Politics & Science
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This is more of a lighter “politics” story, really, but still interesting. During the Olympics I noticed something odd about the way medals were being counted. China’s official web site showed the medal count sorted by gold medals instead of total medals awarded per nation, which seemed odd to me because NBC had been reporting the count by total medals. So I looked into it and apparently the International Olympic Committee does it China’s way — by gold medals.

Here’s China’s official page, in English:
http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml

Here’s the Wikipedia medal count article, which includes an explanation of the IOC’s official means and highlighting China as the “winner”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Summer_Olympics_medal_table

The ranking in this table is based on information provided by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The ranking sorts by the number of gold medals the athletes from a nation have earned (in this context, a “nation” is an entity represented by a National Olympic Committee). The number of silver medals is taken into consideration next and then the number of bronze medals. If nations are still tied, equal ranking is given and they are listed alphabetically by IOC country code.

So then I ran across this story today:
US Pleased with Olympic Medal Count

On top of that, as the country that introduced and perfected the concept of sabermetrical parsing, the U.S. came up with a way to finish on top in gold medals.

Counting its dominance in team sports in the final week of the Games, “More individual U.S. athletes will carry home gold medals around their neck than any other nation, if you want to count it that way,” said Jim Scherr, U.S. Olympic Committee CEO.

By that measure, the Americans routed the home team. Computing gold medals presented to each athlete on teams in men’s and women’s basketball, men’s volleyball, women’s rowing, beach volleyball and relay teams in track and swimming, among others, the U.S. claimed 125 total golds to 74 for China. In total medals awarded, the United States scored 315 to 186 for China.

Rofl! You just gotta love that kind of parsing. But hey, that’s cool, that’s a lot of athletes going home with medals. This quote from USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth is priceless:

“We’re fascinated like any other country by gold medals, but what is more important in a way is that our team sports do very well.

Of course, statistics can often hurt as much as they help:

But the flip side of such numbers-crunching is that the U.S. did not medal in 16 of 38 disciplines or sub-disciplines, and in five sports was unable to achieve even a single top-eight finish.

I think the American athletes have plenty to be proud of, and I haven’t heard any of THEM talking about medal counts or statistics. Good for them.

And I think the real story of these Olympics is China’s emergence, but the next most important story is the fact that more countries medaled than ever before, and more countries won gold medals than ever before. That’s the real spirit of the games.

When China won the Olympic games, one of the things it agreed to do was a bit unusual — it promised not to censor media reporting on anything related to the games, and to allow uncensored Internet access within the Olympic village before and during the games. It’s already broken these promises several times, the most recent incident taking place on Friday. Apparently thousands of people were waiting in line to purchase tickets and a fist-fight broke out around 4am. Hours later, in daylight after the incident was over, reporters were turned away from people standing in line whom they wanted to interview.

Security was ramped up today, and reporters were denied access to people in the lines by military police guards. Hong Kong television showed journalists being shoved by security officers as they tried to film, less than a mile from the main Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium.

“A reporter was trying to go into a restricted area, refused to comply with orders and was brought away by police,” said Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee. “The police were trying to maintain order and we hope that journalists can comply with our rules.”

Beijing organizers have pledged to give reporters the same freedoms as at previous Olympics. Beijing police didn’t respond to a fax inquiring about the trouble last night and the security policy today.

Bloomberg story here.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some journalists were arrested and others were required to destroy footage. It goes on to talk about how this news is being censored within the media centers of the Olympic village.

Meanwhile, the government continues to block news Web sites such as the BBC’s Mandarin site and the Chinese-language, pro-democratic Apple Daily of Hong Kong. That is happening inside Olympic media centers, despite the promise of China’s Olympic organizers that Internet access would be unfettered. It was always unlikely that China’s media cops would be willing to suspend their censorship habits for the Olympics, and Friday’s overreaction to one unfortunate incident will harm China’s image far more than any reporting would have.

I could find only those two stories about the incident through Google News, though granted it’s not a huge incident.

Others attending at the Olympics are also reporting censorship unrelated to this event. Amnesty International’s web site is blocked, for example, according to various blogs.

I’m thinking that now that the games are about to begin, there’s little the International Olympic Committee can do — they can hardly pull the games at this late hour, and doing so would likely be seen by most (including me) as an overreaction.

I think what should happen is that the media needs to wake up and shine a VERY bright spotlight on this issue, instead of the dim and half-noticed one they’re kinda/sorta/thinking-about shining on it now.

These are articles I’ve recently posted to our new “Reading List” thread at SFN.

Slate op/ed on changing the War Powers Act:

http://www.slate.com/id/2195152?nav=wp

Howard Kurtz on the death of Tony Snow:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/13/AR2008071302054.html

From the Wall Street Journal and Cook Political Report. What’s interesting about this image is mainly the lower portion, which indicates how currently-competitive seats are leaning amongst voters in those districts.

[IMG]http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-AR345A_COATT_20080713205616.gif[/IMG]

Interesting article from Politico.com about Oliver Stone’s efforts to make his upcoming film “W” as realistic as possible.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11776.html

Whadya know, turns out daisies are liberal and fishes are conservative.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070401185.html?hpid=sec-politics

Is it time to throw ‘under the bus’ under the bus?

The euphemistic phrase, which now also means jettisoning a political liability, has taken on a twisted and ubiquitous life of its own. The presumptive Democratic nominee seems to be a leader of the pack among under-the-bus flingers, slingers and tossers, according to cable news pundits and blogosphere scribes.

Mr. Obama has been accused of heaving his white grandmother; his former foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power; the former head of his vice presidential vetting committee, Jim Johnson; the Muslim community; public financing of presidential campaigns; his not-quite-e-mail-pal, Scarlett Johansson; and even his short-lived customized presidential seal — all under the bus.

He’s not alone. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, has been accused of flinging conservative radio talk-show host Bill Cunningham and the Revs. John Hagee and Ron Parsley under the bus, too.

The Wikipedia entry on the phrase has an amusing sidebar, fleshing out a tidbit from the above article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throw_under_the_bus

Etymologists trace the popularization of the expression to Cyndi Lauper[1], who was quoted by The Washington Post in 1984: “In the rock ’n’ roll business, you are either on the bus or under it. Playing “Feelings” with Eddie and the Condos in a buffet bar in Butte is under the bus.”

ROFL! There’s also a great example from the same entry:

[quote] * “He not only threw me under the bus, he backed up and ran over me again.” Larry Craig on Mitt Romney
[/quote]

Anyway, the Wikipedia article cites an NPR story saying the phrase has been used in over 400 political stories over the last six months. Time to throw it under the bus!

Friends of the Earth convinced the press to make a big deal last week out of a very routine thing — a major airline having to fly a jet only partially full. In this particular case, a Boeing 777 flew its regular hop from Chicago to London, but there were only five passengers on board. The FotE was certainly correct in pointing out the wastefulness of this flight, but they mislead the public (and more importantly mislead a major newspaper, its editor, and millions of readers) by ignoring significant factors.

1) The airline was contractually bound to fly that airplane.

2) The airplane was scheduled to make a return flight the next day, in which it could (and generally does) carry hundreds of passengers.

3) The flight lost a lot of money for the airline.

The last point above is particularly important with regard to the FotE’s complaint about the environment. Why? Because it demonstrates that this is, ultimately, a self-correcting problem. It doesn’t require any intervention or effort whatsoever to fix this problem, because if the line continues to be unprofitable then the carrier will stop flying it!

But even worse is the fact that this complaint comes a time when carriers are routinely setting records for percentage of seats filled! When combined with newer engine designs (the plane they complained about is brand spanking new!) means that air travel is more fuel-efficient than its ever been before.

Aren’t we supposed to WANT more efficient mass transit? I don’t hear FotE complaining about that empty bus my local transit authority sends down Martin Luther King Blvd during mid-day, week-day hours when everyone is already at work. What’s the difference?

Some scandal!

The story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2008/03/05/nplane105.xml

The play-up on the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/05/ecoscandal-aa-plane-fli_n_90032.html

PBS Frontline tackles Haditha. The whole episode is available for online viewing at this URL:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haditha/

I put off watching this for a couple of weeks because I assumed it would be pretty ugly and uncomplimentary of the Marines. Boy was I wrong. They completely destroyed Iraqi eyewitness testimony and in the end seemed to support the overall exoneration of the Marines, focusing instead on the complexities of ground combat. And John Murtha does not make out well in this at all.

I tell you what, anybody who believes in liberal bias in the media should watch this.

And of course anybody who thinks Haditha was a massacre should watch it as well. They will not be pleased.

But the main thing is that what ultimately exonerates these Marines is scientific investigation and evidence. A brief example of this can be seen in the situation with House 4, which Marines claimed contained men who were aiming AK-47s at them. Iraqi eyewitnesses claimed that the men were unarmed and shot execution-style in another building and then dragged into House 4. But those eyewitnesses had an obvious motivation for deception, and bullet holes in the walls of the room the men were found in directly contradict their testimony. Another example of this surrounds the men who were in the white car, where eyewitness claims were refuted by live video shot from a drone circling above the area at the time.

Science trumps human eyewitnesses. As it should be.

This is another question I hope to tackle on this blog.  In the video below, Professor Mike Hulme of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, discusses the pitfalls of using scientific evidence to determine political policy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxDkXwhtSo

This blog will be about the intersection between politics and science.  I thought I’d start out with this excellent documentary sent to me by one of our members (iNow) on global warming and denial of it.  This is an area that will likely receive considerable focus on this blog, given that it is obviously one of the main battlegrounds between science and politics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio

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