Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I hope everyone had a fantastic solstice season. I spent a week visiting family in Arizona, including a day trip to Sedona, woo-woo capital of the United States. Each visit there I feel like I should really write something about it, and I have a few ideas that will probably require some time I don’t have to do research. What I wanted to say today, though, is on a slightly more serious note. As you almost certainly know by now, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab attempted to detonate plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The result is that another set of inane restrictions are being placed on innocent American travelers. As Joel Johnson at Gizmodo has pointed out, TSA is providing a line of defense against plans so specific as to be nearly useless in screening. I already have to take my shoes off thanks to the shoe bomber. I can’t take the kind of hair gel I like with me unless I check a bag thanks to the perpetrators of the (completely implausible) 2006 liquid explosives plot. On top of that, I have to take my laptop out of it’s bag thanks to some supposed threat so archaic I honestly have no idea what it was.

As the Gizmodo article quoted, the two biggest factors keeping us safe are the reinforcement of cockpit doors and passengers identifying and taking out threats on their own. So these new rules that forbid having anything in our laps and having to hold it in for the last hour on international flights are, in my opinion, only slightly less idiotic than requiring that a brave Dutch man be on every international flight since it was Dutch passenger Jasper Schuringa who tackled the perpetrator on flight 253. If my dime-store science fiction paperback book is a threat, arrest me when we’re all safely on the ground.

I will admit that I occasionally show strong signs of favoritism to a particular news outlet. No, not Fox News. My weakness is for NPR. Fortunately they screw up just often enough to snap me back to the jaded, cynical place I call home. This afternoon I was using my extra hour from the fall-back (did you remember to set your clocks, people living in the United States, except for Arizona?) and the fact that the weather is nice on Nov. 1 in Cleveland to sit on my porch and drink iced tea (it’s not actually warm, I’m just crazy) while listening to the archives of my favorite NPR shows from the week. Then, on the front page, a blurb for this article hit me:

One [poll] released by Franklin and Marshall College last week shows just 40 percent of voters in Pennsylvania believe the president is doing a good or excellent job, versus 59 percent who grade his performance as fair or poor.

There is some important data missing, here, I think. They’ve split the positive responses, and lumped one of them with the one negative response. So we actually have no way of telling if people are overall dissatisfied! Maybe people are very polarized and mostly lumped in the excellent and poor opinion categories, and there’s a reason to talk about the widespread dissatisfaction. On the other hand, maybe  everyone save a few have a positive outlook. Since fair essentially means adequate it seems wrong to call it a negative opinion in opposition to viral enthusiasm.  So if most people in the second group thought the administration was fair, then the statistic as reported is misleading.

Unlike Don Quixote, if you set out into the data looking for windmills, you will find them.

There was an article I caught days ago that I’m just now getting around to. I hope no one has any expectations that I’m ever going to blog anything in real time. Anyway, there was a big teabagger (suppresses childish giggles) rally in D.C. on September 12th. Someone had the rather clever idea of using the daily D.C. Metro (light rail) usage statistics to estimate the number of people at the rally. Someone just also happens to be blatantly dishonest, as pointed out by Jesse Taylor at Pandagon. (more…)

Labor Day weekend is the Cleveland National Air Show. I’ve gone every year since I’ve moved here. And every year there have been protesters standing out front who just don’t seem to get it. It’s an attractive time to object to an apparent military spectacle with two unjust (in my opinion) wars going on and no clear plan to wrap them up. But to object to displays of technology, even if it was developed in black helicopter fashion for the purposes of being a weapon, edges in on the Luddite.

Technology comes from war (read: a non-negligible amount of technology comes from weapons development). As an observational astrophysicist, I use technology which is basically on loan from the military. If you’re prone to getting lost and have a GPS navigation computer on the dash of your car, you use it, too. It started out as a system using radio towers employed during WWII, and the first satellite system was deployed by the U.S. Navy as TRANSIT or NAVSAT. The current constellation of about 30 GPS satellites transmits different signals for civilian and military use.

So it may not be obvious watching aircraft designed to deliver bombs and munitions riding on one or two of the world’s most powerful jet engines that one day some part of that weapons system could be part of your daily life. Certainly, it’s unfortunate that it is frequently humanity’s desire to render other humans dead that leads to innovation. But I think it takes just as much brains and determination to re-purpose it for civilian and academic use. So hopefully here in a little bit I’ll actually get around to talking about how the GPS can be used to help make several simultaneous precision timing measurements against a clock several miles away (in space).

Besides, fast things can be just plain cool.

I’ve been seriously remiss in my duty to arrange words in moderately pleasing permutations for your entertainment and (hopefully) education. I promise I’ll actually get around to forcing myself to post about things I’m actually an “expert” in, but I’ve been thinking about this one for days: how long do people and events stay in our “cultural memory,” and how is this changing with new technology?

It’s hard to watch the news in America today without seeing someone Godwining out in fairly short order. Apparently Barack Obama is like Hitler, as was George W. Bush before him. Until someone uncovers evidence of 6 million deaths on either of their accounts, neither of those are appropriate comparisons. If there were people who had experienced the Third Reich first hand still active in political discourse, would this kind of inane politics be tolerated for very long?

This is probably a much more complicated issue, since I don’t know that most of the public anywhere knew what was going on behind the scenes until after the war. Which is one serious difference that’s developed over the past 50 years. Even on the television these days you can see the most recent footage on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. I won’t say that war is transparent, but the information is more readily available–and persistent. Once something is let loose on the internet, it’s nigh unto impossible to get it silenced.

So information these days is available more quickly, and for a longer period after it is first broadcast. How’s this going to affect the sort of collective behavior of the public when events happening right now are referenced in the future? Will there be any backlash for comparing future events to things happening right now? I’m curious. Is anyone doing research along these lines, and have they written a book about it?

What, you were expecting answers? I told you I wasn’t an expert…

There’s an article up on Slate discussing Sarah Palin’s (McCain’s pick for his VP running mate, in case you missed the now rather old news) daughter’s pregnancy. More specifically, it addresses the probability of another presidential or vice presidential candidate having a young, pregnant daughter who escaped the publicity by having an abortion. Like the title says, it’s on the creepy side of things.

Here’s the kicker, though:

Even if you discount the rate further, on the grounds that these are the wealthiest and best-educated families, the notion that none of these young women got knocked up before their parents’ nominations or elections is—pardon the term—almost inconceivable.

I’m sorry, but it don’t work like that. To summarize the context of that quote, the author, William Saletan, collects some statistics for unplanned pregnancies in the wealtheist demographics for women between ages 17 and 30, estimating the rate at 6-7% per year. And for all the “candidates” going back to 1964 that the sample population is 37 women, so, he concludes, the rate for that 37 woman population is 2-3 pregnancies per year.

This is not how probability works. You cannot hand pick a population based on whatever set of criteria you want and use statistics on what were ideally randomly selected data. For example, if you were to collect, say, one hundred American born-and-raised individuals, you could not claim that it is inconceivable that none of them speak Chinese even though about one-fifth of the world’s population speaks some form of Chinese. According to this sort of reasoning, 20 of that sample should speak Chinese, as they are a subset of Earth’s population! Even though presidential candidates are members of a particular demographic, general statistics based on those demographics do not automatically apply to a very small, biased sample.

Now I’m not saying that Saletan doesn’t have a point regarding the media attention directed at Palin’s daughter and the possibility of other, similar cases escaping public notice. But he’s using statistics in a way that it is not meant to be used and cannot be used in any meaningful way to try to advance his point. Certainly, one or more unknown pregnancies might have occurred in that 37 individual sample, but the alternative, that such a thing has never happened previously is very far from inconceivable based on his statistical analysis.

I’m at work right now waiting for a vacuum pump to do its thing reading the Wiki-news, and I see a snippet on the Turkish government re-instating the ban on the hijab in schools and universities in the name of “secularism.” Perhaps this is my American bias coming through, but it seems rather silly to me to explicitly ban an article of religious clothing because of the secular nature of a government. Nominally, here in the United States the government is explicitly mandated to make no decree concerning religion–much less ban an element of its practice.

There seems to be a very common mistaken belief that it is the “secular agenda” in the United States to remove any display or discussion of religion from the public arena. In reality, the hegemony of religion in public life has granted it a privelidged status which in some cases seems to trump constitutional law. If there is even such a thing as a secularist agenda in the U.S. it is to put the secularist worldview back on equal grounds with the religious.

Knowing as little as I do about Turkish politics, I can’t say what could motivate a rational person to want to ban the wearing of a religious garment (of the country’s predominant religion, no less) in public. My only guess is that certain people might want to make the country seem more friendly to the Islam-fearing Western world, or, as the Wikipedia article indicates, it might just stem from an argument from antiquity going back to the nation’s founder. In any case, at least one card-carying secularist thinks such a ban is silly and contrary to anything that might pass for an agenda.

I feel I must apologize for my adopted city of Cleveland. I can agree with Kucinich’s policy more often than a lot of other Democrats, but whenever he opens his mouth he makes himself look like a crazy person. Obama responds very well to a question about the afterlife, however.