Category Archives: Politics

The OJ Moment

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The Attack on Climate-Change Science
Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century

Awesome post by Bill McKibben, embedded in another post, comparing the climate denialist tactics with those of OJ’s defense team, and why so many people are buying the argument.

If anything, they [the defense team] were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

I also thought this was especially good:

Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.

The feedback problem here is that since they have money, they can buy politicians, who are happy to conclude that global warming is a myth and confound legislation meant to rectify the situation.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Forbes

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Cut Pay For Government Workers

I’m going to rail against this, but it’s only partly because I’m a Federal employee. It’s mostly because the authors are being deceitful.

If this were an airline or an automaker, the solution would be a no-brainer: It would be time for a big pay cut. If the company didn’t cut pay, or increased it, creditors and investors would question the seriousness of management.

The 2010 budget has a freeze of senior staff pay, and the 2011 budget that has been drafted proposes to extend
this pay freeze to all senior political appointees throughout the Federal Government and continue the policy of no bonuses for all political appointees. This is exactly the behavior that many taxpayers wanted, and often did not get, of high-level executive pay in the private sector in businesses that were being bailed out or supported by federal money.

But here’s the biggie:

[T]otal compensation per federal worker–cash earnings plus fringe benefits–now averages twice that of the private sector. So cutting cash earnings by 10% across the board seems not only reasonable, but justified.

The basic problem here is that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison — the spectrum of workers in the federal government is not even close to that of the private sector. Part of the reason for this is that there are many private-sector contractors that do work for the government, and a lot of these are low-paying, unskilled jobs, such as the janitorial staff. Many government jobs require a college degree, unlike a large number of private-sector jobs. I know that my local environment is not representative, but I’d be surprised if as many as 10% of the civilian government positions in the command don’t require a college degree, and perhaps a third of the staff have advanced degrees of some sort. This kind of comparison of averages of dissimilar distributions is at best incredibly misleading and at worst an out-and-out lie, like if you were comparing the compensation of the employees of a fast-food restaurant with the architectural and engineering firm on the next block, and concluding the A&E folks were overpaid.

What would be appropriate is a comparison of similar jobs within the government and private sector. Take me (please!) The median salary for a physicist working in industry was over $100k back in 2004 (couldn’t find anything newer), which was certainly more than I was making at the time, even with my locality pay for living in the DC area. I can think of many jobs where you would take a pay cut to work for the government — lawyers, I understand, can make a nice living in the private sector, much better than government lawyers or judges. And my Google-fu tells me that the article’s authors, Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, both had stints in the federal government. They should have no trouble reporting how their private sector salary and compensation stacks up against what they received as federal employees, but that isn’t mentioned in the article.

What Are the Odds?

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DNA’s Dirty Little Secret

In Puckett’s case, where there were only five and a half markers available, the San Francisco crime lab put the figure at one in 1.1 million—still remote enough to erase any reasonable doubt of his guilt. The problem is that, according to most scientists, this statistic is only relevant when DNA material is used to link a crime directly to a suspect identified through eyewitness testimony or other evidence. In cases where a suspect is found by searching through large databases, the chances of accidentally hitting on the wrong person are orders of magnitude higher.

The reasons for this aren’t difficult to grasp: consider what happens when you take a DNA profile that has a rarity of one in a million and run it through a database that contains a million people; chances are you’ll get a coincidental match. Given this fact, the two leading scientific bodies that have studied the issue—the National Research Council and the FBI’s DNA advisory board—have recommended that law enforcement and prosecutors calculate the probability of a coincidental match differently in cold-hit cases. In particular, they recommend multiplying the FBI’s rarity statistic by the number of profiles in the database, to arrive at a figure known as the Database Match Probability. When this formula is applied to Puckett’s case (where a profile with a rarity of one in 1.1 million was run through a database of 338,000 offenders) the chances of a coincidental match climb to one in three.

It’s scary that a judge didn’t find these statistics relevant, and scarier still that the FBI is denying database access to scientists who might confirm that their statistics are right or wrong.

I wonder, though, if the defense asked if the police had tracked down the other ~300 suspects who would have fit the DNA profile in the US, and if that would have raised reasonable doubt?

George Will is a Boulder

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Global warming advocates ignore the boulders

He’s certainly not a scientist, nor, seemingly, is he scientifically literate.

In his latest steaming pile of op-ed on global warming, Mr. Will attempts to call into question the “settled science” of global warming by discussing virtually no science at all. Seriously — a bunch of politicians not being able to agree on a course of action does nothing to question the science. And likewise for businesses making a business decision. But it is the claim that there has been no recent warming that is what really bugs me. George almost gets it right earlier in the op-ed, when he says there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years, but here he (and many others) sin by omission. If one follows the link back to the BBC interview with Phil Jones, one gets a better picture

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

In other words, if one has a sufficiently noisy data set, it is always going to be possible to pick a subset of the data where the noise masks any statistically significant trend. It doesn’t mean the trend isn’t there, or that the best fit is a zero slope. When Jones says “Yes, but only just” he’s telling us that one can just draw a flat line through the data, but this means that one could also draw a line with a slope of 0.24C per decade through the data, and it would have the same importance — you can’t exclude warming at that rate, either.

Imagine this question being asked instead:

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present it’s possible there has been global warming at a rate as high as 0.24C/decade?

The answer would have to be essentially identical, i.e. it would have to be yes. You can only statistically exclude warming at a higher rate than that!

What one certainly can’t do (that is, with any intellectual honesty) is conclude that this is an absence of warming. Statistically speaking, if the best fit to the data were a line with no slope, one could rule out neither an increase nor a decrease — one could only quote a limit on those trends. That’s one of the things about science — we try and quantify our results, rather than bandy about generalities. You might force a sound-bite answer out of a scientist (or worse, get there by ripping a quote out of context), but the instinct is to properly qualify the result.

So what if you don’t want both of the above scenarios to fit Dr. Jones’ answer? If you want a statistically significant answer you have to do as he suggests and look at a longer set of data in order to beat the noise down (random noise will average out with the square root of the number of data points). Anyone who does experimental science knows this, and is one of those things that a scientifically literate person should know. So the choice of a short data set is a form of cherry-picking — selecting a data set in such a way as to present a misleading result. If one looks at a longer data set, a statistically significant trend does emerge, and it is one of warming.

George, you’re not a scientist. I had some respect for you in the days I used to read your opinion pieces, because you could and did make cogent arguments, even if I did not agree with you. But science is based on facts, not opinions, and when you have to misrepresent those facts to make your point, your conclusions aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed.

Update: there’s more

Here Comes the Bribe

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Paying Zero for Public Services

[T]he idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes.

It’s somewhat difficult for me to appreciate how corruption of this type this can go on; it seems like there has got to be a critical mass of bribery for it to become socially “accepted,” and it’s just not in place in this form in the US (our corruption takes place at higher levels of government). And we have a population that isn’t generally shy about protesting or otherwise calling attention to injustices of this caliber — that’s our mindset. But I wonder how much more difficult it is for true democracy to take hold where such corruption is widespread, and the people don’t have this will to speak out.

Mr. Smith Doesn't Go to Utah

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13-year-old helps save daylight saving in Utah

I know this is supposed to be an uplifting story of how clever a teenager is, in a sort of afterschool special kinda way, but I’m more cynical than that. I see it as a bunch of blowhard politicians happily debating something they do not understand, have made no effort to understand, but are willing to make a decision about anyway, despite the fact that by not understanding the issue you have no hope of recognizing the ramifications of your decision. All this despite the fact that a teenager can understand and explain the concept, so it really wouldn’t have been all that difficult to have a staffer spend a few minutes Googling the information and summarizing it for you.

One Thing's for Certain

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I ran a cross a few infographics recently, while surfing the web because it was too snowy outside to do anything, and I was avoiding doing my own taxes, so I looked at everyone else’s.

The US federal budget, showing the inflows and outflows, broken down into several categories. One thing struck me: income tax revenue is only slightly larger than payroll tax revenue. In many political arguments about tax cuts, it’s only income tax that is mentioned, and the income tax burden is touted. But that’s missing half of the picture, because the payroll taxes are regressive; there are people who pay no income tax but pay a significant fraction of their income in payroll taxes, and are not helped by income tax cuts.

So if you analyze the tax burden incorporating the payroll taxes (as well as state and local taxes), what does the picture look like? It’s only slightly progressive — not the portrayal of woe that some would have you believe.

I Want my Apocalypse, and I Want it Now.

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Why are you so terribly disappointing?

Big f–ing deal. We just do not care. It’s all a big disappointment. Hey, I was expecting to be blown away. I was expecting miracles and transformations and multiple twitching orgasms on sight. Do not come at me with tantalizing promises only to reveal that you can fulfill most of them to a fairly good degree, and not far exceed all of them in every imaginable way. We’re Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.

A typical rant. I was expecting better.

Things Break, Don't They?

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Chad went an mentioned a buzzword that sets my teeth on edge: deferred maintenance.

It’s not just the economics of academia that suck in this regard. I’ve seen my fair share of it, too. As Chad notes, maintenance is not sexy, and it’s hard to get people not directly involved fired up about it.

Things break, even when Dino and Luigi Vercotti aren’t shaking you down. They break even when you can avoid the overzealous attitude of “If it’s stuck, force it. If it breaks it needed replacing anyway.” And there various approaches you can take to this fact of life —

1. Fix/replace things when they break
2. Maintain the equipment in good working order, so it breaks down less often
3. Try to anticipate when something will break, and replace it just before that happens

If we’re talking about things we really need, the first option is pretty much mandatory. Sure, when the singing fish in the rec room breaks down you can let it slide, but not so much when your lab equipment goes. But the other options entail some prioritizing and risk management. If you can afford to let some apparatus run until it dies, and the downtime while you replace it doesn’t affect you, then your choice is pretty clear, but very often in business and research you can’t let that happen. Broken equipment means some people can’t do their jobs, and other people are probably working overtime getting things working again. And yet, all too often the first response to budget cuts is to cut the maintenance budget.

At first glance, from a beancounter’s bottom-line approach, this looks good, which it’s why it’s so tempting. Money not spent is money saved, at least in the short-term, myopic acasual view, and new equipment does tend to last a while even without doing much to maintain it. So you seem to have saved money. But eventually, the equipment dies before it would have, had it been properly looked after, and now you’re stuck. You hadn’t expected the equipment to die, bureaucratically speaking— there’s no money in the budget for a replacement. You don’t already have a spare widget, because that’s an expenditure, and the goal was to cut the budget.

In business situations, where you deliver a product of some sort, you can at least quantify downtime in terms of lost productivity, and make a business case for keeping things running. But what if that metric isn’t there? There are a lot of situations where lost time isn’t measured (people “steal” budget this way — eliminate a position by shifting work to another department. They look like they’ve saved money, and the extra time burden isn’t accounted for because it’s other departments that are taking up the slack)

Here’s where the really insidious part of the process comes into play. From what I’ve seen (in different bureaucracies), even though run-of-the-mill budget expenses are squeezed, if you can turn it into a crisis you can still get money. Without this widget, your operations screech to a halt, and that’s a calamity, dammit, so you take your case to a higher level, and they search for money to patch the figurative or literal gaping hole that’s appeared. Money is siphoned off from other sources (perhaps, ironically, from other programs cutting maintenance budget), and that saves the day. Until the next emergency.

And nobody has learned anything useful. Systems that run this way have this very destructive feedback loop. The catastrophes get fixed, after a fashion, and few stop to think about how that situation — and the large amount of money spent — could have been averted with less money ultimately spent. And the really frustrating thing is that the people involved in these decisions are smart enough to know that not changing the oil in their car isn’t a viable money-saving tactic, and yet can’t seem to transfer that mindset to the business case.