The Obama Surge

Robert Prather | Monday, December 10, 2007

Andrew Sullivan has a reader email post that captures, for me, the reason that Obama has been catching on of late and could very well knock Hillary Clinton aside in the run for the Democratic nomination. A sample:

It’s remarkable how little Obama has focused on black voters until now, but that may have been a savvy move. Fair or not, many African-American candidates get pidgeonholed [sic] as having only niche appeal. But Obama has spent all this time branding himself as a candidate who strives to transcend race, so that now when he has to campaign hard in the black community in South Carolina and elsewhere people don’t see him as limited to one constituency. Oprah is the perfect metaphor for that strategy. He’s trying to get the best of both worlds.

This strikes me as being right. His main obstacle to the nomination is his skin color and the fact that he would be the first black president. Assuaging the concerns of non-black voters first seems like the best approach to handling this problem and then doubling back to deal with the black voters. By doing this he assures non-black voters that he is not to be feared and then makes up with a constituency of which he is a natural part.

He also has some experience issues, but these can be overcome by his appeal to peoples’ hopes and a desire to break with the past. Hillary Clinton has the same issues with experience with just four additional years in elected office. Also, it doesn’t hurt that Clinton has decided to attack his “naked ambition” by revealing a third-grade essay where he says he wants to be president. She has her own naked ambition (notice the lack of ironic quotes) that’s far more obvious and pernicious; she’s trying to attack him from the ambition angle before he does the same to her, a common tactic among politicians.

On a completely unrelated note, before I recently moved to Chicago I hadn’t had a land-line telephone since 1999. I’m starting to remember why. I didn’t realize that telephone spam had emerged as a problem. Some scam artist with an automated dialing machine (company name PFS, 317 area code) has been calling me and claiming that I have a very large debt that’s past due with a company I’ve never heard of. This alone is about enough to get me to abandon the land line again. Be warned.

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That’ll Leave a Mark

Robert Prather | Thursday, September 13, 2007

I haven’t posted in quite a while, but I will try to do better.

George Will wrote a blistering column today about Fred Thompson which, for me, summed up many of the things I don’t like about Thompson. First on the list is that he’s a protege of John McCain and was involved with that awful campaign finance legislation. Indeed, that seems to be Will’s primary objection as well:

Thompson said he had advocated McCain-Feingold to prevent, among other things, corporations and labor unions from “giving large sums of money to individual politicians.” But corporate and union contributions to individual candidates were outlawed in 1907 and 1947, respectively.

Ingraham asked about McCain-Feingold’s ban on issue ads that mention a candidate close to an election. He blamed an unidentified “they” who “added on” that provision, which he implied was a hitherto undiscussed surprise. But surely he knows that bills containing the ban had been introduced in previous sessions of Congress before passage in 2002.

[….]

Thompson, contrary to his current memories, was deeply involved in expanding government restrictions on political speech generally and the ban on issue ads specifically. Yet he told Ingraham, “I voted for all of it,” meaning McCain-Feingold, but said “I don’t support that” provision of it.

Oh? Why, then, did he file his own brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold McCain-Feingold, stressing Congress’s especially “compelling interest” in squelching issue ads that “influence” elections?

Well, I suppose his objection is larger; Thompson seems to have some recollection issues when it comes to things he’s said and done in the past. You really should read the whole thing.

Even apart from his support for McCain-Feingold, Fred Thompson leaves me cold. If it comes down to a choice between him and Hillary, I suppose I’ll choose him, particularly if the House stays under Democratic control. But the Republican I like best these days is Rudy Giuliani, in spite of the amateurish foreign policy piece. He generally radiates competence, which I think we need.

This is a fairly lame post after such a long absence, but I’ll try to do better over the weekend, provided nothing comes up.

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After a Great Deal of Delay, I’m Back

Robert Prather | Friday, July 6, 2007

I wish I had something of more substance to post on, but I’m rusty and just thought I would bring attention to this piece by CNN:

With the aviation industry currently in the spotlight over its impact on the environment, Boeing has been keen to play up the 787’s green credentials. Lighter than other planes of is size and powered by more efficient engines supplied by GE and Rolls-Royce, it’s estimated that it will use 20 percent less fuel that other similar sized aircraft.

[…]

There have been a few teething problems with reports of a lack of rivets and ill-fitting front sections, but so far nothing like the woes faced by Airbus and the problems that effected the 350 miles of wiring that snake back and forth through the double-decker A380 super jumbo. Being a mid-sized jet, the 787 only has 60 miles of wiring to contend with.

[…]

All Nippon Airlines will be the first of 787’s 45 customers to receive the plane in May 2008 after flight test this Fall. As one of three models planned for the Dreamliner, it will be able to carry 250 passengers up to 8,200 miles. The 787-9 will have an even longer range and accommodate up to 290 people.

Now, perhaps I’m being pedantic, but shouldn’t an organization the size of CNN be able to afford editors? More evidence that blogs, when done correctly, have their advantages (our grammar errors and typos don’t cost money). I’ll have something of more substance to post later in the weekend.

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Evolution Yet Again

Robert Prather | Sunday, October 1, 2006

One of the dangers of blogging infrequently is that you only post when you’re angry. Such is my dilemma.

I’m generally OK with religious people, but it makes me fume when I think of what they will do to the nation if the latest nonsense against evolution actually succeeds:

I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: “How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don’t even accept evolution?”

I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of “intelligent design” in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education. And an independent education foundation has concluded that science-teaching standards in 10 states fail to address evolution in a scientifically sound way. Through changes in standards and curriculum, these efforts urge students to doubt evolution — the cornerstone principle of biology, one on which there is no serious scientific debate.

This war could decimate the development of U.S. scientific talent and erode whatever competitive advantage the United States enjoys in the technology-based global economy. Already, U.S. high school students lag near the bottom in math skills compared with students in other developed nations, and high school seniors are performing worse in science than they were 10 years ago.

These trends can only worsen if students come to regard evolution as questionable or controversial. Thirty-seven percent of the high school Advanced Placement biology examination tests knowledge of evolution, evolutionary biology and heredity, according to the College Board. Students who do not thoroughly understand evolution cannot hope to succeed on this exam; they will be handicapped in competitive science courses in college and the careers that may follow.

The article goes on to mention that some young person in one of the states that is attacking evolution will be robbed of a future by this nonsense; her head will be filled with superstition rather than science, thus limiting her ability to work as a scientist.

I may return to this later when I’m not quite so upset.

Via Jonathon Adler.

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September 11th, A Short Remembrance

Robert Prather | Monday, September 11, 2006

I’ve written about this numerous times on my old site, but I thought I would share a bit on the new site.

On September 11th, I worked in the suburbs of Chicago and left my townhome at 7:45am CT. At the time, I left for work thinking that it was a small commercial airliner that hit the towers. How wrong I was.

I arrived thinking it was no big deal and arrived at work thinking it was a small matter. In Chicago traffic, I arrived 45 minutes later to find it was a major airliner and that another had hit the Pentagon. It was devastating.

I never felt the same after.

Our CEO sent an email sending us home at about 10:00am CT and I stayed because I was a news junkie and didn’t want to miss any events. It was traumitizing and I felt it for days. People were filling up their cars even though there was no immediate threat to gas supplies. I ended up in Connecticutt a year later and managed to visit Ground Zero at the time. It seemed holy, and I’m not even a believer.

Rest in peace, victims of terrorists.

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Non-Monetary Endowments

Robert Prather | Sunday, September 10, 2006

Megan McArdle had a good post the other day pointing out the inconsistency of those who want to tax income at a higher rate because the rich supposedly get utility from spite. That is, the rich are made to feel better than people who have less money because of their relative positions.

She used peoples’ natural endowments for beauty and height as another way that people make themselves feel better at the “expense” of others. She facetiously asked why we don’t throw acid on Cindy Crawford to even out the distribution of beauty in the country. She also noted that beauty, unlike money in most cases, is not earned but is instead an accident of nature.

I think Megan’s point was a good one, particularly in terms of pointing out the inconsistencies of those who favor “cutting the tall poppies down”. I don’t favor it in either case and simply hope for a bit of modesty to restrain peoples’ worst instincts — like puffing themselves up in their minds based on their endowments, earned and unearned. It’s still a good discussion.

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My First Original Reporting

Robert Prather | Thursday, August 24, 2006

As the OTB Roving Correspondent for New Orleans, I actually ran into George Stephanopoulos at the Acme Oyster House. Of course, it wasn’t a professional run-in: I’m not a professional. Nevertheless, I met him and he’s in NOLA to do a story tomorrow. I was discreet and didn’t want to disturb him too much.

I said: “You look exactly like George Stephanopoulos.”

He said: “I am George Stephanopoulos”.

For me, a news junkie, it was almost as great as meeting Jennifer Aniston (almost).

Anyway, he’ll be in NOLA tomorrow only to do a story. I assume it’s Katrina related. Watch “This Week” to find out.

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Weirdness Finally Costs Tom Cruise Money

Robert Prather | Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Hmm. I’ve wondered when this might happen. It’s been building for a while, since they cut his budget a few months ago. The latest:

Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone said his company’s Paramount Pictures is terminating its 14-year relationship with actor Tom Cruise’s production company, citing the actor’s controversial and sometimes erratic behavior of the past year.

Mr. Cruise, the star of Paramount hits like “Mission: Impossible,” “Top Gun” and “Days of Thunder,” has based his moviemaking company, Cruise/Wagner Productions, on the Paramount lot since 1992. But in the past year, Mr. Cruise’s star has fallen in the wake of a series of public incidents in which he stumped for his faith in the Church of Scientology; severely criticized the use of antidepressant drugs; and engaged in sometimes offbeat behavior, such as jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch to proclaim his love for actress Katie Holmes.

Paramount now believes that Mr. Cruise’s behavior hurt the box office of his most recent film, “Mission: Impossible III.” Now, Mr. Redstone said he wants to sever the studio’s connection to its biggest star.

“As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal,” Mr. Redstone said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

Gone Hollywood

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Why Is AI Surprised?

Robert Prather | Tuesday, August 22, 2006

I’m not sure why Amnesty International would find it surprising that civilians died in large numbers when Israel is fighting a bunch of skulkers:

Amnesty International says attacks on civilian targets by Israeli military forces during the recently ended fighting in Lebanon look like deliberate war crimes.

In a report released on Wednesday, the London-based human rights organisation argues that the destruction of Lebanese homes and basic infrastructure “was an integral part of the military strategy”.

Noting violations by both sides, Amnesty says it has asked the United Nations to open a “comprehensive, independent and impartial inquiry” about the 34-day war between Israel and the Lebanese-based Hizbollah militia.

The losses inflicted by Israeli forces were not just “collateral damage” under the accepted rules of war, according to Amnesty.

More than 7,000 air force attacks and 2,500 naval bombardments “particularly concentrated on civilian areas”, the report says. Israeli officials, while acknowledging Lebanese civilian losses, have placed the blame on Hizbollah for allegedly hiding weapons among the population.

This I’ll never understand. If Hezbollah hides among civilians, the moral burden of the deaths is theirs. Capitulating to this kind of nonsense will mean more civilian deaths in future conflicts because it will reward the skulkers. What is AI thinking? (I’m not sure I want to know.)

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The Female Brain

Robert Prather | Monday, August 7, 2006

In spite of what happened to Larry Summers, research into the differences between male and female brains seems to be all the rage these days. And the conclusions are fascinating:

Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

So the next time parents scold their daughters for excessive text messaging, consider Brizendine’s neurological explanation:

“Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.”

Part road map for women looking for scientific explanations for their behavior, part geeky manual for relationship woes, “The Female Brain” already has become fodder for the morning chat shows. On the “Today” show this week, one critic downplayed the book’s explanation of gender differences, saying men and women are “more like North Dakota and South Dakota.”

Brizendine’s goal isn’t man-bashing (despite snippets like “the typical male brain reaction to an emotion is to avoid it at all costs”). Instead, she celebrates the differences.

“There is no unisex brain,” Brizendine writes. “Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they’re born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality.”

The thing about girls and text messaging won’t suprise most parents, I suspect.

The Economist has two articles on this same subject this week. First:

Technology and globalisation are undermining the usefulness of male skills. Take map-reading. The female tendency to call for five right turns while holding the map upside down, playing “I spy” with the children and remarking on interesting features of the local half-timbering has been attested to over many decades by impartial scientists as well as by irritated husbands. But once satellite navigation rendered the ability to tell the cartographic difference between a car park and a lake redundant, that aspect of male superiority disappeared out of the window, along with the crucial pages of the road atlas that the toddler removed while practising his superior hand-eye co-ordination skills.

Men, studies show, are exceedingly good at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their head. Perhaps women once stared open-mouthed in wonder as their mates juggled pyramids of imaginary polyhedra. Such tricks are also quite handy for engineers who specialise in building large bits of machinery, digging tunnels or slinging bridges across rivers. But, now that the rich world has about as many tunnels and bridges as it needs, and the large bits of machinery which aren’t made by computers and robots are made by the Chinese, their usefulness is limited.

Modern professional life is dominated by management, which these days sets high store by emotional intelligence, empathy and communication. Wise chaps seeking professional advancement should therefore spend their free time with groups of women, boning up on how to undermine somebody’s confidence while pretending to boost it, and how to turn an entire lunch table against an absent colleague without saying a mean word. Such skills are likely to have a greater influence on their lifetime earnings than the ability to spin an icosahedron.

This conclusion may be true, but the articles also mention that males are generally better at problem solving, and there will no doubt be more of those. We’re not obsolete yet.

Second:

Another proposal to explain the lack of women professors of maths and science is that even if there is little or no difference in average ability, there might be differences in the variation around this average, with more men found in the tails of the distribution curve and fewer in the middle. In other words, among males there are more idiots and more prodigies. One study of IQ, covering everyone born in Scotland in 1932, supports this idea. It showed that there were more women in the middle of the distribution, but more men at both of the extremes.

The question raised by Dr Summers does get to the heart of the matter. Over the past 50 years, women have made huge progress into academia and within it. Slowly, they have worked their way into the higher echelons of discipline after discipline. But some parts of the ivory tower have proved harder to occupy than others. The question remains, to what degree is the absence of women in science, mathematics and engineering caused by innate, immutable ability?

Innate it may well be. That does not mean it is immutable. Spatial ability is amenable to training in both sexes. And such training works. The difference between the trained and the untrained has a d value of 0.4, and one programme to teach spatial ability improved the retention rate of women in engineering courses from 47% to 77%. Biology may predispose, but even in the rugged world of metal bashing, it is not necessarily destiny.

That last paragraph is what was so galling in the response to Larry Summers. Knowledge can be used for both good and evil, but it’s rarely a good idea to stick your head in the sand and say you don’t want to know. That’s what Larry Summers’s critics were saying and they were wrong.

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Permanent Income and Voting Patterns

Robert Prather | Sunday, August 6, 2006

Perhaps Democrats should consider permanent income — or peoples’ average incomes over several years — when considering how people might vote. Briefly, the idea is that people base their current period’s consumption on their permanent income rather than that period’s income. There is some support for this and it makes sense if people are forward looking.

In my masters thesis, I used a variation of Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis to estimate a money demand function and it was more predictive than current income. In fact, I was a good example of the PIH in practice: my spending tracked better to my expectations of my earnings than to my current income, which was near zero. My consumption was a good deal above zero based on the assumption that my earning power would return to previous levels, or something close, in time. Likewise, my voting remained the same in spite of the drop in income. If my income had dropped due to political failures, I might have voted differently.

Voting seems like a natural application of this theory:

A single-year snapshot of Census data can show almost 40 percent of the U.S. population making less than $40,000. On paper, that amounts to widespread economic distress. It suggests that something close to a majority of Americans may have a very direct personal stake in supporting social safety net programs for the poor — the programs that the Democratic Party is most commonly identified with in public opinion surveys — because they themselves might need government assistance at some point in their lives.

But because people’s incomes fluctuate from year to year, the more accurate way to measure their economic wellbeing is to look at their average earnings over a longer period, for instance, 15 years. Analyzed that way, the data show that about 23 percent of adults in their prime working years have average family incomes of $40,000 or less. This is the segment of the population with the most direct interest in social safety net programs for people in economic distress.

Via N. Gregory Mankiw.

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Sexual Repression, Political Repression and Violence

Robert Prather | Sunday, August 6, 2006

Martin Scorsese could have a field day with this, al la Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It’s not entirely surprising that a repressed view of sexuality might spawn violence, given that they seem to be revulsed by their feelings:

Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.

WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future.

Rather than turning their revulsion on themselves, they lash out at the object of their revulsion. Hence the focus on the “godlessness” of America.

Also interesting is the point about terrorism coming from politically repressed societies. This has been studied before by Alan Krueger and he reached a similar conclusion.

Via Ann Althouse.

update: I forgot to mention that I was walking the French Quarter the other day and saw some men who were quite clearly of Middle Eastern extraction. They noticed a woman stripping in silhouette and were fascinated. One of the guys posed in a “he-man” like position in front while another took a picture. At the time it struck me as a pretty healthy reaction coming from societies that look down on women being naked, even in silhouette. OK, that looks down on them not wearing a burka.

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Ana Marie Cox To Be Time’s Washington Editor

Robert Prather | Thursday, July 27, 2006

This is more than a little distressing (WSJ, $):

Time Inc. hired former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox to be Washington editor of Time.com. In her new role, Ms. Cox will head the Web site’s political coverage and produce stories for the print and online editions of the magazine. Ms. Cox joined Time magazine as a contributing writer in March. Previously, she was founding editor of the blog Wonkette, where she gained fame for her irreverent posts on political life and scandal in Washington, D.C. Earlier this year, Ms. Cox published a novel, “Dog Days,” a satire of life in Washington. She currently blogs at anamariecox.com.

How one goes from blogging about John Kerry’s member to being Time Magazine’s Washington editor is unknown to me, but best of luck to her.

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Sequestering CO2

Robert Prather | Sunday, July 23, 2006

In earlier posts I mentioned the use of geoengineering as a way of dealing with excess CO2 emissions. One such method is called carbon sequestration and generally means pumping CO2 emissions into the ground for storage. The Economist has a report on one early attempt:

But few studies have looked at what happens once the gas is in the ground. In October 2004 a group of researchers led by Yousif Kharaka of the United States’ Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, pumped 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Frio formation, a disused brine and oil reservoir east of Houston, Texas. The results of their experiment have just been published in Geology.

The team compressed the gas into its liquid form and pumped it into a layer of sandstone 24 metres thick, lying 1.5km (about a mile) under the surface. They have been monitoring the site ever since, and so far they have found no leaks.

What they have, however, found is that the carbon dioxide has increased the acidity of the water in the aquifer. This, in turn, has dissolved the minerals that hold the sandstone together. As their report puts it, “this rapid dissolution of carbonate and other minerals could ultimately create pathways in the rock seals or well cements for carbon dioxide and brine leakage.”

Of course, the study of this problem is in its infancy; hopefully, as technology improves, other experiments will turn out better.

Related:

The Heresy Begins.

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