Via everyone in the profession: the statistician Frederick Mosteller has died. Mosteller was one of the great leaders of the generation of statisticians in which our field went from being an annex of mathematics (as it was when he attended Carnegie Tech) to an autonomous, institutionalized discipline. He had an astonishing range as a researcher, but is perhaps best known for his work on stochastic theories of learning theory and the authorship of the Federalist Papers. He was also a notable teacher, as his essay “Classroom and Platform Performance” suggests, and in the later part of his career tried to bring elementary inferential hygenie to educational research. More anecdotes are available from Tales of the Statisticians, or this brief sketch by his student Stephen Fienberg.

Not so much in the interests of spurious balance, but because it provides a way to deal with a number of general issues of international law in a more neutral framework, I thought I’d consider what war crimes have been committed by Hezbollah in the course of the present conflict. I am not an international lawyer, though I have had reasonable luck in the past arguing points of international law on the Internet. I am leaving comments enabled for the time being, though I would like all commenters to respect the principle that the blame game is not zero sum, and in specific application to this case, the fact that one side is committing war crimes does not absolve the other side from their obligation to obey the law.

Throughout this post, I am assuming that Hezbollah can be considered as a separate military entity and that its troops are being judged according to the law of war rather than as civilian criminals (or for that matter, as “illegal combatants”). I think that this is fair enough; the Geneva Conventions are rather vague on what constitutes a legitimate military entity, but my opinion is that if state sponsorship was a necessary condition this would have been explicitly stated and it seems to me that it would be hard to argue that Hezbollah are not guerillas under Protocol I. Although the Conventions seem to mainly be considering cases of civil war rather than cross-border aggression by parastates I personally believe that they apply. More under the fold.
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If you aren’t reading “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/ on the war in Lebanon, well you should be.

From one of his “more recent posts”:http://billmon.org/archives/002581.html :

bq. I’ve been watching events in the Middle East off and on for the past 25 years, and I’ve seen the Israelis get ugly before. But I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen them this ugly — Ariel Sharon’s scowling mug excepted, of course. It’s almost as if bits of Sharon’s DNA have been duplicated and injected into the entire Israeli cabinet and the general staff: Massively disproportionate use of force (as defined in the Geneva Conventions, not the fevered war porn fantasies of Right Blogistan) reprisal terror bombings, an if-it-moves-shoot-it mentality on the ground:

bq. “Over here, everybody is the army,” one soldier said. “Everybody is Hezbollah. There’s no kids, women, nothing.”

bq. Another soldier put it plainly: “We’re going to shoot anything we see.”

bq. And now a proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free fire zone.

bq. This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong.

UPDATE: A couple of people have emailed to make the point that the two quotes from soldiers need to be read in the context of the previous paragraph of the report from which they are taken, which reads:

bq. Now more Israeli soldiers are on the way, including an armored unit being transferred from Gaza to Lebanon. They have been told civilians have left the region where they will fight.

Perhaps that makes those soldiers’ remarks less damning as indicators _of their personal attitudes_ , but it rather raised the question of who is telling them the falsehood that civilians have led the region and why, since their acceptance of that falsehood might well lead them to kill non-combatants. In the context of Billmon’s post as a whole — which you can read by following the link — it is clear that the “proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free-fire zone” is a reference back to statements by the Israeli Justice minister Ramon, and not a conclusion based on those quotes from soldiers.

I’m preparing for a short trip to Buenos Aires and am seeking advice on how to approach the trip for least amount of fatigue. CT folks seem to have a wealth of experience in the travel domain so I thought I’d ask if anyone had ideas for me. I am only going for a few days so when I get there at 9am I want to be ready to start exploring town instead of spending hours in bed. But is that realistic after a ten hour flight? I have a three hour layover in DC, which may add to my fatigue. I’m usually not so good at sleeping on planes (except in business class) so I don’t know if I can count on that much.

I have lots of experience with cross-continental travel and long flights so that’s not the issue. (The longest trip was probably when we moved to Honolulu from Budapest for a few months.) I have been taking such flights ever since I was nine, but it has always involved significant time-zone changes. Is it the long trip, the time-zone change or a combination of the two that causes one to be completely useless after a trip from the U.S. to Europe? I’m hoping most of it has to do with the time change so I can avoid it this time around.

For entertainment, I am bringing the manual of my new digital camera and a small English-Spanish dictionary and phrasebook, both of which I was happy to find in my favorite dictionary brand today at the local store. (I wouldn’t bother with a dictionary for a few days, but I figured it was worth getting one given my move to California in a month. I hadn’t planned to get a phrasebook, but I am a sucker for those little Langenscheidt books.)

I’ve been enjoying the company of colleagues, Australians currently living in the US, for the last few weeks, and last night we (and families) all went to dinner at a riverside restaurant. Discussion turned to schools, as it does, and the Texas system under which the top 10(?) per cent of students from every school are guaranteed a place in the state university of their choice came up. This system seems to provide at least a partial answer to the schools choice problems. There’s a built-in incentive to send children to a school where the competition won’t be so tough. Moreover, it mutes the incentive for schools to game the system by ‘teaching to the test’ – Australian studies have regularly shown that the entry scores of students from private schools overpredict their university performance relative to those from state schools, presumably because the private schools do a better job of boosting those scores.

I haven’t thought through it in detail, but on the face of it, a system based on implicit trade in university places seems more appealing and robust than the system of cash-based markets for incoming students discussed by Harry.

Colbert returns to the amazing interviews he did with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland and Rep. Robert Wexler. Only this time, it is to skewer the allegedly serious television shows that mock his.

Colbert: “But the Today Show and Good Morning America could be right. I could be asking the wrong questions. For instance, I asked U.S. Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, who proposed requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House and Senate chambers if he could name the Ten Commandments. What I should have asked him was this …”

Clips from other shows:
“Is it possible that tanning is addictive?”
“How long does it take you to grow that thing [a long beard]?”
“Do you really need to wait a half-hour after you eat before you go swimming?”

It’s much funnier to watch the whole thing.

Tip: Atrios

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/world/europe/27cnd-mideast.html today.

bq. We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world,’’ Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Israeli radio, “to continue this operation, this war, until Hezbollah won’t be located in Lebanon and until it is disarmed.’’ Mr. Ramon also raised the possibility of an expanded air assault, saying “all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah.’’

[as with my other posts on Israel, where our past experience has been one of vicious fights between pro- and anti-Israel commenters, I’m keeping the comments section closed. I’m not happy about this either.]

Brisbane readers of CT should already be aware of the BrisScience lecture series. The speakers so far have all been from the natural sciences, but I’m talking on Monday July 31 at the Ithaca Auditorium, City Hall, on the topic “Economics: The Hopeful Science”. The general theme is that economic progress and environmental sustainability are naturally* complements rather than substitutes.

I’m sure lots of you will want to fly in for this event, but may be concerned about the associated greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, although Australia is not a Kyoto signatory, Australian states are getting into the carbon credit business and (for now at least) it’s surprisingly cheap to offset a long-distance flight. More details here.

*a loaded term which I’ll try to justify in the talk

As I posted over on one of my other blogs, one’s first reaction to this paper is horrified amusement that it got printed in a reasonably respectable journal. The authors are mainly from the faculty of “Maharishi University” and it’s a study of the efficacy in reducing the frequency of terrorist incidents in Israel and Lebanon of installing a group of people practising Transcendental Meditation. It is, to be honest, pretty whacky stuff, although my personal opinion is that the meditators get the best of the methodological debate which followed (really, the yogis were not pulling any statistical funny business and they did find a significant effect; it’s discussed in this rather good article on statistical methodology generally)

But really, who is in the wrong here?
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I wish Daniel would post more on CT and less on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, partly because I worry that regular CT readers may sometimes miss his pieces. Today he has “a really interesting article”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/07/dumping_dumping.html arguing that agricultural subsidies aren’t always bad for the global poor and, indeed, by lowering prices for Africa’s consumers, may often be good for them. That definitely goes against the conventional wisdom (both left and right) in blogdom. Definitely worth a read.

(one of these things is not like the others … )

I’m reading Paul Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity_ which I’m enjoying a lot, both the bits that I agree with and the bits that I disagree with. But one thing struck me as a little odd.
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I just finished reading Julian Betts’s essay “The Economic Theory of School Choice” in his (excellent and remarkably inexpensive) edited collection Getting Choice Right. For the most part I don’t expect to find really new ideas about school choice in what I read, so it was a thrill to find something I hadn’t encountered before. The contributors all assume (correctly in my view) that school choice is an inevitable feature of the education system, so the issue is how to get it right — in other words, how to make it as efficient and equitable as possible (self-styled opponents of school choice tend to support the de facto status quo, a school choice system riddled with inefficiencies and inequities).

The most obvious barrier to a school choice being efficient and to it being equitable is the fact that in a choice system schools get to choose students, leading, one presumes, to a concentration of advantaged students into popular schools. Defenders of choice usually offer three solutions to this problem; lotteries (preventing schools from choosing); quotas (allowing them to choose but limiting their ability to select for advantage) and weighted student funding (allowing them to choose, but giving them incentives to choose disadvantaged children, and compensating schools which get landed with high concentrations of disadvantage). (I suggest a combination of these in my proposal at the end of School Choice and Social Justice).

So what’s new in Betts’s paper?

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In the comments to my post on Onsager, Maynard Handley explains why he finds himself somewhat unsympathetic, as Onsager apparently did not expend the effort necessary to make himself understood by others.

You, the author of the paper, have a responsibility to make your ideas comprehensible. If the first method you choose to explain them fails, then you listen to what people say about where they lost all track of understanding and write a new paper—- with NEW explanations, not the same explanations that failed last time only renumbered. … [This is] not something that is drilled into young scientists; that it is YOUR responsibility to make your ideas clear to others, not their responsibility to try to figure out what you are talking about. As science grows ever larger and ever more complex, I think it is time for all scientists to be much more explicit and much more ruthless on this point.

Whether this is really a fair criticism of Onsager, I couldn’t say, but the general point is true, important, and a perfect hook for the next thing I wanted to post about.

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