mag:

And the cumulative findings support the belief now widely held in the scientific community that sexual orientation -- perhaps along with the characteristics we typically associate with gayness -- is biological. "We're reaching a consensus on a broad question," says J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Is sexual orientation "something we're born with or something we largely acquire through social experience? The answer is clear. It's something we're born with."

After 20 years of gay gene propaganda, there is no such consensus. It is an open scientific question.

Even young people who support same-sex marriage are not convinced. A new NY Times poll asked:

48. Do you think being homosexual is something people choose, or do you think that it is something they cannot change?

34% of all adults say they choose, while 43% of 17-29 year-old said they choose. If there were really some scientific proof, then no one would have to bother with these silly arguments and polls.

Those folks aren't learning what is being taught in Maryland, according to this:

According to the American Psychiatric Association, there are no replicated scientific studies supporting any specific biological cause for homosexuality. But now the Montgomery County Board of Education has done what science and medicine could not do by declaring in its newly approved curriculum that homosexuality is "innate" or inborn. The board could not produce any factual evidence for what it will now teach students -- only political "pledges" and payoffs for last year's school board elections as claimed by gay rights activists.

Homosexuality could be innate without any specific biological cause being known, but there is no proof that it is innate either. There are some known correlations with innate characteristics, just as there are for IQ, criminality, and other mental properties.

Men avoiding accusations

Glenn Sacks writes:

If dad goes for a walk with his daughter and holds her hand, apparently Virginia Department of Health officials wants you to pick up the phone and destroy his life by reporting him as a possible sexual abuser.

From Campaign advocates recognizing, reporting suspected abuse (Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 6/21/07):

For years, campaigns to stop child sexual crimes have focused on encouraging children to speak up about abuse.

State health officials are trying a new tactic. The latest push, at least in Hampton Roads, is to educate adults on how to spot - and stop - sexual offenders. ...

Billboards and posters show an adult hand holding a child's hand, with the words: 'It doesn't feel right when I see them together.'

A national help line number is listed, and through it callers can get advice about what to do.

Rebecca Odor, who directs the sexual and domestic violence prevention division for the state Department of Health, said officials hope to reach people who might feel uncomfortable reporting a relative or acquaintance to law enforcers.

I do hope that people feel uncomfortable about reporting a hand-holding relative to the police.

Meanwhile, another blogger reports:

"We have a serious challenge facing our organization," said Mr. Kobara, President and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. "For every 10 people inquiring about becoming a 'Big Brother' or 'Sister', only three are men.

Actual participation by men may well be even less, otherwise it would have been mentioned instead of the irrelevant stat about inquiries. In any event, that's well below the national rate for all types of volunteering. During 2006, 42% of all adult volunteers were male.

The article sets out a number of possible reasons men don’t volunteer at BB-BS in greater numbers – but the fact that the rate at BB-BS is less than the overall average for volunteer-based organizations moves me to throw out an undiscussed possibility: men are afraid of having their lives destroyed by a false accusation, and fear the BB-BS will protect itself by throwing its resources behind the accuser.

I don't understand how the BBBSA operates. It supposedly checks out each mentor to make sure his (or her) motives are pure. For the sake of nondiscrimination, it allow homosexual mentors and doesn't tell the parents. But men only mentor boys, and women only mentor girls. So sex discrimination is okay but sexual preference discrimination is not, I guess. Maybe a lot of men are turned off by the whole organization, and don't want their scrutiny.

Phony H-1B tactics exposed

Slashdot reports:

Congress is now calling for a Dept. of Labor investigation into a Pittsburgh law firm after a video showing its attorneys advising employers how to game the immigration system was posted on YouTube.

Programmersguild.org/RIR/ has more info on how lawyers train big businesses to skirt the law and hire foreigners on H-1B visas over Americans. It even has examples of phony want-ads that are designed purely to justify hiring a foreigner over an American.

Average can be more than median

A new US CDC sex survey has gotten a lot of attention, some of it confusing. Here is one AP story:

NEW YORK — The average American man has sex with seven women during his lifetime, compared to four male sexual partners for the average woman, according to a federal survey that used high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use.

Here is another:

The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four. ... (This version CORRECTS that figures for lifetime sexual partners were median figures, not averages.)

Use of "median" and "average" makes a difference because the average number of sex partners is actually about the same for men and women. Most women don't have so many sex partners, but a few highly promiscuous women raise the average for all women enough to match the average for men.

Use of medians is probably better because it is more likely to reflect typical men and women, but it is just not right to say that the average man is having more sexual intercourse than the average woman.

If you don't believe that women lie about how many sex partners they've had, just read this letter to an advice columnist:

I'm a 35-year-old woman, and met a very handsome 43-year-old man named Daniel. We've been dating for five months now and still haven't slept together.

My problem is that in the beginning, Daniel asked me how many men I've slept with. Being a little scared of his reaction, I lied and told him seven. But after a few months, I could not live with the lie and finally decided to tell him the reason why I still haven't slept with him yet.

I told him I didn't want to make love because I was scared that he'd lose respect and eventually leave me like all the other men. At this point he asked me again, just how many men were there, to which I replied forty-three.

His reply was, "Hmm, one for each of my birthdays." And from that day on, I never heard from him again. I don't get it Curt, why is it that when men sleep around, they're studs , yet when women sleep around, they're sluts ? Why can't women have their fun too?

Bad Astronomer misreads Bush

The popular Bad Astronomy blog says:

Whether you think stem cell research is immoral or not, this little trope needs to be dealt with.

President Bush vetoed a bill last night to fund stem cell research. He then made a statement which is, to be blunt, a lie:

If this legislation became law, it would compel American taxpayers for the first time in our history to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

This is 100% absolutely untrue, and there is no way to interpret the bill to mean this. The bill would provide funding for additional research to use embryos which were going to be discarded anyway.

If the President were really trying to prevent what he thinks of as murder of humans, then he should block any attempts at in-vitro fertilization, which is what creates so many zygotes in the first place. Instead, he goes this route, which satisfies his far-right fundamentalist base without having to deal with actual, y’know, reality, in any way.

His statement is a lie. It is partisan pandering. It is putting ideology before science. It is distorting science.

The Bad Astronomer is just another lying Bush-hater. The embryos were going to be discarded, but not with taxpayer money. Some people do indeed have some moral qualms about in-vitro fertilization, and federal tax money does not support it. Bush is consistently objecting to forcing taxpayers to pay for killing embryoes.

So President Bush's statement is correct. You can find more about federal stem cell funding here. The feds are spending 100s of millions of dollars on stem-cell research, including embrionic stem cells. State governments, universities, and private companies are spending billions of dollars.

A comment on the Bad Astronomy blog points out what a dope the Bad Astronomer is, but he persists in his error anyway. I just call people like that lying Bush-haters. If he disagrees with Bush policy, he should just say so, but when he accuses Bush of distorting science, he is just being a dope.

Pediatrics policy

News from pediatricians:

The influential American Academy of Pediatrics is reviewing its neutral stance on circumcision following recent studies showing the procedure may have reduced HIV infection rates in African men.

The organization, which represents 60,000 pediatricians and helps set pediatric policy for the larger American Medical Association, is expected to issue a new policy statement in six to 12 months, academy president Dr. Jay E. Berkelhamer said.
...

Berkelhamer, a pediatrician in Atlanta, said the organization's researchers are in the "literature review" stage, and that it's too early to know whether they plan to endorse routine circumcision. But he wouldn't go so far as to recommend the surgery to expectant or new parents, noting that he's "not terribly uncomfortable with policy as currently written."

A year for a literature review? The Bible describes recommendations for circumcision dating back 1000s of years, but I doubt that the peds will be reviewing that.

My guess is that the peds are dying to tell everyone what to do, but don't want to admit that it is based on the possibility of African promiscuity. They should admit that personal choice, customs, and circumstances are factors here, and there is no best universal policy. The pediatricians have a long history of making recommendations that are based more on ideology than science.

Kilimanjaro not a victim of climate change

Seattle Times reports:

The shrinking snowcap atop Mount Kilimanjaro has become an icon of global warming.

Pictures of the African peak, which has lost 90 percent of its ice cover, were featured in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Greenpeace activists once held a satellite news conference on the summit to sway participants in an international climate conference.

But most scientists who study Kilimanjaro's glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano's poster-child status. ...

Rising nearly four miles from the plains of eastern Tanzania, Kilimanjaro has seen its glaciers decline steadily for well over a century — since long before humans began pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Mote points out. ...

Also, recent data from Kilimanjaro show temperatures on the 19,340-foot volcano never rise above freezing. So melting triggered by a warmer atmosphere can't be the reason the small summit ice sheet is retreating about 3 feet a year, said Georg Kaser, co-author of the new article and a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. ...

Models predict global warming will increase rainfall in Eastern Africa, which could actually be the thing that saves the "shining mountain's" snowy crown.

So those pictures of Kilimanjaro are really evidence that we don't have enough global warming yet.

Ritalin use doubles after divorce

Psychiatry news:

TORONTO (Reuters) - Children from broken marriages are twice as likely to be prescribed attention-deficit drugs as children whose parents stay together, a Canadian researcher said on Monday, and she said the reasons should be investigated.More than 6 percent of 633 children from divorced families were prescribed Ritalin, compared with 3.3 percent of children whose parents stayed together, University of Alberta professor Lisa Strohschein reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The study of more than 4,700 children started in 1994, while all the families were intact, Strohschein said. They followed the children’s progress to see what happened to their families and to see what drugs were prescribed.

"It shows clearly that divorce is a risk factor for kids to be prescribed Ritalin," Strohschein said.

Other studies have shown that children of single parents are more likely to get prescribed drugs such as Ritalin. But is the problem caused by being born to a never-married mother, or some other factor?

"So the question was, 'is it possible that divorce acts a stressful life event that creates adjustment problems for children, which might increase acting out behavior, leading to a prescription for Ritalin?'", Strohschein said in a statement.

"On the other hand, there is also the very public perception that divorce is always bad for kids and so when children of divorce come to the attention of the health-care system -- possibly because parents anticipate their child must be going through adjustment problems -- doctors may be more likely to diagnose a problem and prescribe Ritalin."

Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, is a psychostimulant drug most commonly prescribed for the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.

There is a big debate in much of the developed world over whether it may be over-prescribed — given to children who do not really need it. In March, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the use of drugs to treat ADHD has more than tripled worldwide since 1993.

No, those really aren't the only possibilities. Maybe the misbehaving child caused the parents' divorce. Maybe no one wants to marry a single woman with a misbehaving child. Maybe parents with ADD genes are more likely to get divorced. Maybe the child doesn't have ADD at all, but is given ritalin as a way of scapegoating him or pretending that problems are being addressed. Maybe the child is doing just fine, but the single parent has trouble coping with normal misbehaviors and tries ritalin. Maybe there is no such thing as ADD, but ritalin is still a useful tool for lazy parents, and especially useful if no spouse is helping. Maybe the child is misbehaving because he is learning from the misbehavior of his parents, and not suffering emotional stress.

Conventional wisdom is that divorcing parents cause problems for kids, and not the other way around. But a scientific study should consider all the possibilities. There is no obvious link between emotional distress and attention deficits, so some of those other explanations seem more likely to me.

Tech execs lobby Senate on H-1B visas

The Si Valley newspaper reports:

WASHINGTON - Silicon Valley executives, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Lt. Gov. John Garamendi lobbied Congress on immigration Wednesday as the tech sector made some headway in getting employer-friendly provisions in a massive Senate bill. ...

"We're caught in a vise on immigration, and we're worried that this point system will mean a lot of job needs go unmet," said Bill Coleman, CEO of San Jose-based Cassatt. He noted that 53 percent of Silicon Valley engineers are foreign-born. ...

The Senate bill raises the cap on H-1B visas for skilled workers from 65,000 to 115,000, but does not exempt holders of advanced degrees, as last year's Senate bill did. The Cantwell-Cornyn amendment includes that exemption - which executives said was crucial in filling specific jobs quickly - and raises the cap to 140,000.

Many visa-holders wait years for a green card, and that backlog "is causing a massive recruiting and retention crisis for employers," the TechNet executives said in a letter to senators. ...

Some critics of the visa program say employers have abused it to hire foreign workers at lower wages. Tech representatives say such abuses are few ...

So it is a crisis that only 53% of our engineers are foreign-born? How many do they want? 80%? 90%?

All H1-B visas are for the benefit of employers hiring foreign workers at lower wages. There are always American workers available for the same jobs. Aliens of extraordinary abilities get EB-1 visas.

Mohammedans taking over England

UK news:

Muhammad is now second only to Jack as the most popular name for baby boys in Britain and is likely to rise to No 1 by next year, a study by The Times has found. ...

Scholars said that the name’s rise up the league table was driven partly by the growing number of young Muslims having families, coupled with the desire to name their child in honour of the Prophet.

Although the official names register places the spelling Mohammed at No 23, an analysis of the top 3,000 names provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) puts Muhammad at No 2 once the 14 spellings are taken into account. If its popularity continues – it rose by 12 per cent last year – the name will take the top spot by the end of this year. It first entered the Top 30 in 2000. ...

Overall, Muslims account for 3 per cent of the British population, about 1.5 million people. However, the Muslim birthrate is roughly three times higher than the nonMuslim one.

In a few years, there will be millions of Mohammads all over Europe.

The funny part of this article is where they had to consult scholars to say that the trend has something to do with Muslims.

Should English be the official language

I was surprised that none of the major Democrat candidates will willing to answer positively to this question:

Show of hands question: Should English be the official language of the United States?

It seems to me that the safe answer would have been to say that English is already the official language. They could still support translations into other languages when practical.

Just remember, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say that English should not be the official language.

Early sex correlated with low self-esteem

NY Times reports:

Girls who have sex at an early age are at slightly greater risk than their peers for feeling depressed, a new study has found. But their self-esteem suffers only if the sex occurs outside a romantic relationship. ...

First sex was associated with a decrease in self-esteem, but only among girls who were younger than the average age and not in a romantic relationship. Girls who had sex at the average age or later had no increased risk for depressive symptoms compared with those who had not had sex. ...

"I think this is a good study," Dr. Lindberg said. "I'm struck at how much you have to recognize that teen sexual behavior occurs in a social context."

"One of the big findings here," Dr. Lindberg continued, "is that it's age norms and not the actual age that matters, and these norms vary depending on what group in society you’re in."

I think she is trying to say that it is psychologically healthy for young girls to have sexual relations as long as everyone else is doing it.

The trouble with these psychologicsl studies is that all they can really do is tell you about behavior that is outside social norms. They can't tell whether the behavior is good or bad. I am not sure they can even say that early sex causes low self-esteem; maybe young girls with low self-esteem are more likely to have casual sexual relations.

NASA says climate may not be optimal

NASA administrator Michael Griffin was interviewed on NPR:

INSKEEP: It has been mentioned that NASA is not spending as much money as it could to study climate change — global warming — from space. Are you concerned about global warming?

GRIFFIN: I'm aware that global warming exists. I understand that the bulk of scientific evidence accumulated supports the claim that we've had about a one degree centigrade rise in temperature over the last century to within an accuracy of 20 percent. I'm also aware of recent findings that appear to have nailed down — pretty well nailed down the conclusion that much of that is manmade. Whether that is a longterm concern or not, I can't say.

INSKEEP: Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?

GRIFFIN: I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

You wouldn't expect any of this to be controversial, but look at the reaction:

James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist: "It's an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement. It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change."

Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University: "It's astounding that the head of a major U.S. science agency could hold such attitudes — basically ignorance about the global warming problem. It's so astonishing that I think he should resign."

Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate scientist: "Griffin's comments seem surprisingly naive. We are not in a situation where we are shopping around for an ideal climate, but that we have adapted to the climate we have, and that therefore large changes to it are not likely to be beneficial."

Berrien Moore, Director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire: "I don’t understand it. I'm really stunned he would say something like that. I mean, I just really find it shocking."

They don't want a NASA official to be saying stuff like that, but the criticisms are more political than scientific. There is no scientific paper that shows that the Earth's current climate is optimal. Yes, we have adapted well to the climate, but we might adapt even better to a different climate. At any rate, NASA has no business taking a stand on what sort of climate the Earth should have anyway. It should just gather info and make predictions.

A school principal who hates tests

Dale Jones, a local Cupertino California school principal, writes and attack on standardized tests in the May 29 San Jose Mercury News. (It is not online, strangely.) He complains that the tests take 6 hours (spread over several days), and adds, "what messages does it send to our children when we devote this kind of time to a test?".

He also complains that most of the kids have to take the tests in English, that the schools can't do fire drills during a test, and that test scores can go up if the school concentrate on the curriculum.

His real frustration is that he is unable to convince parents that the tests are worthless. Parents like the tests.

The message it sends to our children is that they will be graded on what they learn. The tests aren't much different from those that have been used for generations, except that the results are more widely reported and acted on.

Woman kills husband, goes free

The LA Times reports

After spending 16 years in prison, Hudie Joyce Walker walked out of a Pomona courtroom Tuesday a free woman — a sign of how much the law has changed for battered women who strike back.

Walker was the beneficiary of the first appellate court decision to interpret a 2002 state law that allows inmates to reopen their cases if they can show that expert testimony on abuse probably would have changed the outcome. ...

Walker was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly shooting her husband, Thomas Walker, at their Hacienda Heights home on Mother's Day 1990. It was a day she had hoped to go to a Dodgers game with her daughters and grandchildren.

Her husband, who had beaten her for years, had other ideas. He insisted that she accompany him to the Moose Lodge in El Monte, one of his regular watering holes.

After they returned home, he pointed a shotgun at her and said, "Today will be your last goddamned day on this Earth," according to court records.

Note how uncorroborated self-serving allegations against the husband are reported as fact, but the LA Times only says that she "allegedly" shot her husband. In fact, a jury convicted her of premeditatedly murdering him, and she even pled guilty to manslaughter eventually.

Here is a story about women who go free after killing their own kids.

The whole idea that expert testimony might manipulates jurors is offensive. Jurors know what murder is. There is no need for experts to tell jurors what is or is not murcer. When experts are allowed to testify on stuff like this, then prosecution and defense experts offer dueling theories about the defendant's state of mind. The experts just don't add much.

Wiring for mindreading

Wired magazine reports:

Three months ago I took my 7-year-old son through a neurological treatment designed to hack his brain. ... As a child diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, or SPD, Caleb doesn't experience senses the way other people do. Stimuli from his environment and body are sometimes misinterpreted or ignored altogether. ... The month-long Sensory Learning Program in Boulder, Colorado, was designed to recalibrate Caleb's reception of sensory input, reorganizing the neural pathways that process information. ...

Another interesting "side-effect" is that Caleb has begun to guess peoples' motives by observing their behavior.

I didn't know that mindreading could be taught by rewiring the brain.

The temperature CO2 correlation

A common global warming argument is to show a graph showing a correlation between increases in temperature and CO2 over millions of years. A correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but in the presence of a strong theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the graph is pretty convincing.

The only trouble is that a closer examination shows that the tightest correlation is between the temperature increases and the CO2 increases 800 years later. This suggests that the temperature increases is causing the CO2 increase, and not the other way around.

The global warming scientists acknowledge this. They say that in typical past warming periods, the Earth warmed for 800 years before causing an increase in CO2. The CO2 then exacerbated the warming for rest of the typical 5000 year cycle, before some unknown force started a cooling trend. They say that the CO2 still causes warming, it just hasn't started the warming cycle as it has in the last century.

All that may be true, but what does the graph prove of relevance to us today? Nothing that I can see. It doesn't give any evidence at all that the recent warming was caused by CO2 or humans. It doesn't tell us whether CO2 has anything to do with the duration or intensity of a warming cycle. It doesn't give us any reason to cut back on CO2 emissions.

Misleading poll on immigration

Yesterday's lead NY Times front page story announced that poll results favor the current immigration reform bill in Congress. It said:

Taking a pragmatic view on a divisive issue, a large majority of Americans want to change the immigration laws to allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status and to create a new guest worker program to meet future labor demands, the poll found.

Here is the actual poll question:

61. If you had to choose, what do you think should happen to most illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States for at least two years: They should be given a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status, OR They should be deported back to their native country?

5/18-23/07 Results: 62% Chance to apply for legal status, 33% Deported, 4% DK/NA

The new immigration bill does not just give illegal aliens a "chance to apply for legal status", it gives them legal status immediately. No chance, and no wait. All they have to do is to prove that they were here before Jan. 2007.

So that 62% includes all of those who want to give illegal aliens legal status immediately, as in the Kyl-Kennedy bill, as well as those want some more moderate procedure in which illegals could apply for legal status, and some would be granted it and some would not.

There are also people who want to continue the status quo where illegal aliens do not get legal status, but are not deported either. I don't know how they would have answered.

Meanwhile, the Wash. Post reports on another aspect of the bill:

NEW YORK - Would America open its doors for the next Albert Einstein? Under the new immigration reform bill, the answer is maybe, but maybe not.

For years, foreign-born Nobel Prize winners, corporate officers and the top talents in sports, arts and sciences have had a fast-track to permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship in the United States. In the name of attracting the world's greatest and brightest, authorities have granted these luminaries priority access to green cards under a little-known provision offered to "aliens of extraordinary abilities." ...

But the bill now being debated in Congress does away with the special "EB-1" preferred status category, effectively forcing foreign VIPs to take a number and get in line with everyone else. ...

Last year, 36,960 individuals and family members were granted "priority" permanent resident status under the "extraordinary abilities" category. Under the new 100-point system outlined in the bill, both "extraordinary or ordinary" abilities in specialized fields would offer, at most, eight additional points to a candidate. That is less than the 10 points awarded to those applicants holding a two-year college degree.

This is bizarre. I have complained that the H-1B visas are supposed to goto foreigners filling jobs for which no American is available, but in fact they nearly all goto recent graduates who displace Americans.

But these EB-1 visas really goto for foreigners of unusual merit. I say that we should keep the EB-1 visas and scrap the H-1Bs.

Who opposed the Iraq War?

Conventional wisdom is that while leading Democrat presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and John Kerry all voted for the Iraq War, Barack Obama and Al Gore have the virtue of being against the war all along.

I am wondering where the proof for this is. Obama and Gore were out of the Congress, and did not have to vote one way or the other. Their statements appear ambiguous. Eg, Gore said in Sept. 2002:

I believe this proposed foreshortening of deliberation in the Congress robs the country of the time it needs for careful analysis of exactly what may lie before us.

Gore made some valid points in that speech, but claiming that we rushed into war is not going to win him any votes. There was a long and public deliberation over the war decision. It is not clear from Gore's comments how he would have voted on the war. I think that it is a mistake to say that Obama and Gore were anti-war unless they actively spoke out against the war.

Gore also said:

I vividly remember that during one of the campaign debates in 2000, Jim Lehrer asked then-Governor Bush whether or not America, after being involved with military action, should engage in any form of nation building. The answer was, "I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. We're going to have kind of a nation-building corps in America? Absolutely not." My point is, this is a Bush doctrine. This is administration policy. Given that it is administration policy, we have to take that into account as a nation in looking at the likely consequences of an overwhelming American military victory against the government of Iraq. If we go in there and dismantle them - and they deserve to be dismantled - but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos, and say, "That's for y'all to decide how to put things back together now," that hurts us.

So Gore agreed that the Saddam Hussein govt of Iraq deserved to be dismantled, but argued that the USA should occupy Iraq long enough for some serious nation-building.

That is what Pres. Bush has done. He broke is promise to avoid nation-building. Those who oppose nation-building have a right to be annoyed with Bush's Iraq policy. But Gore's position was to advocate just the sort of nation-building that Bush has done. I don't see how Gore is going to argue that he would have handled the war any better.

This excerpt from Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, starts with a complaint about a lack of public debate leading up to the Iraq War. I wonder how Gore could be so detached from reality. No war in all of human history was more publicly and openly debated. The arguments for and against the war were debated in Congress, on TV, on blogs, at the United Nations, and in other countries around the world.

Probability of guilt

This article describes a nurse in jail as a result of bogus mathematical arguments, and explains:

suppose that police pick up a suspect and match his or her DNA to evidence collected at a crime scene. Suppose that the likelihood of a match, purely by chance, is only 1 in 10,000. Is this also the chance that they are innocent? It’s easy to make this leap, but you shouldn’t.

Here’s why. Suppose the city in which the person lives has 500,000 adult inhabitants. Given the 1 in 10,000 likelihood of a random DNA match, you’d expect that about 50 people in the city would have DNA that also matches the sample. So the suspect is only 1 of 50 people who could have been at the crime scene. Based on the DNA evidence only, the person is almost certainly innocent, not certainly guilty.

This kind of error is so subtle that the untrained human mind doesn’t deal with it very well, and worse yet, usually cannot even recognize its own inability to do so.

I don't think that the author deals with it very well either. Both conclusions depend on unspecified assumptions about how the suspect was selected, and could be correct. More info is needed.

Mr. Right, It Turns Out, Does Not Take Classes

The NY Times has a silly article about disappointed women who take introductory wine-tasting classes looking for men. You'll find better analysis here:

Men prefer to look at something they have decided to do and figure it out on their own. They like to observe, analyze, and discover. They accept the risks and enjoy the excitement of trial and error. They don't like sitting around having someone tell them what to do, and they aren't intrigued by the prospect of meeting women who spend so much time doing something they loathe.

Truly attractive women need never search for men. We men are searching for them everywhere, all the time, around the clock, from puberty until death us do part. We have men positioned on alert around the planet in strategic locations ready to launch at a moment's notice should an attractive woman appear. A pretty girl can't go to the grocery store for a quart of milk without coming back with a date. Follow a pretty girl around for a few hours and you will find that she is constantly hit on by every man with a pulse. As far as providing our companionship to attractive women in need of it, we men have the Earth covered. There are no gaps in our coverage. None.

So if a woman and her girlfriends can find no men who will date them it is not because all the available single men have been sucked off the face of the planet and deposited in some faraway nebula. It is far more likely that they have overestimated their attractiveness in the dating market and rejected the invitations that any reasonably attractive, healthy woman receives in the course of a week. There is not a single woman alive who can fail to get a date by lowering her expectations, which are too often wildly inflated by conceit.

The fact that such overpriced women seek men by taking classes in tennis, sailing, and wine-tasting demonstrates that they are trying to cull out blue collar applicants for their affections and market their charms to the elite.

The kind of women who complain about the absence of men are the kind of women who complain about the presence of men. Complaining women are a form of Man Repellant. This is an important clue as to why these women are dateless.

The simple explanation is that real men don't even drink wine.

Pediatricians refusing patients

Business Week reports:

Pediatricians are encountering parents who refuse vaccinations for their children, prompting the doctors to show them the door

... In a survey of 302 pediatricians published a year-and-a-half ago in Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, 28% "said that they would ask the family to seek care elsewhere" for "refusing specific vaccines," and 39% said they would do so for families refusing all vaccines.

They mostly cited as the reason "lack of shared goals" and "lack of trust," while "fear of litigation" was cited by a relatively small number. ...

Increasingly it seems, the pediatricians are following through on their threats, despite the potential for serious revenue loss. ...

And what about the business implications for pediatricians giving the boot to an apparently growing group of parents? Douglas Diekema, a Seattle pediatrician who authored the academy's guidelines on handling anti-vaccination parents, says that so far "The numbers are small enough that it has little impact on physicians."

But longer term, he argues that physicians who refuse to treat objecting patients may actually save money.

If a pediatrician refuses non-vaccinating parents, then you don't want that pediatrician anyway. The job of a physician is to make recommendations, and it is the responsibility of the patient or parent to make the final decisions. Pediatricians don't necessarily know anything about vaccines; they are just following the official mandates from the CDC.

The vaccine schedules are very profitable for pediatricians, and many of them very much like being able to bully patients into following orders. If the pediatrician is going to disregard your wishes on vaccines, then he may also disregard your wishes on more important matters. My advice is to tell the medico to his face that you make your own decisions, and if he has a problem with that, go elsewhere.

Why Americans hate soccer

Here is an amusing anti-soccer rant:

Soccer is a great game for uncoordinated kids to play because no one else out there appears to be doing it right, either. It's impossible to be humiliated while you're playing. You can't strike out, get sacked, or shoot an air ball. You can't even fight, like in hockey.

Soccer is the ideal sport for countries that don't have any other source of national pride remaining. ...

Soccer is effeminate. ...

No, I mean it literally: soccer is a sport for women and girlie-men. ...

If you play or care about soccer and you call yourself a man, you are a liar. It's a sport that requires men to cast aside what makes them men. Of course, if you live in Washington, New York, or (snicker) Greenwich, and you make your living as a law professor or in some other occupation that doesn't require you to lift anything heavier than a salad fork, well, then soccer is perfect for you, twig-boy. You won't look any more ridiculous doing it than any of the nancies competing in the World Cup, or a girls JV team.

Want to know why the rest of the world loves soccer? The rest of the world isn't filled with men anymore. It's filled with appeasers and fruits. Have you ever met a foreigner whom you didn't suspect of being gay? I rest my case.

British TV gone feminine

The British BBC reports:

British TV standards are deteriorating because the BBC is "run by women", astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has said.

The Sky at Night host also described female newsreaders as "jokey" and called for separate channels to cater for the needs of the different sexes.

The presenter said: "The trouble is the BBC now is run by women and it shows soap operas, cooking, quizzes, kitchen-sink plays. You wouldn't have had that in the golden days." ...

I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching Sir Patrick Moore
"I would like to see two independent wavelengths - one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men." ...

"I used to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek, but they went PC - making women commanders, that kind of thing. I stopped watching."

Sir Patrick appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-serving TV presenter, having appeared on his show about astronomy since 1957.

In Britain, the people who read the news on TV are calls newsreaders.

Who is smarter than a fifth grader?

My 5th grade daughter just competed in the Santa Cruz Math Contest, and had to answer these questions:

10. Find the surface area of a plate with the radius of 6 inn. Use 3.14 for pi.
11. A Ferris wheel at the boardwalk has a diameter of 50 meters. Find its circumference. Use 3.14 for pi.
19. What is the sum of the first ten prime numbers?

Answers: about 113 in², 314 m, 101.

I am afraid that I would not have won. Problem 11 is just wrong. If the radius were 50 then the circumference would be 314, but as it is, the correct answer is pi times the diameter, or 157 m.

You can only get the approved answer to problem 19 if you count 1 as a prime number. But it is not. It seems to satisfy the definition for primes, but it is excluded in order to simplify mathematical statements such as the unique prime factorization theorem. If 1 were a prime, then prime factorizations would no longer be unique as you could include or not include factors of 1.

The difficulty with problem 10 is that it uses the term "surface area", instead of just "area". The term "surface area" suggests that the plate should be considered a 3-dimensional object, and that the areas of both sides should be added together. The given answer is just the area of one side.

Unilateral divorce

There appears to be a shift from the term "no-fault divorce" to "unilateral divorce", as in NY Times articles here and by Tyler Cowen and Isobel Coleman.

I am not sure what the reason is for the shift, but the term "no fault" is indeed very misleading. The divorce court does not consider fault for purpose of dissolving the marriage or dividing the assets, but it certainly does consider fault for matters of child custody and support. When a child is involved, the courts can spends years scrutinizing the most trivial of faults.

Can lawyers beget evil?

Terry McDermott on CSPAN2 today said:

People do evil things. Mohammad Atta didn't come into the world as an evil creature. His dad was a lawyer.

MIT Admissions Dean gets booted

The book Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond gets rave reviews, except for this one:

The co-author of this book, Marilee Jones, was recently forced to resign from her position as Dean of Admissions at MIT when information supplied to MIT revealed that she lied when she applied for a job there, and subsequently. Jones had claimed to have degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, M.I.T. officials said.

No wonder Jones recommends not stressing out about being admitted to college. Follow her example and just lie about it.

You would think that MIT would have checked at least once in the 28 years she worked there.

Freakonomics is ruining economics

The Freakonomics blog writes:

I blogged a few weeks back about a piece in The New Republic last month that claimed I was ruining economics. At that time, there wasn’t a full version of the article online to link to, so there did not seem to be much point in saying much about the piece. Now, you can read the full article here.

If you’ve read the article, I’m curious as to how you would answer the following questions:
1) Where did the author of the story get his economics PhD?
2) How many years was he enrolled in the economics graduate program at Harvard?
3) How many times have he and I been in the same room in our lives?

It might surprise you to know that the answers to those questions are: he has no PhD, he never attended the economics graduate program at Harvard (the closest he ever got was dating someone in the program), and he and I have never been in the same room in our lives.

Wow, that article must have touched a new. Do I have to attend Harvard to criticize his book?

The New Republic article is actually entertaining and informative. Steven D. Levitt has written a bunch of clever papers but they also invite criticism. I am surprised that his response is so lame.

Dear Abby and Bill O'Reilly

Today's Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: ... I am a single mother who supports her children. I can't afford to be killed or maimed on the road. This afternoon I was behind a woman who was driving erratically. She rolled through stop signs, sped up and slowed down for no apparent reason, and switched from lane to lane. When I was finally able to safely pass her, I saw ... the woman was doing 70 miles an hour. ... Maybe your family doesn't need you alive and healthy, but my kids need me! -- CINDY IN MINNEAPOLIS

I hope Cindy stays in Minneapolis. She seems to think that her life is worth more than others, and she seems to drive like a maniac.

I just watched the O'Reilly factor on Fox News TV. It has high ratings, but I can see why some people hate it.

Sen. Chuck Schumer explained his support for the Second Amendment, and said, "Every amendment has limitations. First amendment. Pornography -- can't do it except in certain instances." Huhh? Just about the only limitation is that the models have to be over 18 years old. Then Schumer said that we should have licensing and registration of guns just like cars. In fact the gun requirements are greater than those for cars.

Then O'Reilly lectured atheist Richard Dawkins on how he is a Roman Catholic and "being humble is a Christian virtue". Neither has much humility.

O'Reilly bragged about how he refused to air the tape of Alec Baldwin chewing out his daughter. He also had two guests discussing it, but they didn't talk about how Baldwin has been stopped from seeing his own daughter. Fox News did play the tape as soon as the O'Reilly show ended. Sean Hannity compared Baldwin to a violent criminal.

O'Reilly quizzed guests about Rosie O'Donnell playing Wilma Flinstone in a cartoon movie, and made fun of her for saying that five Supreme Court justices are Catholic. He ended by saying that sixth graders were smart to watch his show, and giving a commercial plug for the companies that made his shirt and suit.

In other news, Michigan student was suspended for wearing a sticker that said 'I'm straight'. The other kids were wearing gay stickers, and I guess he was being disruptive.

Also, see how the Frisco paper reports a shopowner successfully defended himself against some armed robbers. The paper suggests that the owner is no better than the robbers.

Europeans consider paying organ donors

William Saletan writes:

Twice in the past two weeks, transplant experts from around the world have convened in Europe to discuss the emerging global market in human organs. Two maps presented at the meetings tell the story. One shows countries from which patients have traveled for organs in the past three years: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan. The other shows countries from which organs have been sold: China, Colombia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

The numbers on the maps add up to thousands. According to the World Health Organization, the annual tally of international kidney transactions is about 6,000. ...

Politicians have tried to rein in this market. The United States banned organ sales two decades ago. India did the same in 1994, and China followed last year. But when lives are at stake, rules get bent. To procure more organs, doctors have discarded brain-death standards, donor age limits and recipient health requirements. States have let transplant agencies put patients on life support, contrary to their living wills, to preserve their organs. ...

Some reformers think they can solve the organ shortage and tame the market by legalizing sales. Their latest proposal, presented at one of the European meetings last week by Arthur Matas of the University of Minnesota, is a single-payer system for organs. It is half-libertarian and half-socialist. On the one hand, Matas says markets for eggs and sperm are harmless, kidney purchases can save countries money and offering poor people cash for organs is no more coercive than offering them money to work in mines or join the army. On the other hand, he thinks the government can fix kidney prices and determine who gets them.

But studies reviewed at the meetings in Europe show that flooding the market with purchased organs reduces the incentive to donate.

I believe that reducing the incentive to donate would be a good thing. The organ donors are being exploited the most.

Defending Don Imus

I am still surprised at how few people defended Don Imus. Here is the original complaint about him. All he said was that the Rutgers players looked like hos. The context was that he watched the Rutgers-Tennessee girls basketball championship, and commented that the winning Tennessee team was cute while the Rutgers girls had tatoos and were "rough". I don't see why he was either racist or sexist, as he was merely expressing a sports fan's preference for one team of black girls over another.

This law blog reports that the European Union is criminalizing "condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide". Even academic historians can get into trouble. The policy seems self-defeating to me -- I tend to discount any story when the contrary point of view is forbidden. I also think that free speech should allow you to trivialize whatever you want to trivialize.

George writes:

What makes Imus a racist and a sexist is that he is a white man.

It is racist and sexist to punish a white man for things that others could say with approval.

Zuni v Dept of Education

A hotly contested US Supreme Court decision centered on the meaning of the word percentile. Breyer argues:

Finally, we draw reassurance from the fact that no group of statisticians, nor any individual statistician, has told us directly in briefs, or indirectly through citation, that the language before us cannot be read as we have read it. This circumstance is significant, for the statutory language is technical, and we are not statisticians. And the views of experts (or their absence) might help us understand (though not control our determination of) what Congress had in mind.

The upshot is that the language of the statute is broad enough to permit the Secretary's reading. That fact requires us to look beyond the language to determine whether the Secretary's interpretation is a reasonable, hence permissible, implementation of the statute. ... We consequently find the Secretary's method of calculation lawful.

This is a pretty ridiculous excuse for not using the literal meaning of the word.

Racial preferences in dating

John Tierney has some data on racial preferences in dating. One commenter said, "It is unthinkable that anyone would want to be with someone of the same race -- don’t they know about the power of genetic diversity?"

Unthinkable? It seems quite common to me. But Tierney actually has data saying that women have racial preferences and men don't. He says:

David predicted that black men are more likely to date white women than white men are to date black women — which is right, although not for the reason many people think. It’s not that white men are more reluctant to date non-whites; it’s that black women are less willing to date someone of another race.

News to me.

There are some wacky comments from those trying to be politically correct. One says, "How does this data work towards improving race relations? Does it not work to increase divide and suspicion?". Another says:

The biggest fallacy in this "research" on racial profiles and dating is that the experimental design is faulty. As a biologist, I will tell you that race is NOT A VALID criterion in taxonomy. For example. there is more genetic disimilarity between a two "white" guys sitting in a classroom side by side than the 'white' guy from New York and a "chinese" guy from Beijing. You might want to read the article in New York Times (April 5, 2007)which states that the difference between a Chihuahua and a Great Dane is one gene! So, how did the researchers decide who is Black, Hispanic and Asian? Why is Barack Obama considered "black"? Doesn't his mother (who is "white")get any credit for giving him 23 chromosomes when he was conceived?? Prof. S. K. Ballal?

So if I were getting a dog, Prof. Ballal would tell me that it is not meaningful to distinguish between a Chihuahua and a Great Dane.

Winning the vote

AP news:

Maryland officially became the first state on Tuesday to approve a plan to give its electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the candidate chosen by state voters.

A statistician striving for terminologically correctness attacks another aspect of this story, but I think that he jumped on the wrong phrase. The error in the article is saying that new plan is to award electoral votes to "the winner of the national popular vote". In fact, the plan is to give the electoral votes to the winner of a plurality of the national popular vote. When we say that the President has to win the electoral vote, that means that he has to win a majority of the electoral vote.

At Least Google Listens

From another blog:

Men talk to their search engines more than their girlfriends, work colleagues or even their families, research has claimed.

A poll conducted by MSN Search found that search engines are the first port of call for nearly half of men seeking advice. Family are consulted by a third, while partners are the sounding board of choice for only one in four men.

In comparison, the study into gender search patterns reveals that women still opt for more traditional advice options, with one in three rating family as their number one choice for help and information. ...

The problem may be the age old complaint about men "helping" when women have a problem. Men seek solutions, women seek empathy. Girlfriends don't offer solutions, Google does. Girlfriends offer consolation that men take as patronizing, Google offers information that can be used to overcome the problem. Girlfriends say "It's okay," Google gives you options for how to fix it.

Funny. That last comment was from a man, obviously. The (female) blogger says that maybe Google has better listening skills. Yeah, right.

Staying fat and single

Today's Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: I recently ended a nine-month relationship with a 40-year-old man I'll call Shallow Hal. I was head over heels in love with him. We had a lot in common and our personalities were compatible, but there was one major problem. Hal loved everything about me, but his love for me was contingent upon my losing weight. ...

For nine months Hal strung me along, and I believed that losing weight would change everything and we would end up together, happily ever after.

I am currently working on my master's in counseling psychology, and I should have known better. Clearly, Hal did not accept me for who I was, ...

Why do so many women like me waste so much time on men who simply don't care?

What she didn't do was to lose weight, and Dear Abby didn't advise her to. Abby said that it was more important for her to get a therapist to convince
her to be a contented fat woman than it is to please a man.

This is wacky. THe writer is better off losing weight than seeing a therapist.
Her boyfriend Hal told her what she needed to do. She is the one who strung him along by promising to lose weight.

Defining harassment

Princeton University says:

The University defines sexual harassment as unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when ... such verbal or physical conduct has the effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work, academic performance, or living conditions by creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.

Sexual harassment makes victims feel uncomfortable, hindering their ability to function in school, at work, or in social settings. Both men and women can be targets of sexual harassment, and it can occur between individuals of the same gender. Sexual harassment comes in many forms – it may be intentional or accidental, subtle or obvious.

No, that is not harassment. Harassment is repeatedly annoying someone for no legitimate purpose, over a prolonged period of time.

FIRE has info on other colleges trying to restrict free speech.

Girls Gone Wild maker to be jailed

LA Times reports:

A federal judge in Panama City, Fla., on Thursday ordered "Girls Gone Wild" founder Joe Francis jailed for contempt of court in a civil suit brought by seven young women who claimed the entrepreneur's film crews had placed them in sexually explicit situations.

Francis, the Santa Monica-based multimillionaire who has made a fortune selling risque videos of scantily clad coeds, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak to surrender to court by noon Thursday, but hadn't done so by mid-evening.

Francis told the Associated Press late Thursday that Smoak "had lost his mind."

"This judge has gone as far as to call me the devil and an evildoer," he said. "It is a case of a judge gone wild." ...

Smoak ordered Francis jailed if an accord had not been reached in the case by Saturday, but he suspended that order when it appeared that a deal had been struck.

At an emergency hearing Wednesday, a lawyer for the plaintiffs told the judge that he thought the case was resolved but then learned Francis had altered the offer, making it unacceptable to his clients.

I never heard of a defendant being jailed because he refused to agree to a settlement.

SF woman complains of bicycle attack

California news:

It was supposed to be a birthday night out for the kids in San Francisco, but instead turned into a Critical Mass horror show -- complete with a pummeled car, a smashed rear window and little children screaming in terror.

The spontaneous Critical Mass bike rides, in which thousands of free-spirited cyclists roam the city, have been a fixture on the last Friday night of the month since the early 1990s. ...

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando's 11-year-old daughter. ...

Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van.

Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides.

A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side.

"It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons", Ferrando said.

The trouble with Ferrando's story is that there are dozens of witnesses who say that she was a hit-and-run driver. Being from out-of-town and not expecting crowds of bicyclists does not give her the right to hit them with her van.

George writes:

What gives those bicyclists the right to decide that their bike ride is more important than car traffic? The Critical Mass bikers don't ride in single file, run traffic lights, and cause traffic jams.

And why is Ferrando's birthday celebration more important that the bike ride? The police could take measures to slow down the bikers, but that would just cause worse traffic jams.

Under Idaho law, a bicyclist may treat a stop sign like a yield sign, and a red stop light like a stop sign.

New H-1B invasion

VDARE reports and comments:

The rush by companies, particularly of the high-tech persuasion, to apply for H-1B visas has come to an end–only one day after it began.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Tuesday that it had received 150,000 applications as of Monday afternoon for the controversial work permits, which allow foreigners with a bachelor’s degree in their area of specialty to be employed in the United States for up to six years.

Now, what this is really about: there are 10,000,000 folks that apply to get into the US each year. A subset of those folks are willing to do are say anything to get US immigration rights-which are considerably more valuable than anything they can reasonably aspire to in their home companies. Bloated, corporate welfare cases like Microsoft, HP, Intel and Oracle depend on cheap guest worker visas so they can pay employees in immigration rights-rather than cash-and appear like viable companies.

Those spots should be auctioned off. The more an employer is paying for an H1-B visa, the more highly-skilled the worker in question is likely to be. IOW, we really will be getting those people with skills we can’t find here.

Auctioning off the visas is actually a good idea. Anytime we have a scarce resource, it is worthwhile finding out what firms are willing to pay. Companies that they are not just seeking cheap labor, but desperately filling jobs that no American can do. If so, then they should be willing to pay high prices for the visas, and an auction would help the feds make sure that the visas go to companies that really need them.

Update: I didn't think that there was any market data on what an H-1B is worth, but this article says:

We don’t really have "markets" in U.S. immigration rights. But India does. In the Indian dowry market, an Indian IT worker can expect the dowry from the bride's family to double when he acquires an H-1b visa (which also confers barely a 50% chance of attaining citizenship).

Schools drop Holocaust and Crusades

UK news:

Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging "charged" versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.

A report for the Department for Education and Skills found that a history department in a northern city had avoided selecting the Holocaust as a GCSE topic for fear of confronting "anti-semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial" among some Muslim pupils.

Another school decided to teach the Holocaust despite anti-semitic sentiment among students, but avoided the Crusades as "their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques".

They ought to be teaching that the Crusades saved European civilization.

Bad Kids? Train the Parents

A new study claims that parenting classes work:

Here’s an interesting paper from the British Medical Journal which argues that children’s anti-social behavior can be significantly altered by training their parents to be better parents. (And here is the BMJ’s editorial summary.)

The paper’s authors conducted a randomized study with 153 socially disadvantaged Welsh parents with children aged 3 or 4. Some of the parents were given a 12-week “intervention programme,” in which two professionals taught the parents how to reward, punish, and discipline their children. The control group of parents were wait-listed for this workshop.

The results showed that the children of the parents who took the workshop behaved significantly better afterward, at least in the short term.

These results aren't too surprising, but don't really prove that the classes are teaching anything useful. Maybe just inducing parents to reflect on what they are doing causes them to do better. It would be more interesting if someone did an experiment like this comparing different parenting theories.

Paranoid parents don't allow bicycles

An LA Times op-ed says:

"Haven't you heard about all of the predators in this area?" asked a father.

"No, I haven't," I said. "I think this is a pretty safe neighborhood."

"You'd be surprised," he replied, lowering his eyebrows. "You should read the Megan's Law website." He continued: "You know how to solve the traffic problem around this school? Get rid of all the predators. Then you won't have any more traffic."

The article describe how kids aren't allowed to ride bicycles anymore.

Don't-mess-with-Texas justice

Texas news:

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Darrell Roberson came home from a card game late one night to find his wife rolling around with another man in a pickup truck in the driveway.

Caught in the act with her lover, Tracy Denise Roberson -- thinking quickly, if not clearly -- cried rape, authorities say. Her husband pulled a gun and killed the other man with a shot to the head.

On Thursday, a grand jury handed up a manslaughter indictment against the wife, not the husband.

In a case likely to reinforce the state's reputation for don't-mess-with-Texas justice, the grand jury declined to charge the husband with murder, the charge on which he was arrested by police.

Wow, a woman might actually suffer an adverse consequence to making a false rape charge. Besides her lover getting shot, that is.

Boy caught using slang in email

UK news:

A father criticised a police force today for launching an investigation after his ten-year-old son allegedly called a schoolfriend "gay" in an email.

Company director Alan Rawlinson said he was astounded after two police officers arrived at his home in Bold Heath, Cheshire, to speak to his son George.

The officers were called earlier this month after a parent complained that George had called her son a "gay boy" in an email.

Mr Rawlinson, 41, said: "I could not believe what I was hearing when the officers told me.

"They told me they considered it a very serious offence, I thought they were joking at first. ...

"The use of the word gay would imply this is homophobic but we would be hard-pushed to say this is a homophobic crime."

I thought that "gay" was a preferred term.

Free infinite storage space

The Si Valley paper reports:

Yahoo's e-mail users currently get 1 gigabyte of storage, but that will start to change in May when the Sunnyvale-based company plans to gradually lift all space constraints. It will take several months before all of Yahoo's e-mail users have infinite storage space.

Yahoo just has to buy some infinite capacity disc drives.

Free-trade economist warns of coming disaster

John writes:

[Princeton economist Alan S.] Blinder estimates 30-40 million jobs are offshorable in the next 10-20years -- about one-fourth of our entire labor force. That's 10 times a published estimate ... quoted four years ago. Moreover, the jobs which Blinder lists as relatively safe from offshoring just happen to be the same types of lower-paid jobs that seem to be filled disproportionately by immigrants both legal and illegal.

Blinder says that the USA has an urgent need to retrain everyone, because the only safe jobs are for divorce lawyers and civil engineers.

Why feminism could be bad for your health

A UK paper reports:

For years, feminists have fought for equality, believing it is the key to a better society.

Now researchers have found that parity between the sexes may be bad for your health.

A study in Sweden, arguably one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, discovered that men and women who are equal are more likely to suffer illness or disability.

Those who earn the same are also more likely to become unwell or suffer a disability.

People who have management jobs, male or female, were also found to die younger than those with a less pressured lifestyle.

Scientists looked at both public and private sector workers. They used nine indicators of equality, including the proportion of men and women in management jobs and average income.

These were related to local figures for life expectancy, disability and absence from work through ill health. The study compared data from all of Sweden's 290 municipalities.

I'm not sure what this shows. It may just be that a real job is more stressful than being a housewife.

Gays mainly want dignity and respect

Prominent same-sex marriage advocate Dale Carpenter writes:

A legal reform that has given gay couples all of the rights and benefits of marriage under state law -- a change that would have been unthinkable a generation or two ago -- is now considered hurtful and degrading by the very people it benefits. ...

What I think this suggests is that for many gay couples the struggle for marriage is not only, or even primarily, a struggle for particular legal benefits. It is a struggle for equal dignity, recognition, legitimacy, and respect under the law. That is something only full marriage can provide because it is a relationship that families, friends, co-workers, and employers readily understand.

I think that he is correct. The fight for same-sex marriage has very little to do with legal rights and benefits. The real purpose is to force the public to respect homosexual lifestyles.

Unemployed homeowners

Tim Harford writes:

English economist Andrew Oswald has shown that across European countries, and across U.S. states, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment. More conventional factors such as generous welfare benefits or high levels of unionization don't explain unemployment nearly as well as the tendency to own houses. Renting your home and staying flexible do wonders for your chances of always finding an interesting job to do.

People say home ownership is a good thing, but it also has its drawbacks.

Chickenpox vaccine endangers adults

Here is some new CDC research:

BOSTON (Reuters) - Merck's chickenpox vaccine Varivax not only loses its effectiveness after a while, but it has also changed the profile of the disease in the population, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study confirmed what doctors widely knew -- that the vaccine's protection does not last long.

And with fewer natural cases of the disease going around, unvaccinated children or children in whom the first dose of the vaccine fails to work have been catching the highly contagious disease later in life, when the risk of severe complications is greater, they said.

"If you're unvaccinated and you get it later in life, there's a 20-times greater risk of dying compared to a child, and a 10 to 15 times greater chance of getting hospitalized," said Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who worked on the study.

The findings, reported fully for the first time in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, have already had an impact.

They helped prompt the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to recommend a booster shot between the ages of 4 and 6. The panel also said in its June 2006 report that children, adolescents and adults should be given boosters as well.

No one knows how long the effects of a second shot will last, said the research team, led by Sandra Chaves of the CDC.

I have spoken out against the chickenpox (varicella) vaccine mandate as one that is unnecessary and may be causing more harm than good. It is much better for people to get chickenpox as kids than adults, and the vaccine leaves adults without the immunity they need.

Feminism defined as equality

Conservapedia defines feminism

The University of Oklahoma offers "There are many definitions of what a feminist is--the simplest and probably the best is what is listed in most dictionaries—'a person who believes in the full equality of women and men.' ... The goal of feminism is equality ...

The source continued:

I guarantee you -- when men start being 50% of secretaries or 50% of fathers -- those careers will become much more valued.

The feminists want men to be 50% of fathers? Just what do they want the other 50% to be?

I think the author wanted 50% of stay-at-home parents to be men, or 50% of fathers to assume a mother's role, or something like that.

It is funny how feminist complaints center on asking men to do women's work. The jobs that are over 99% male (according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) are: loggers, car body repairers, cement masons, truck mechanics, power-line installers, tool and die makers, and roofers. Women can sign up for these jobs anytime they want.

I got this list from the March 12 San Jose Mercury News. I did not see the story online. The percentages were from 2006, with wage data from May 2005. The only job that was 99% female was dental hygienist. The dental hygienists have an annual median wage of $60,890, more than all of the above male occupations.

New report on California schools

The NY Times reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "Today’s studies show that no amount of money will improve our schools without needed education reform. We need to focus on critical school reform before any discussion about more resources."

California spends more than other states on education, about 60% of tax revenues. But it performs worse on test scores. Spending per student is not so high, because of the huge number of illegal alien kids, but the schools still have plenty of money.

Schwarzenegger is right.

NY Times attacks blog article

The NY Times published this AP story:

The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has suggested that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.

The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and one of the country’s evangelical leaders, posted the article on his personal Web site earlier this month.

Mr. Mohler said in the article that scientific research "points to some level of biological causation" for homosexuality.

Mohler has more comments here.

I am wondering why any of this is news. The opinions are completely innocuous. Somebody must have said something politically incorrect, but I'm not sure what. Apparently this is a subject where the slightest deviation from the approved lingo can get you in trouble.

A couple of days ago the Pentagon’s top general called homosexuality immoral, and he was immediately denounced by presidential candidates. But none of them was willing to express an opinion on whether homosexuality immoral or not. Apparently there are certain opinions about homosexuality that everyone is supposed to have, but you'd better not go into any detail.

Update: I guess the candidates had to consult some focus groups before giving an opinion:

WASHINGTON -- Homosexuality is not immoral, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama said Thursday -- after gay and lesbian Democrats pressured them to denounce Gen. Peter Pace's claim that same-sex relationships were wrong.

Over the previous 48 hours, Clinton and Obama had dodged reporters who asked them point-blank if homosexuality was immoral.

Tooth decay bacteria

The NY Times says that you can blame moms for tooth decay:

If the tooth decay bacterium spreads easily from person to person, any geographical pattern would soon be blurred. But Streptococcus mutans is transmitted almost entirely from mother to child, preserving its lineages over thousands of years. The bacteria apparently infect the infant during birth, beginning the work that provides the dentistry profession its livelihood. We’ve never seen father-to-child transmission," Dr. Caulfield said. Thanks, Mom.

Now that they have identified the bacteria, why can't they kill it?

Daylight saving time does not save energy

ABC reports:

Congress's logic was simple. If there's an extra hour of sunlight in the evening, people will turn on fewer lights. The Transportation Department once did a study saying daylight savings reduced America's use of oil by 100,000 barrels a day.

But Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who are working on their doctorates in economics, say the reduced need for light in the evening will likely be negated by the increased need in the early morning.

The folks in Washington apparently hadn't considered this. The daylight savings shift was a three-paragraph item in a 550-page energy bill in 2005. And that study from the Transportation Department? It's more than 30 years old.

Kellogg and Wolff came to their conclusion by studying Australia, where several states extended daylight-saving time (DST for short) by two months in 2000 to accommodate the Olympic Games in Sydney that year.

They compared electric demand in the state of Victoria, which extended DST, with its next-door neighbor, South Australia, which did not.

"Our results show that the extension failed to conserve electricity," they wrote.

It is amazing that there wasn't more analysis going into a change like this. My Win2000 computer and my satellite receiver had trouble with yesterday's shift.

Jury clears girl in suit over bike-skate crash

New Jersey news:

A Morris County civil jury deliberated just 15 minutes Monday before clearing a Chester Township teenager of negligence when she and a wealthy physician neighbor collided in 2003 while she was inline skating and he was bicycling. ...

The physician -- who earned $800,000 in 2004 and got $750,000 for half the sale of his former fertility practice -- also maintained that he deserved about $160,000 to cover income he lost recuperating from his injuries.

According to testimony, the doctor saw the girl skating ahead of him on Sugar Maple Row and paced her for about 400 feet before deciding to pass her. He said he rang his bell several times as he approached from behind and yelled "watch out" when she did not appear to hear him.

So a rich physician crashed into an 11-year-old girl from behind, and he sued her!

I wonder how much his occupation was a factor here. Apparently he was used to exploiting desperate women for obscene amounts of money. Most people would say that he was at fault for not watching where he was going.

Ethics of colleges spying on teenagers

Randy Cohen, the New York Times Magazine Ethicist, gives wacky advice to readers each week. Here is today's stupidity:

I interview high-school seniors who apply to my alma mater. I routinely Google these students and discovered that one posted information on his blog that reflects poorly on him. May I ask him about the blog? May I mention it to the university? Should it affect the score I give him? — Keith Lublin, West Bloomfield, Mich.

... You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly. Your reading this student’s blog is legal — he posted it voluntarily, and in that sense it is public information — but not every young person grasps this. Many unwisely regard their blogs as at least semiprivate. You should not exploit their youthful folly. ...

You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly. Your reading this student’s blog is legal — he posted it voluntarily, and in that sense it is public information — but not every young person grasps this. Many unwisely regard their blogs as at least semiprivate. You should not exploit their youthful folly. ...

UPDATE: Lublin checked with the university and was told not to ask the student about the blog but to include its URL with his report.

In essence, Cohen is saying that it is unethical to spy on the boy, but then endorses it anyway, and approves of secretly reporting on his snooping to the college that the boy might attend.

This is the worst possible answer. The boy has a right to know how he is being judged. He may have a good explanation for whatever is on the questionable web page, and the interview is the place to consider it, if it is to be considered at all.

I did my own googling, and apparently the college advocating the secret spying is the University of Michigan. It apparently also refused to be quoted for this despicable policy.

The Low-Fat Diet Flunks Another Test

A NY Times blog reports:

The federal government has determined that a low-fat diet is beneficial to your health. That’s why it’s been advising Americans for so long to cut back on fats. But scientists are obstinately refusing to get with the program.

The latest blow to the official wisdom comes from Stanford University researchers in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was described as the largest and longest comparison yet done of four popular diets, as Reuters reports :

The study randomly assigned a group of 311 overweight, post-menopausal, non-diabetic women one of the four diets. All attended weekly diet classes for eight weeks and were given books to follow. Their weight and metabolism were then checked for the following 10 months.

Another big medical study has shown benefits to a high-fat diet. For many years, supposed experts have been telling everyone that a low-fat diet is healthier, while the science says the opposite.

Common sense would seem to imply that you would eat a low-fat diet to lose fat. But if your physician tells you that, then you can conclude that he hasn't read any of the research for the last 40 years.

Math teacher on Libby jury

The TalkLeft readers are starting to worry about a hung jury in the Scooter Libby case:

Never, ever, ever let a mathematician on your jury. Drilled into my head by a now-deceased colleague "between spoons of soup" over our several years of collaboration.

Why? -- Because no case has everything fitting together like the proverbial Swiss watch or jigsaw puzzle. There is always a loose end, and mathematicians (and, to a lesser degree, engineers and other scientists) both abhor loose ends, and reject anything which contains one.

One of the jurors is a retired math teacher. The jury also has a lawyer, a banker, and some others that could have been rejected.

The latest jury question does not sound like it came from a math teacher. It doesn't sound like the juror is near a conviction either.

What Mohammedan female suicide bombers expect

Slate tries to answer:

If male martyrs can expect to find 72 virgin maidens in paradise when they die, what rewards can female suicide bombers expect?

It gives several answers, including this:

One of the inmates, Ayat Allah Kamil, 20, from Kabatya, told me why she had wanted to become a martyr: "Because of my religion. I'm very religious. For the holy war [jihad] there's no difference between men and women shaid [martyrs]."

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr "will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair".

I wonder what the Mohammedan leaders say about this.

Leftist blogs use more dirty words

Some bloggers are complaining that Ann Coulter used an offensive term as part of a joke to a conservative audience. It is funny how most of them are either unable or unwilling to say exactly why they are offended (if they really are offended).

The NewsBuckit did a comparison:

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to "dirty" language? ...

And this is what I found, using what I deemed ... to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. ...

So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

This study is not surprising. The Left does far more coarse name-calling than the Right.

Remember it was John Edwards who launched a bigoted gay-baiting attack on Cheney's family on national TV in 2004. Running mate John Kerry didn't disavow it; he followed it up with his own anti-gay attack on national TV. The entire Democrat Party applauded.

Single women do less housework

The UK BBC reports on a new study by UK labour economist Helene Couprie of Toulouse University:

And by examining information on more than 2,000 people, she concluded that on average, an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single.

Meanwhile the men, who do seven hours while living alone, do only five when they co-habit.

The findings are partly, Ms Couprie suggests, due to influences that people have grown up with - where traditionally women have taken on the lion's share of domestic tasks.

She says that as long as children see their parents stick to certain tasks, such trends become hard to change.

Ultimately, she adds, "it is the work of social evolution".

And evolution takes time, she insists - perhaps another 20 years for the situation to really change in terms of the division of labour.

Her conclusions don't really follow from her data. If she really wanted to test whether housework habits are really based on seeing a parental division of labor, she could have looked at people reared by single parents or who otherwise grew up seeing a different division of labor.

She also could have looked at male roomates, and at female roommates. My guess is that a woman with a female roommate will do more housework than a single woman. If so, memory of seeing parental role models could have nothing to do with it.

New Mexican domestic violence law

Mexico news, via Dr. Helen:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican men who display extreme jealousy or avoid sex with their wives could be tried in court and punished under a new law, the special prosecutor for crimes against women told a local newspaper on Friday.

Men who phone their wives every half hour to check up on them, constantly suspect them of infidelity or try to control the way they dress are committing the crime of jealousy, special prosecutor Alicia Elena Perez Duarte told Excelsior newspaper.

Those who stop talking to their wives, avoid sex or try to convince suspicious spouses they are "crazy" even if they are caught red-handed having an affair, are guilty of indifference, she said.

Men found guilty of jealousy or indifference could face up to five years in prison, the newspaper said. Mexico's individual states will determine the punishments, it said.

The progressive new law was passed this month to protect women from domestic violence. ...

Perez Duarte said indifference, jealousy or lack of love were crimes against women just as much as physical violence.

"Jealousy produces a particular type of stress in the person that comes up against it," she said. "It is exactly the same. They are wounds, psychological scars identical to physical scars."

I thought this was a joke, at first. I have ridiculed domestic violence law before, but this is beyond what I thought possible. She is saying that if a man avoids sex with his wife, then he has committed a crime of domestic violence just the same as if he had beaten her up. Amazing.

Here is another article:

President Felipe Calderon, sworn into office in December, backed the law despite fears among women's groups that he would not ratify it.

Some lawyers argue the law may bump up against constitutional guarantees in granting the Interior Ministry extra powers, for instance. And the definitions of gender-based violence are too broad, they say.

"To tell sexist jokes in a bar is misogynous conduct that often goes unpunished. Is that femicide?" said Luis de la Barreda, the former Mexico City rights ombudsman and now director of a citizen-based legal center.

Jokes are often unpunished? Just what is the usual punishment for telling a joke in a bar? Weird.

Most Research Findings Are False

The 2005 John P. A. Ioannidis paper Why Most Published Research Findings Are False became an instant cult classic, and now has a couple of follow-ups by others: But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way and When Should Potentially False Research Findings Be Considered Acceptable?

These articles are particularly important for understanding medical studies that seem to have practical significance.