“A new Bravia Ad”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/paint/thead/. No, not the bouncy balls one. A new one. Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com.
Posts by author:
Kieran Healy
“Following up on yesterday’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/18/floating-the-fraud-balloon/, David Kane’s unfounded accusations have been removed from the front page of the “Social Science Statistics”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/ blog. SSS blogger Amy Perfors “apologises for the error of judgment”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/removed_a_case.shtml and says they removed the post because the “tone is unacceptable, the facts are shoddy, and the ideas are not endorsed by myself, the other authors on the sidebar, or the Harvard IQSS.” Good for them. IQSS Director “Gary King”:http://gking.harvard.edu also “comments briefly”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/the_probability.shtml on the matter.
“Daniel wrote a piece”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html for the Guardian’s blog saying that critics who wanted to reject the findings of Burnham et al.’s “Lancet paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf and believe the Iraq Body Count estimate (or similar-sized numbers) were going to have to come out and claim that the paper was fraudulent, “and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.” Well, now “David Kane has floated that balloon.”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/a_case_for_frau.shtml
*Update*: Kane’s accusations have been removed from the front page of the SSS blog. In a “follow-up,”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2006/10/removed_a_case.shtml Amy Perfors apologises for the error of judgment and says they removed the post because the “tone is unacceptable, the facts are shoddy, and the ideas are not endorsed by myself, the other authors on the sidebar, or the Harvard IQSS.” Good for them.
Here are some comments from “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/10/estimate_of_ira.html on the “Burnham et al. paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf. People who’d like (or ought) to learn more about statistics could do worse than read Gelman and Nolan’s terrific Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am awaiting the publication of Gelman and Hill’s Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models with a degree of anticipation that seems indecent (or unhealthy) to direct at a statistics textbook. (More about the book “here”:http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052168689X. Note the blurb from a well-known blogger.)
How many people are murdered in the U.S. every day? How many people die in car accidents every day? How many people die of heart disease in the U.S. in a year? What about the number who die for any reason at all? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, do you have immediate, confident intuitions about what the answers must be?
The “Lancet paper”:http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf by Burnham _et al._ study estimates about 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq for the period of March 2003 to July of 2006, of which about 600,000 are directly attributable to violence — an appalling number. Right-wing reaction has been, understandably, that the 600,000 estimate is unbelievably high. (“Tim Lambert”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/flypaper_for_innumerates.php gives a roundup.) Convincing those critics who see this number and declare “that can’t possibly be right,” or “my gut says no” or “this doesn’t even pass the smell test” is difficult. This is partly because some will just think that any estimate that sounds bad must be false, and take refuge in old saws about lies, damned lies, and what have you. But it’s also partly because six hundred thousand violent deaths since the war began seems huge — and, frankly, it is. As “this typical guy”:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html says, that’s equivalent to 3 to 10 Hiroshima atomic blasts, 6 to 20 Nagasaki atomic blasts or 10 Dresden bombing campaigns. Yes, that’s right. Those events happened in a single day or over a very short period. The present estimate is for a large country of twenty six million people over three and a half years. Sadly, this means it’s quite achievable. As “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/interview-with-rajiv-chandrasekaran.html points out, you just have to believe that four our five people a day are being shot or otherwise killed in each of Iraq’s major towns outside of Baghdad.
The incredulous ones will then say, “But that’s about 500 violent deaths a day over the period! Why hasn’t this been reported! “So, does this mean all of those headlines of 18 or 30 deaths were off by 700 or so?”:http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html Inconceivable!” As David Lewis once said, it is hard to know how to refute an incredulous stare. If neither a careful reading of the study itself nor examples like Cole’s will do anything to make you doubt the cognitive power of your bowels, then there’s probably not much to be done. Consider this, though. Even small societies are big. And big societies are huge. Nearly two and a half million people die in the United States every year. Nearly seven hundred thousand people die of heart disease. Lots of things happen that you don’t hear about. I can say with confidence that about a hundred and fifteen people died in road accidents today in the U.S., as did yesterday, and will tomorrow, and the day after that. And about fifty people in the U.S. died today as the result of assault, and will again tomorrow. These numbers are accurate, but I don’t mean them as any kind of serious comparison. They’re just a catalyst for the imagination. Fifty in the U.S., five hundred in Iraq. The two countries are very different, but is it really so inconceivable that ten times as many people might be dying violently on any given day in Iraq than in the United States?
Just “listen to at least the first few minutes of this radio show”:http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram?file=/radiolab/radiolab042106a.mp3 (“or via links here”:http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21), which begins with the work of “Diana Deutsch”:http://psy.ucsd.edu/~ddeutsch/, a psychologist who studies the psychology of music. The opening segment demonstrates a remarkable phenomenon, whereby a looped segment of ordinary speech appears — after a few repetitions — to become musical. Moreover, once you’ve perceived it as music, listening to the segment in context makes it sound like the speaker is in a Busby Berkeley musical and has just begun to segue into a solo number. The general musicality of speech is obvious, I suppose, especially when you listen to certain accents, or hear “uptalk”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html. But this is a very nice sort of case.
Via Clifford at “Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/09/music-and-language/
I just watched the “trailer for 300”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/, a film version of a “Frank Miller graphic novel”:http://www.amazon.com/300-Frank-Miller/dp/1569714029 (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of “Zulu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008PC13/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its big golden thrones, and ambassadors to Sparta standing unwisely close to large open pits. The Spartan tradition of compulsory homosexuality was less in evidence in the trailer. My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the “wide variety”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_Labe%21 “of people”:http://irelandsown.net/Nation.htm “who have been”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Colombia inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army.
“ABC news runs a story”:http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/warnings_about_.html under the headline “Warning Signs about Foley Ignored for at least Five Years.”
“No one in the Republican leadership, nor Congressman Shimkus, saw those messages until last Friday when ABC News released them to the public,” said Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL). But there were lots of warning signs. In 2001, pages were warned to be careful with Foley. In 2005, one page complained to his congressman about “sick” e-mails from Foley, a complaint passed on to the Speaker’s staff.”
You can see how the story is taking shape. I expect soon we will learn of the existence of a Presidential daily briefing headed “FOLEY DETERMINED TO STROKE IN U.S. CONGRESS.”
*1*. _trans_. To corrupt the morals or moral principles of; to deprave or pervert morally.
bq. The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated. … The legislation … strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime. … The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense. It strips detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of a habeas right to challenge their detention in court, relying instead on procedures known as combatant status review trials, which have looser rules of evidence than the courts. It allows evidence seized in this country or abroad to be taken without a search warrant.
Via “Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com and “ThinkProgress”:http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/25/newsweeks-latest-cover-by-geographical-region/, Newsweek’s current cover as it varies by geographical region:
I commend them for sparing the world from “Annie Leibowitz”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14964292/site/newsweek/. The funny thing is that the graphic is right there “on Newsweek’s own site”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3037881/site/newsweek/. I went back and looked for others. Here are the covers from the week before last.
Here’s an Ad from Amazon’s front page, designed to sell the drug “Adderall”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall.
The sketch writes itself, I suppose. Thank you for calling 1-800-GOT-ADHD. Please listen carefully as our menu of options has recently changed. If you have questions about ADHD diagnosis, please press hey, have you ever put a bunch of Mentos in your mouth and then drunk some Diet Coke? I did that once and it was a blast. I want to go outside.
I’m sorry. I’ll get my coat.
Via “Jeremy Freese,”:http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/09/and-you-thought-astrosociology-was.html a paper by Alan Gerber and Neil Malhotra called “Can political science literatures be believed? A study of publication bias in the APSR and the AJPS.” Here’s the main finding.
I’ve been on the road for the last week or so, gradually making my way by tramp steamer to Australia. By coincidence, I was on “ABC”:http://www.abc.net.au radio’s “Background Briefing”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2006/1740584.htm programme on Sunday, talking about gift and market exchange in the world of human organ and tissue procurement. There’s a “podcast of the show”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbg_20060917.mp3 available if you want to listen. The topic is easy to treat in a glib or sensationalistic way, but I thought Ian Walker (who wrote and presented the show) did a really good job with it. There’s a lot of good first-hand material from organ and tissue donors, recipients and bankers, alongside stuff from me, “Virginia Postrel”:http://www.vpostrel.com/weblog/ and others.
By chance, I had just finished rereading a famous speech by Ronald Reagan when I heard the news that President Bush had confirmed the existence of secret CIA prisons. Yesterday, while looking over it again, I heard the “Judge Advocates General”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08detain.html?hp&ex=1157774400&en=fa1da1053abb2a24&ei=5094&partner=homepage strongly resist the White House’s plan for military tribunals that would allow conviction based on secret evidence. When Reagan spoke in 1964 on behalf of Barry Goldwater, he presented TV viewers with a stark choice between those with the courage to make a principled stand for Freedom and Liberty, and those who would capitulate to the global threat of Communism for the sake of a quiet life. He didn’t pull any punches.
bq. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ‘accommodation.’ … We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing and immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, ‘Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ … Admittedly there is risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face … When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people [that] we are retreating under the pressure of the cold war, and … our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead” … Where then is the road to peace? You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they will not advance! … You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
Via “Dave Weeden”:http://backword.me.uk/2006/August/why_i_can.html, the “latest moneyspinner”:http://www.sptimes.com/2006/05/06/Tampabay/Scientology_nearly_re.shtml/ to emerge from the “muppet labs”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/further-muppet-resistance/ at Scientology HQ in Clearwater, FL:
Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual rollout in Scientology’s massive building in downtown Clearwater. … A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one’s perceptions – and not just the five senses we all know – hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that people have 57 “perceptics.” … Hubbard promised Super Power would improve perceptions and “put the person into a new realm of ability.”
How much would you pay to receive this marvellous training? Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Don’t answer yet! There’s more. The 57 Perceptics (not a brand of tomato sauce or an unsuccessful doo-wop outfit) include Timen Sight [sic], Tasten Colorn Depth [sic], and Personal Size [if you know what I mean].
Asked about Super Power, church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written statement: “Super Power is a series of spiritual counseling processes designed to give a person back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his power of choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities.” Shaw would not say how much the program will cost. Upper levels of Scientology training can run tens of thousands of dollars. He declined to provide further insight into Super Power. “It’s not something I’m willing to provide to you in any manner,” Shaw said.
Comic Book Guy Alert! No information will be imparted to you whatsoever until you answer me these questions three, and also sign over the deeds to your house.
Super Power takes “weeks, not months” to complete, said Feshbach. He would not discuss the specific machines and drills that former Scientologists said are used to enhance perceptions. The perceptics portion of Super Power is one of 12 “rundowns” in the full program … Details of Super Power training have been kept secret even from church members. Like much of Scientology training, details aren’t revealed until one pays to take the course.
Notice the 11 extra rundowns that have just been added to the program, of which Super Power Perceptics is only one! _Now_ how much would you pay? Sign up now! Remember, your very willingness to cough up large amounts of cash for this stuff is evidence that you need professional training to heighten your preceptual awareness of the world and the sort of people who live in it.