Category Archives: Politics

Giving the Devil His Due

Posted on by

I read The Devil Is in the Digits, an analysis of the Iranian voting results, and something doesn’t feel quite right about it. (And it’s not that these two political science student authors are being touted as mathematicians in some of the blogs linking to the story) Disclaimer: there seem to be lots of reasons to question the vote. I’m not addressing anything but the rigor of this analysis.

Now, I could be wrong about this, because anything past basic probability gives me trouble — I’m not particularly skilled (my lowest math grades were on probability exams. What are the odds of that?), and those feeble skills have atrophied for most anything beyond simple dice-rolling and poker calculations.

But I do recall that when you multiply probabilities together, it needs to be for independent events. And I question what’s going on here.

We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

OK, the premise seems fine. You expect each digit to show up 10% of the time, but you can deviate from that and still have a random distribution. But the relationship between the digits is not random — if you have too many 7s, you must have fewer of other numbers! So what I want to know is how they arrived at the four percent result.

Let me illustrate with an example that’s easier to see, and one I can work through: coin tosses. If you toss a coin twice, there are three outcomes: Two heads (25% of the time) a head and a tail (50%) and two tails (25% of the time). So while the expected, average result is one head, it only happens half the time — a result of either two heads or two tails isn’t evidence of anything fishy; we don’t have enough trials. But here’s the biggie: what is the probability of getting two heads, and no tails? It’s still 25%, because (heads) and (not tails) are not independent results. They have the maximum amount of correlation you can get, and since they aren’t independent results, you wouldn’t multiply the probabilities together to find the answer.

I found an analysis someone did using random numbers, and their model simulation gives the odds of a number appearing 5 or fewer times as about 20%, and appearing more than 20 time as 11%. But the odds of both shouldn’t simply be the product of the two, because the results would be correlated in some fashion that’s more involved than the coin-tossing.

So I wonder how they arrived at 4%. It’s not at all clear.

The second part of their analysis is of the last two digits, and whether they are adjacent (or identical) numbers or not, e.g. 54 (adjacent) vs 59 (not).

To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran’s vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits.

Aha! They assume that the numbers are perfectly distributed, and we know the last digits are not; I didn’t see any mention of the second-to-last digit. So one has to wonder whether this analysis holds. I can certainly think of some examples where it fails: the second-to-last digits are all 5, and the last digits are all 4, 5 or 6. In that unlikely result, there would be zero pairs that were non-adjacent, rather than 70%. So I have to wonder how far the assumption holds and how badly it fails. And if these odds depend on the distribution, the digits and the pairings are not independent of each other, so multiplying the probabilities won’t give the right answer.

That’s what my gut and some basic probability math, dredged up from the recesses of my brain tell me. Perhaps someone who does math for a living can confirm that I’m right or tell me that I’m wrong and should stick to my day job. (or that I’m right and I should still stick to my day job)

The Deluge of Sarcasm

Posted on by

A risk you run with in the digital age is that if you do something stupid, it will almost certainly be recorded in a quasi-permanent way, in contrast to the ephemeral nature of a spoken conversation. You don’t even have the “I was misquoted” excuse when you’ve removed the human being from the equation.

Great example: Pete Hoekstra (R, Min) tweeting about the horrible mistreatment he and his colleagues have suffered.

Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

Not surprisingly, that set off the internet’s sarcasmotron. Lots of tweets, and a blog post devoted to it. If you don’t want to sift sort too much, here are some highlights

benhuh: @petehoekstra I had to sit in the last row of our corporate jet this morning. This is what Rosa Parks must have felt.

curtsmith: @petehoekstra, fell off my surfboard in Malibu today, now I know what D-day felt like.

donnahon: @petehoekstra Got some sand in my shoe. Now I know what it’s like to be on my third deployment in Iraq.

I Dare You to Steal this Story

Posted on by

Ralph Nader with a slim jim.

The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

Thinking like a criminal is Tobias’ idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you’ve never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He’s the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.

Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site’s streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration’s prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.

I don’t know which is worse: the ones who overplay the threat to make us afraid, or (as in the story) the ones who overplay the quality of security to make us feel safe.

Seeing it in Perspective

Posted on by

America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making

Breaking down the $2 trillion in deficit since 2000. For all the hysteria about recent events, I find this tidbit interesting (summarized in this graphic):

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

Obama doesn’t get a free pass, though.

“Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”

“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.”

Let's Teach Adults, Too

Posted on by

How to Teach a Child to Argue

And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.

I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.

Teaching kids how to argue properly presumes that the parents know how to argue, which I don’t think is generally the case. But that’s a rant for another post.

Honor thy Scientists?

Posted on by

why you should honor thy scientists

[I]t’s not just zealots who will equate scientific methodology with theistic dogmatism. In an attempt to appear completely objective and beyond any charge of bias, some writers will give equal importance to every opinion with seemingly no regard for whether it’s right or wrong. They think that by giving a biologist who’s life was spent researching evolution and a random televangelist the same weight in their articles will make them insightful reporters who diligently consider every side of a story. But the truth is that not everything you hear is accurate and if you’re reporting an incorrect assumption without actually doing your homework and noting that it’s wrong, you’re not an objective reporter or analyst. You’re a scribe afraid of being called biased.

What's Your US News IQ?

Posted on by

News IQ quiz

You correctly answered 11 out of the 12 possible questions, which means you did better on the quiz than 82% of the general public.

Couldn’t remember where the DJIA has been hanging out recently.

You can check out nationwide results by age, gender and education level.

Science v Politics, Round Whatever

Posted on by

Obama’s green guru calls for white roofs

One of the many things about politics and political reporting that I find annoying is the eagerness with which the reporters will “interpret” what was said, and this story appears to be no exception. It’s hard to say for sure, because precious little of what Chu actually said is quoted, so one doesn’t know how much the reporter is making up. The other point that comes up here is how very different politics and science are.

What he is actually quoted as saying:

“If you look at all the buildings and if you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour and if you do that uniformally, that would be the equivalent of… reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years – just taking them off the road for 11 years,” he said.

Now, what he didn’t say was that we are actually going to force people to do this — there’s no mention of a policy initiative, or a spending bill to hire TomSawyer Inc to whitewash everything (or, more specifically, to subcontract out the whitewashing to other companies at an enormous profit). It is, at its core, a statement of science that can be buttressed or argued on points of fact. People familiar with scientific analysis might recognize the physicist presenting the idealized case: how would reflection vs absorption change if we went from a black surface to a white surface, and what is the equivalent effect of doing that. The point of such an analysis is a first pass at deciding whether it’s a worthwhile endeavor, an attitude which the president has been trying to re-instill after an eight-year absence. Engaging in this kind of exercise indicates whether or not further action should be taken; if the numbers were different, one could come to a different conclusion about how worthwhile such an effort might be. Here is a distillation of what Secretary Chu said: the albedo of the earth is a large effect in the global warming picture. Here’s how big. There. That’s it. Now, start your engines and decide how one might go about leveraging this idea, or if it should be applied — that’s where politics comes in.

But this is not the direction the article takes, and furthermore, not what many comments attached to the article reflect (at least, as far as I got in reading them). It’s amazing, and not a little bit scary to me, that people feel free to criticize things they obviously don’t understand, the first of which is that science is not a democracy. The reflectivity of concrete as compared to blacktop is not a political question, and the answer does not depend on whether you are conservative or liberal. You are not entitled to have an opinion about factual things. “Blue is a nice color” is an opinion. “The sky scatters blue light” is not. When you exercise the right to make political decisions, you also have the responsibility to make sure that these are informed decisions.

So let’s look at a little physics that’s botched in the comments.

Continue reading →

Gimme a G! Gimme an M!

Posted on by

How GM is Making Electric Vehicles Relevant

Some rah-rah from someone who works for GM. I think the basic ideas later in the piece are sound — all else being about the same, the US is not going to widely adopt electric cars that are solely lethargic commuter vehicles, so gas/electric plug-in hybrids are the next step.

But I disagree with the turd that leads off the article:

There seems to be in the minds of many some sort of inherent conflict between being a large, traditional automaker and the ability to develop cars of the future.

I couldn’t disagree more with that sentiment, and GM is on a mission to prove it.

Dude, you’ve been bailed out by the taxpayers and you’re on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. If you had great vision and the ability to develop cars of the future, you wouldn’t be in this situation.