Feminists gripe about double standards

The feministing blog has a long list of gripes about sexist double-standards. Here are a few:

My personal favorite is when people say the phrase, "you guys." It's just infuriating that many describe it as a gender-neutral phrase, when "you all" or "y'all" work just as well.

I'm an amateur weightlifter. The general philosophy at the gym is "no pain, no gain." As most of us know, pain is not pretty. I've had a few people comment on how I never smile, that I look too aggressive/angry when I lift.

The avowed feminist career woman and single mother who turns into a stay-at-home mom upon marriage, and, when divorced, demands alimony to maintain her lifestyle while only working part time. This has happened to three friends. For some reason, these women, all in their mid to late forties, can demand equal rights without assuming equal economic responsibility.

One of the double standards that I hate the most is the distressing difference in the clothing that is marketed towards girl infants when compared with boy infants.

How about engagement rings? Two people decide to get married, but only one of them is marked as "taken"?

However, the young, female clergywoman is NOT considered generally a catch, especially if she's trying to do something not involving child-care or youth groups. If she's trying to actually be the preacher, to represent the church, etc. dating is extremely hard.

1) double standards that I internalize and make me unhappy every day. ..., the absolute worst is the gender and appearance double standard. I totally have a type of people that I think are attractive, and they really are not anything like the convential beauty standard. But I continue to judge myself by that convential standard! Which sucks. And then on top of that, when guys are not considered conventially attractive, they have full permission to ask out whoever they want!

It seems like only white women who are capable and career-driven are being asked to stay home and be mothers, while single, poor, uneducated minority women living on government assistance are being asked to actually leave the home and their children (God forbid!) to pursue a career. I ...just ...don't ...get it.

The blogger writing a book.

Richardson says it is a choice, or not

At the Democrat debate:

Perhaps the most surprising moment of the night came when Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, causing a visible stir in the audience, replied to a questions about whether he believed being gay was a biological fact or a personal choice.

"It’s a choice," Mr. Richardson said, a view that is contrary to the position of many gay rights advocates. He added, "I don’t like to answer definitions like that that are perhaps grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand."

Richardson had to backtrack:

"Let me be clear — I do not believe that sexual orientation or gender identity happen by choice," Mr. Richardson said in the statement. "But I’m not a scientist, and the point I was trying to make is that no matter how it happens, we are all equal and should be treated that way under the law."

Richardson does appear far too inept politically to be President, but his comments here are not totally stupid. It is entirely possible that homosexuality is a choice, that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that the questions are properly answered by choosing some definitions and doing a scientific study. The term homosexuality usually refers to behavior, and there is certainly some choice about it. The term "sexual orientation" was concocted to reflect a part of human nature that is not a choice.

It is the gay rights advocates who want their personal views to supersede science. If there were some scientific proof that homosexuality is not a choice, then they could just cite the scientific papers.

The is a similar controversy over whether obesity is a choice. Just in the last week, NewScientist reported that kids can get fat because a leptin deficiency gives them a food addiction. A New England Journal of Medicine article claims that obesity is contagious. This latter paper is so goofy that it has to have a glossary of its own jargon:

Ego: The person whose behavior is being analyzed.
Alter: A person connected to the ego who may influence the behavior of the ego....
Induction: The spread of a behavior or trait from one person to another.

I wonder what these politicians would say if asked whether being fat is a choice.

Needing a wife

The NY Times reports:

Married men and women, on average, earn more than those who are unmarried, with part of that possibly attributed to career and wage advancement as workers mature (and are more likely to be married). But the gap is significantly larger for men than for women. Married women make an average 17 percent more than unmarried women, according to 2005 B.L.S. data on the median earnings of full-time workers, while married men make 42 percent more than unmarried men.

A more statistically rigorous analysis published in 2004, using the Minnesota Twins Registry, tried to isolate the effect of marriage on earnings. It found that holding education and genetics constant, married male twins made 26 percent more than their unmarried brothers.

It is not as clear what effect marriage has on women's careers and earnings, but having children is, over all, an impediment. "There's a well-documented motherhood penalty: women with children are paid less than women without children," controlling for other factors, said Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist and author of "Competing Devotions," a study of executive women who kept working versus ones who discontinued their careers.

Fathers, however, are not similarly disadvantaged and might even benefit at the workplace from being parents, according to more than one study, including one published in March in The American Journal of Sociology.

No, these studies don't control for the other factors. (And no, the "Minnesota Twins" are not baseball players.) Maybe married men make more than single women because women would rather marry a man with a high earnings potential. Or the men work harder to support their families. Or the wives nag their husbands to earn more.

The article suggests that married men get more domestic support from their wives, than working women get from their husbands. But the studies don't distinguish housework that wives to support their husbands, from housework the wives do for their own purposes. The article quotes a husband saying, "I assume most bachelors don’t worry about how clean their houses are." If so, then those men aren't getting much benefit from housecleaning. The wives are doing it for their own satisfaction.

Kolata disputes sex studies

Noted NY Times science reporter Gina Kolata writes:

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. ...

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. ...

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

It is about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

No, there is no logical contradiction. It is quite plausible that men have a higher median number of sex partners, as I've discussed here. It can be explained by a small number of women having a lot of sex partner. That is, most men have more sex partners than most women, but a few slut outdo everyone by a wide margin. That's the way it is with the people I know, anyway.

Kolata gives the explanation that men exaggerate while women minimize their misbehavior. But she ignores other possible explanations, such as men having a different definition from women. These surveys don't usually define a sex act or sex partner, and people really do have different definitions.

Update: A reader cites this:

Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives, reveals a new study. ...

Women change their answers depending on whether or not they believe they will be caught out not telling the truth, the researchers found. The number of sexual partners a woman reported nearly doubled when women thought they were hooked up to a lie detector machine.

The reader also gives an example where the median can be different from the mean. A small number of sluts can increase the averages, and increase the median for men, but not affect the measured median for women. But Kolata says:

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just "reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females."

The suggestion here is that the study authors are publishing inconsistent data, and failing to even notice that the problem. But that is just not true about the govt study cited above. Here is the USA CDC study. This AP story on it even has a correction:

(This version CORRECTS that figures for lifetime sexual partners were median figures, not averages.)

Now Kolata and Gale should issue a correction because the CDC study measured the median, and it probably is true that men have a higher median number of sex partners than women.

I mentioned this CDC study before here. Justoneminute makes a similar point, and gives a nice explanation as why median and mean are different in this case.

Germinal movement to abolish the Electoral College

The NY Times reports:

Further, there is a germinal movement to effectively abolish the Electoral College, awarding the White House instead to the winner of the national popular vote. Maryland recently became the first state to have such legislation passed and then signed into law, although legislatures in several other states have passed similar measures.

No, that is not correct. The proposal is not to award the White House to the winner of the national popular vote, but to whoever gains a plurality of the popular vote. If the proposal is adopted, it will make it less likely that the President will have won the popular vote.

Baby videos may hinder infant language development

Univ of Wash. research:

Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby."

Rather than helping babies, the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. The study was published today in the Journal of Pediatrics.

"The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and there is some suggestion of harm," said Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a UW associate professor of health services. "The bottom line is the more a child watches baby DVDs and videos the bigger the effect. The amount of viewing does matter."

Co-authors of the study are Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrics researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and a UW professor of pediatrics, and Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

The paper is part of a larger project looking at the trajectory of media viewing in the first two years of life and examining the content of what is being watched and its effects on young children. A paper published last spring by the same researchers showed that by 3 months of age 40 percent of infants are regular viewers of television, DVDs or videos and by the age of 2 this number jumps to 90 percent.

For both papers, the researchers conducted random telephone interviews with more than 1,000 families in Minnesota and Washington with a child born in the previous two years. Television, DVD and video viewing were divided into four categories: baby DVDs and videos; educational TV programs, DVDs and videos such as "Sesame Street, "Arthur" and "Blue's Clues"; children's non-educational television shows and movies such as "Sponge Bob Square Pants," "Bob the Builder" and "Toy Story," and adult television such as "The Simpsons," "Oprah," and sports programming.

The researchers found no positive or negative effects on infants of either age group from viewing educational and non-educational media or adult television programs.

I never used the Baby Einstein stuff. I am not surprised that studies would show them to be worthless. But I don't think that it follows that all TV is harmful at this age. My guess is that an hour or so of the right TV shows could be beneficial to one-year-olds.

Kids like McDonalds food

NewScientist reports:

Dina Borzekowski at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and her colleagues asked 63 preschoolers, aged three to five, to sample two meals, each consisting of a chicken nugget, a quarter of a hamburger, french fries, two baby carrots and a small cup of milk.

Although both meals came from a local McDonalds, only one of them appeared in its original packaging. Researchers presented items from the other meal in plain wrappers, which lacked the company's distinctive logo.

In most cases children said they tasted a difference between the two meals, and they overwhelmingly preferred the McDonalds-branded foods.

So little kids can be manipulated. I'd like to see this studied with adults.

Grownups seem more irrational about food branding than kids, to me. People will think that food is good just because it is expensive, or was served in a fancy restaurant, or is marketed to those with sophisticated tastes.

Other claims that Barry Bonds cheated

Michael Witte adds to the claims that Barry Bonds cheated:

Beyond his alleged steroid use, Barry Bonds is guilty of the use of something that confers extraordinarily unfair mechanical advantage: the "armor" that he wears on his right elbow. Amid the press frenzy over Bonds’ unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed.

This is unfortunate, because by my estimate, Bonds' front arm "armor" may have contributed no fewer than 75 to 100 home runs to his already steroid-questionable total.

Others complain that Bonds uses a black maple bat, while baseball players have traditionally used ash bats.

All this is supposed to help explain the seemingly improbably fact that Bonds had his best hitting year at age 37. But is that even so improbable? By one well-regarded measure, Ted Williams had the 9th best year anyone that anyone ever had at age 38, and Hank Aaron had his best year at age 37.

I think that Bonds just outsmarted everyone. When he was younger, he was a golden glove fielder and a base-stealing champ. As he slowed down, he decided to concentrate on power hitting. He lifted weights in the gym for four hours every day. He gained about 50 pounds. He stopped trying to hit to the opposite field. He used the BALCO drugs (the cream and the clear) at a time when they were not banned. He testified that he didn't know that they were steroids, and that ought to be defensible because no one else knew that they were steroids either. He used a maple bat and a bulky elbow guard.

Bonds is the greatest home run hitter ever. He is far greater than Aaron. He is breaking the career record in the face of more adverse public pressure than any athlete I can think of. If his performance was helped by his own ingenuity, so much the better for him.

Mandatory arrest is killing people

The NY Times reports:

TWO decades ago, in an effort to curb domestic violence, states began passing “mandatory arrest” laws. Police officers responding to a call for help would no longer need to determine whether one person was truly violent or out of control; every time someone reported abuse, the police would simply be required to make an arrest. ...

But 20 years later, it seems the mandatory arrest laws are having an unintended, deadly side effect. The number of murders committed by intimate partners is now significantly higher in states with mandatory arrest laws than it is in other states.

I don't think that this should be called an "unintended" consequence. The law essentially says that you cannot call the cops to just break up a fight and not arrest anyone. Every time these laws get debated, someone always points out that if it is impossible to call the cops to just break up a fight, then it is a predictable consequence that the law will deter some people
from calling the cops.

The law should be obviously foolish anyway. 22 states must have legislatures that think that cops should spend their time going around busting up marriages.

Anti-nuclear paranoia

Paul Josephson writes:

Since the 1950s, the nuclear industry has promised energy "too cheap to meter," inherently safe reactors and immediate cleanup and storage of hazardous waste. ... Thankfully, after public protests, the federal government did not approve Consolidated Edison's 1962 request to build a reactor in Queens, N.Y., three miles from the United Nations.

Maybe some of those protesters didn't want the UN to get any more power!

Nuclear energy never got too cheap to meter, but it did become the safest and cheapest source of huge amounts of electricity. The only thing more efficient is the gas electricity/heat cogeneration plants, in areas that can use them. Unfortunately, nuclear power is made more expensive by excessive costly regulation, and the fossil fuel plants get subsidies and avoid paying carbon and pollution externalities.

Why physicians make more money

This NY Times article:

Doctors in the United States earn two to three times as much as they do in other industrialized countries. Surveys by medical-practice management groups show that American doctors make an average of $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Primary care doctors and pediatricians make less, between $125,000 and $200,000, but in specialties like radiology, physicians can take home $400,000 or more.

In Europe, however, doctors made $60,000 to $120,000 in 2002, according to a survey sponsored by the British government in 2004.

prompted some letters, including this:

American doctors make more, in part, to offset the astronomical cost of medical school. Medical students now graduate with an average of $130,000 in academic debt from undergraduate and professional school.

No, American physicians do not make one extra dime to offset their debts. Once they get out of school, they are subject to market forces. Those with debt compete against those without debt. Their employers pay them market rates, whether they have debt or not. Radiologists manage to make a lot more than pediatricians, but debt has nothing to do with it.

The causality is the other way. Medical students are willing to incur large debts because they know that they can easily pay them off later.

Obesity is contagious

Fumento explains:

The basic premise of obesity as contagion is simple: The more something becomes prevalent, the more it becomes acceptable and the more of it you get. In a vicious cycle, more divorces begat more divorces, more unwed pregnancies begat more unwed pregnancies, more tattoos and piercings begat more self-mutilation (er, "body art") and so on. Obesity isn't just a physiological problem of too many calories in and too few out; it's a long-term social problem.

I am wondering if stupidity is contagious.

Study attacks abstinence education

The UK BBC reports:

Sex abstinence programmes do not stop risky sexual behaviour or help in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy, a research team has concluded.

The Oxford University team reviewed 13 US trials involving over 15,000 people aged 10 to 21.

They found abstinence programmes had no negative or positive impact on the rates of sex infections or unprotected sex, the British Medical Journal said. ...

The latest study, which included trials comparing young people attending abstinence-only programmes against those receiving no sex education, raises questions over whether they work in developed countries.

Researchers found none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies.

Actually the study also compared against regular sex eduction programs, and even "safer sex" programs, and found no difference in effectiveness. While this study will be used as evidence against abstinence sex education, it does not give any evidence in favor of safer sex education. Maybe they are all a big waste of money.

Smarter people have less sex

The study on the 237 reasons people have sexual relations has gotten a lot of publicity, but it missed a few reasons, such as low IQ. GNXP has theories for why smarter people have less sex:

One reason we might guess that smarter people in high school, or in more challenging colleges or majors, delay their sexual debuts is because they are delaying gratification in expectation of future reward. Sexual behavior (or at least the investment needed to procure a partner or sustain one) may compete with time/resources required for other goals, and intelligent people may have more demanding goals. ...

Another idea is that smarter people are more risk averse, and delaying these activities is a byproduct of enhanced concerns about unwanted pregnancy and disease. While not avoiding sexual behaviors, per se, they are just less likely to seek it out or consent to it for fear of the potential consequences.

Another idea is that smarter people are more religious or more ethically conservative, and are trying harder to wait for marriage to have sex.

Another idea, consistent with popular media portrayals of geeks and nerds (males at least), is that intelligent people actually want to have sex, but are simply less likely or unable to obtain willing partners because they are disproportionately viewed as unattractive or undesirable as partners.

Another idea is that intelligent people have lower general sex drives. This shouldn't be confused with the first theory, where their sex drives would be normal and they have greater self-restraint.

Apparently more research is needed.

Who’s Minding the Mind?

The NY Science Times reports:

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm. ...

In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.

The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent.

More than previously known? Conventional wisdom favors unconscious and subconscious explanations for all sorts of things that have never been scientifically shown. The evidence in the article is rather meager, and I'm not sure any of it has been replicated.

Learn math to learn science

USA Today reports:

Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Robert H. Tai of the University of Virginia surveyed 8,474 students taking introductory science courses at 63 U.S. colleges and universities. Their findings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science. ...

Using a scale of 0-to-100 points, Sadler and Tai found that every year of high school math a student took added 1.86 points to their grade in college chemistry. Taking chemistry in high school added 1.72 points to the college grade, but taking biology or physics in high school had no significant impact on the college chemistry grade.

Likewise, students taking college biology got a 1.84 point boost for each year of high school math. Taking high school biology got them an extra 1.35 points, but high school chemistry and physics had no significant effect.

And for physics, each year of high school math added 1.28 points, high school physics gave a 1.32 point boost, while high school biology and chemistry had no impact.

In other words, if you want to be a scientist, then study as much math as you can. You can learn science in college.

Update: A reader points out that maybe taking high school math and getting good college science grades are just both symptoms of a hardworking overachiever.

Freakonomics and Freedomnomics

I enjoyed the Freakonomics book, and now just just got its rival, Freedomnomics. Freakonomics is based on the work of hot-shot economist Steve Levitt, who is mainly famous for the theory that legalized abortion reduces crime. Freedomnomics is written by John Lott, who is best known for his study showing that guns deter crime.

Both Levitt and Lott have had their embarrassments. Levitt had to admit that his abortion study had a critical coding error that made the abortion/crime effect seem much larger. Lott once lost some data with a hard disc crash.

Levitt trashed Lott in his book and elsewhere, and now Levitt has had to retract some of what he said. Levitt put down a Lott article as not being peer-reviewed, when in fact it was and Levitt himself was one of the reviewers!

Update: Sailer has more info.

Update: Here is more on the abortion-crime dispute:

Further, in 2005, The Economist magazine reported that two economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston determined that the Levitt-Donohue study was filled with statistical errors. The magazine opined, "To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect, quite another."

Levitt was traveling this week and deferred comment to Donohue.

In a written statement, Donohue did not comment on either study. He instead raised questions concerning Lott's research methods and said, "I am a social scientist, however, so Lott's behavior has in my mind, put him outside the bounds of scientific discourse."

I think that it is a little strange that Levitt uses a spokesman to make a personal attack on Lott, instead of just defending his own research.

Rise of hedge funds

I thought that big company CEOs were overpaid, but read this:

A study by Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh finds that it's not corporate honchos who are filling up the ranks of the filthy rich. It's hedge fund managers. Or, as Kaplan and Rauh put it, "the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined." The hedge fund guys are profiting not because there's been a shift in social norms favoring the mega-rich. It's just that a few superstars are now handling so much capital.

This New Yorker article says that the hedge funds are making their managers rich, but the funds aren't necessarily doing that well for investors.

Update: Here is an example of a hedge fund doing badly. The Harvard endowment invested $500 million in Sowood's Alpha hedge fund, and the fund lost most of its value just in the last month.

Explaining Ohio domestic violence

The Ohio supreme court has dismissed a domestic violence indictment because of Ohio's Defense of Marriage Amendment. I expect the gay lobby to soon be arguing that resistance to same-sex marriage is allowing men to beat their girlfriends in Ohio.

Assault and battery are still crimes in Ohio, just as they are elsewhere. What is really peculiar about the law in Ohio and some other states is that the domestic violence lobby has convinced them to punish spousal battery more severely than stranger battery. I think that the idea is that betrayal by a spouse is somehow worse than being attacked by a stranger.

I don't really agree with the premises behind these domestic violence laws, but if you accept them, then the Ohio court ruling is not surprising. The court is merely saying that if the greater penalty is based on the partners being married, then the law requires that they really be married before that greater penalty is applied.

This court ruling is not an unintended consequence. It is merely distinguishing those who are married from those who aren't, and that is apparently what the people of Ohio wanted to do.

NASA doesn't think Moon landing was a hoax

Here is an interview with the head of NASA:

Question: I live about 200 miles down southeast of here, at the home of slapstick living and most of the folks down there are convinced that the Moon landing were a hoax, and wrestling’s real. [Laughter] Do you have any ideas on how to speak to these people?

Griffin: I don’t. [Laughter] [Applause] I mean, what can we say? I mean, all the guys who were still alive and a couple of the ones who are not have all become personal friends of mine, and in the intervening decades. I don't think they're lying to me. I just don’t. I don’t know what to tell people who say the Moon landings were a hoax.

Weak answer. He doesn't think that the astronauts are lying?! And how is he making friend with dead astronauts anyway?

Bad mom sues rink for neglecting her delinquent son

Here is a silly lawsuit:

Van Dusen is the mother of the notorious 10-year-old involved in the Amherst Pepsi Center dispute. Charles Schmidl and his 5-year-old son were at the center for a mid-April skate when, he said, the 10-year-old taunted him, shot hockey pucks at him and his son and dared him to do something about it.

Schmidl, a 38-year-old autoworker, said he searched for 40 minutes in vain for staff, security or the boy's parents before taking matters into his own hands. He dragged the obnoxious kid off the ice, at which point Charlene Van Dusen appeared and had him arrested.

Amherst cops say witness accounts largely confirm Schmidl's story. They also say the 10-year-old has a history of trouble at the rink and that his family is "familiar" to Amherst police, and not for the right reasons. ...

The plot thickened Friday, with the news that Van Dusen -- mother of the wayward kid -- intends to sue the Town of Amherst and its Recreation Department. She claims that the lack of supervision at the rink resulted in "physical injuries and emotional trauma" to her son.

Essentially, Van Dusen is suing the town for not doing her job.

Too bad no one is allowed to drag the mom out of town.

Companies cannot give H-1B numbers

A letter in today's Si Valley paper says:

H-1B visas driven by desire, not need

It is often stated that this nation is in dire need of highly skilled foreign workers. How would we know that? A recent article in the Mercury News (Page 1A, July 15) interviewed a number of people regarding H-1B visas. Among them were representatives for Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Interestingly, none of them were able to state the number of visas needed. State and federal representatives were just as ill-informed.

Filing multiple visa applications for the same position or applying for an over-estimated number of visas suggests that the companies first get as many H-1B visa employees as they can and then fill the rest with the locals. Perhaps this is not the way the program should be used.

Zoltan Lukman
Santa Clara

He's right. The companies just want cheap labor. If the foreigners were really filling a labor shortage, then the jobs would go unfilled when the H-1B quotas are filled. But no, the companies are always able to hire local engineers when they cannot get the H-1B visas.

Why do they hate us?

Pakistani-American Mohsin Hamid tries to explain:

The residue of U.S. foreign policy coats much of the world. It is the other part of the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" Simply because America has -- often for what seemed good reasons at the time -- intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, walked away.

In other words, they hate us because we are not more imperialist in imposing our values on Third World countries. They realize that they'd be better off if America ruled the world.

Checkers is mostly solved

The NY Times reports:

Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, set out on his checkers-playing quest in 1989, aiming to write software that could challenge the world checkers champion. He and his colleagues finished their computations 18 years later, in April.

"From my point of view, thank god it's over," Dr. Schaeffer said.

Even with the advances in computers over the past two decades, it is still impossible, in practical terms, to compute moves for all 500 billion billion board positions. Instead, the researchers took the usual starting position and then looked only at the positions that would occur during the normal course of play.

"It's a computational proof," Dr. Schaeffer said. "It's certainly not a formal mathematical proof."

Then it is not a proof at all. A proper computational proof would have examined all the possibilities, and proved that those really were all the possibilities. It appears that Schaeffer just computed end-game scenarios for some list of likely positions, and didn't prove anything at all about the other positions.

That is not a proof.

Here is another description of what they did:

The Alberta researchers exhaustively checked the final stages of play for any arrangement of 10 pieces or less, identifying which of the 3.9 x 10¹³ positions won, lost or drew.

Next they identified 19 representative opening sequences and searched through subsequent moves for the easiest-to-find connections to final positions—win, lose or draw. To save time, they ignored pointless back-and-forth moves or those that did not turn a draw into a win.

This doesn't sound like a proof to me.

German language is dying

Stefan Klein complains that the German language is on the verge of atrophy among scientists:

By now, English is the sole language used in lectures in 250 out of 1,976 advanced educational fields in Germany ("master's degree" programs). Should this development continue, it would mean certain death for German as a language of research.

German scientists speaking in Germany at a German conference to a mostly German audience will usually speak in English. He also complains about the difficulty in translating concepts like the "long-distance ghostly effect".

The trend is inevitable. English is the world's standard language.

America No Longer Tallest Country in the World

AP reports:

America used to be the tallest country in the world. From the days of the founding fathers right on through the industrial revolution and two world wars, Americans literally towered over other nations. ... But just as it has in so many other arenas, America's predominance in height has faded. ...

And those height differences translate into real benefits. A number of studies have shown that disease and malnutrition early in life -- the same things that limit a person's height -- increase a person's chances of developing heart disease and other life-shortening conditions later on. Though tall people are more likely to get cancer, they suffer less mortality overall than short people.

International statistics bear it out. Life expectancy in the Netherlands is 79.11 years; in Sweden it's 80.63. America's life expectancy of 78.00 years puts it in somewhat shorter company, just above Cyprus and a few notches below Bosnia-Herzegovina. ...

"American children might consume more meals prepared outside of the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density and low in essential micronutrients," wrote Komlos and co-author Benjamin E. Lauderdale of Princeton University. "Furthermore, the European welfare states provide a more comprehensive social safety net including universal health care coverage."

In the United States, by comparison, an estimated 9 million children have no health insurance.

See also this 2004 New Yorker article, and this 2006 Komlos-Lauderdale paper, and this 2007 paper.

This is being used as an argument for socialized medicine.

The obvious explanation is that the USA has had massive Mexican and Oriental immigration. The study authors don't control for this directly, but have an argument that it is not the explanation. Besides, they argue, except for African pygmies, any population can grow as tall as any other.

I am not convinced. Some European countries have longer life expectancies also, but it is not necessarily because of better diets or better health care. The Dutch used to be shorter that other Euros, and now they are taller, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with health care.

Poll shows liberals want to censor political web sites

A Rasmussen Poll reports:

Americans are evenly divided as to whether or not the government should "require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary." The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 41% favor that proposal and 41% are opposed. The concept, known as the "Fairness Doctrine" in legislative circles, has been gaining ground on Capitol Hill ever since public opposition forced the Senate to back down on the immigration issue.

Immigration? The immigration bill failed when the Democrats who control Congress failed to cut off debate on the subject. They tried to get a vote with no debate, and their plan was ruined by a public debate on radio and elsewhere.

An interesting dynamic of the public debate is that liberals are more supportive of the "Fairness Doctrine" than conservatives. ... A separate survey found that the general public tends to believe that major broadcast networks have a liberal bias. ... Even those who are politically liberal are more likely to see the New York Times as biased in favor of liberals than conservatives.

So this liberal push for "fairness" appears to be driven by an attempt to censor opposing viewpoints. Here is the real kicker:

A large segment of the public would like to extend the concept of the Fairness Doctrine to the Internet as well. Thirty-four percent (34%) believe the government should "require web sites that offer political commentary to present opposing viewpoints." Fifty percent (50%) are opposed.

Wow. These folks really want the govt to censor the political content of web pages?! How would that even work?

Origin of the zero

SciAm magazine reports:

The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth. Zero reached western Europe in the 12th century.

There was no year zero. The year 1 BC was followed by the year 1 AD. That is because the zero had not been invented yet. So when was it invented? It turns out that, as far as we know, it could have been invented in what would have been the year zero!

Decline of civilization

Pat Buchanan on McLaughlin Group today says:

The rise of women to power in a civilization is very often the mark of its decline.

Eleanor Clift is flabbergasted.

Ten pop psychology theories

Sailor recommends a fun pop psychology article with theories for:

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce

Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Some of this sounds bogus to me, but the theories are amusing anyway.

Spinning US Census data

WSJ reports:

Census demographer Martin O’Connell explained that the survey results are weighted by age, race and gender. If a 26-year-old black man is married to a 35-year-old white woman, and if 26-year-olds and blacks are underrepresented in the survey sample, then his interview may be weighted more heavily than hers. "There's no final step to make sure the number of husbands and wives is exactly equal," Mr. O’Connell told me. "If we did that, we would have to reweight the data again, and the data would endlessly spin around.” Nonetheless, he says of the American Community Survey numbers, "They are the best numbers you will ever get, any place."

They are already spinning the data.

There was some controversy over whether the 2000 Census should weight the data for Congressional apportionment. As you can see, spinning the data has some adverse consequences that are subject to political manipulation.

Females bear grudges

The John Horgan George Johnson video blog has good commentary on current scientific news. Among other things:

Females bear grudges more than males. My pet theory attributed this to boys playing team sports, but Horgan says that the same thing has been observed in monkeys, chimps, and bonobos.

The new studies are puzzling, and the old ones on things like the Flynn Effect still have no good explanation.

Evolution by natural selection is a tautology. There won't be any more paradigm shifts because evolution can absorb any truths that might be discovered.

Mindreading terrorists

Security technology writer Bruce Schneier writes:

the theory says that people infer the motives of an actor based on the consequences of the action. So people assume that the motives of a terrorist are wanton death and destruction, and not the stated aims of the terrorist group ... This certainly explains a great deal about the U.S.'s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Many people -- along with our politicians and press -- believe that al Qaeda terrorism is different, and they're just out to kill us all.

The question is whether we should judge al Qaeda terrorists by what they say or what they do. The cited paper says that terrorists are ineffective because governments ignore the stated wishes of the terrorists. (Here is a sample of what al Qaeda says.)

I don't believe in mindreading, and I don't believe in assuming that the stated goals of a bunch of terrorists are their real goals. Why believe that a bunch of terrorists are telling the truth? If they are willing to murder innocent civilians to advance their agenda, then they are surely also capable of lying.

If ignoring the stated goals of the terrorists is causing them to be ineffective, then so much the better. Schneier seems to be arguing that this means that we are wrong about al Qaeda, but as I see it, it implies that we are right.

Bomb ended the war

AP Tokyo reports:

The Japanese defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, came under fire for saying the US atomic bombings of Japan during the second world war were inevitable. In a speech on Saturday, Mr Kyuma said: "I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped."

He stated the obvious. Not only did the atomic bomb end the war, it saved millions of lives, kept Japan from Soviet domination, and helped keep the peace for 50 years.

Dubious rape case

Here is news from a local rape trial:

Two women who knew Michael McClish testified Monday, June 25, that the Ben Lomond resident had pinned each of them to his bed but didn't do anything sexual in either incident. McClish isn't charged with any crimes related to those incidents. ...

The Press-Banner has a policy against naming the reported victims of sex crimes and domestic violence. In this case, we also are not naming the reported victim's relatives, because that would point to her identity.

These two women were not claiming to be victims of sex crimes; they were just public witnesses participating in a character assassination. Their testimony should not have been even considered relevant to the case.

The rape case seems very weak:

In the second week of the trial, the victim testified that she had an 18-month affair with McClish, often meeting him for consensual sex at a location on Old County Road in Ben Lomond that they called "up top."

One day she called McClish at home because of car trouble, she said. When he showed up and her car started, she said, they went to "up top." That was where he reportedly raped and sodomized her, dangled her off a cliff and threatened her with a hatchet.

Afterward, both returned to McClish’s house, and she didn't mention the incident to McClish's wife, she said. She also said she participated in family activities with the McClishes, including a trip to Disneyland after the alleged incident. Also after the incident, she said, she left her daughter with Melissa McClish for child care.

Note that the paper calls the accuser a "victim", even thoough no crime has been proved.

Here is the real reason for the prosecution:

She never reported the alleged incident to authorities. The Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office arrested McClish only after detectives, questioning market employees about the disappearance and killing of market cashier Joanna "Asha" Veil nine months ago, heard her story.

You can figure that the case is bogus when you see stuff like this:

Also Monday, an expert on "intimate-partner battery" -- the present term for what used to be called battered-woman syndrome -- told the nine-man, three-woman jury that victims of sexual assaults often are unable to remember clearly what happened and frequently stay with their abusers.

If they think that McClish is a murderer, then they should try him for murder. The rape charge is ridiculous. I don't believe that women goto Disneyland with their rapists, no matter what the so-called experts say.

Update (July 6): The verdict just came in:

After deliberating for just over two days, a jury of eight men and four women found Michael McClish guilty today of one count of rape, two counts of sodomy, assault with a deadly weapon and threatening the life of a woman he was having an affair with two years ago.

McClish, of Ben Lomond, was arrested in September and has been held in County Jail since his arrest. His bail remains at $1.5 million tonight.

He faces life in prison. Sentencing is set for August 3.

McClish had an 18-month affair with the woman, a 30-year-old Aptos resident he met when they both worked at the Ben Lomond Market. He hid the affair, one of four he had during his 9-year marriage, from his wife, Melissa McClish. She defended her husband in court, but has said she will divorce him.

The rape charges against McClish surfaced during the investigation of the killing of Joanna "Asha" Veil, a 28-year-old pregnant Ben Lomond Market employee who was found dead on Love Creek Road in mid-September.

Amazing. I don't see how the jury can reach that conclusion, unless they suspect him of killing Asha. Real rape victims just don't goto Disneyland with their rapists.

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.