Category Archives: Politics

Biodiesel, Ahoy!

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My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy’s Great Green Fleet

The navy is pushing toward green fuels and energy efficiency, but not always with the agreement of Congress.

Four times in history it has overhauled old transportation paradigms—from sail to coal to gasoline to diesel to nuclear—carrying commercial shipping with it in the process. “We are a better Navy and a better Marine Corps for innovation,” Mabus says. “We have led the world in the adoption of new energy strategies in the past. This is our legacy.”

It goes beyond supply lines. Rising sea levels lapping at naval bases? A melting and increasingly militarized Arctic? The Navy is tackling problems that freeze Congress solid. What it learns, what it implements, and how it adapts and innovates will drive market changes that could alter the course of the world.

But not without a fight.

Scientific Illiteracy

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Scientific Illiteracy

There is certainly a problem, but when it reaches the level of elected officials it has gone beyond a problem of literacy. I’d venture to say that Paul Broun being Chairman of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is not so much illiteracy as bordering on the abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP. That someone like this could be elected is surely a symptom of the illiteracy in the US, but brings with it a whole new level of problems.

When elected officials, the very people we ask to lead our country, are ignorant of how the world works, how can our country be expected to survive much longer?

Also, I can’t help but think that if meteor impacts had been brought up as a point of discussion a few weeks ago, there would have been a backlash of anti-science opposition, attacking the science and scientists involved and accusations of fear-mongoring. (Now, of course, there’s a possibility of an overreaction and advocation of programs that will be nothing but safety theater.) There seems to be a tendency to deny there is any problem until it has reached a crisis level.

It's All in the Way You Spin It

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How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year

I think it’s great the Etsy found a new way to think about things and realized that the old ways were depriving them of quality people. I hope that others adopt newer ways of thinking as well. (I’m looking at you, my physics brethren, and by the numbers, physicists are more than likely brethren.)

But way down in the story (not quite paragraph 19, but it’s close)

At the time of the talk, Etsy’s had twenty women on its 110-person engineering team, which is a roughly eighteen percent (or a four and half times) increase from the previous year. It’s not quite hockey stick growth, but it’s a huge step forward.

18%/4.5 is 4%, and since we need a whole number, my guess is that there were 3 women out of ~75 the previous year (I assume they were expanding), unless they fired a bunch of engineers as well as hiring new ones, and had 4 out of ~100. The fantastic growth trumpeted by the headline obscures the reality that their starting numbers were craptacularly low and have been improved to merely poor.

Aye, There's the Rub(io)

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Why Doesn’t Florida Senator Marco Rubio Know How Old the Earth Is?

Rubio’s statement sounds to me to be standard politico-speak — trying not to say anything that might offend his base. It’s possible he knew the answer (bucking the trend, as it were); to state it would be troubling to those who think the answer can be expressed in five digits or fewer. But probably not, given the general state of things and his disconnect between science and the economy:

I got a chill when I read Rubio’s statements, “I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow.”

Perhaps Senator Rubio is unaware that science—and its sisters engineering and technology— are actually the very foundation of our country’s economy? All of our industry, all of our technology, everything that keeps our country functioning at all can be traced back to scientific research and a scientific understanding of the Universe.

Building a Better Soccer Ball

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Better in terms of durability.

Joy That Lasts, on the Poorest of Playgrounds

The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.

“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.”

The solution was a foam similar to what is used in Crocs.

[H]e happened to be having breakfast with Sting, a friend from his days in the music business. Mr. Jahnigen told him how soccer helped the children in Darfur cope with their troubles and his efforts to find an indestructible ball. Sting urged Mr. Jahnigen to drop everything and make the ball. Mr. Jahnigen said that developing the ball might cost as much as $300,000. Sting said he would pay for it.

An interesting logistical issue is also brought up: the balls are more difficult to ship than traditional balls, because they can’t be deflated (the reverse of a certain balloon issue I’ve run into)

If you are so inclined, you can go to the website and buy a ball for about $40, in which case one will also be donated, or you can donate one for $25.

Silver for the Gold

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Silver Medal
Subtitle: Obama’s big win does not mean Nate Silver is a towering electoral genius.

It’s well after midnight on the East Coast, and the results are in: Nate Silver has won the 2012 presidential election by a landslide. His magic formula for predictions, much maligned in some corners in recent weeks, appears to have hit the mark in every state—a perfect 50 green M&Ms for accuracy. Now my Twitter feed is blowing up with announcements of his coronation as the Emperor of Math and the ruler of the punditocracy. Wait—it was even more than that, they say: a victory for blogging, and also one for rational thought. He proved the haters wrong! He proved science right! Is this guy getting lucky tonight or what?
But all these stats triumphalists have it wrong. Nate Silver didn’t nail it; the pollsters did. The vaunted Silver “picks”—the ones that scored a perfect record on Election Day—were derived from averaged state-wide data. According to the final tallies from FiveThirtyEight, Obama led by 1.3 points in Virginia, 3.6 in Ohio, 3.6 in Nevada, and 1.9 in Colorado. He won all those states, just like he won every other state in which he’d led in averaged, state-wide polls. That doesn’t mean that Silver’s magic model works. It means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it’s done repeatedly.

Two things: 1) yes, it does mean — to some degree of certainty — that Silver’s model works, and 2) you’re missing the point of the triumph. This wasn’t Nate Silver vs the pollsters, it was Nate Silver vs the pundits. And most of the pundits botched almost everything having to do with statistics beyond a trivial interpretation, and said that the predictions from the 538 blog were bogus. This was a triumph of statistics done right over the people who abuse, or are clueless about, statistics.

Put another way, the pundits had the same access to the polling data. And they were all over the place in their predictions, because they went with their gut instead of the data. That’s the underlying lesson.

The article points out, quite fairly, that other people use statistics properly, and had similar success in their predictions. Which raises the question — why all the other pundits weren’t doing this? The message here, if you hadn’t already figured it out, is that punditry is not about prediction, it’s about rabble-rousing and guesswork. Claiming that doing the electoral math is easy is a bit disingenuous when almost nobody who had a big platform (i.e. television) was doing it. It’s easy to see in hindsight, and apparently it’s easy to continue to try and marginalize the effort and the results.

Further, when you insist that predicting the result of the presidential race doesn’t prove he was right — with which I agree — you can’t then turn around and look at other individual races to say he was wrong.

Hack and Shill Went Up the Hill

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Why Nate Silver’s Gambling Streak Makes Me Trust Him More

America is filled with people who think its okay to lie, bullshit, or otherwise misrepresent the truth in order to advance the electoral prospects of a politician or the cause of a governing coalition. Let’s call them shills. Other people aren’t necessarily aware that they’re misrepresenting the truth, but their work is so shaped by what would advance the causes of a candidate or governing coalition that it’s often indistinguishable from the shills. We’ll call them hacks. In a better world, journalists would be sworn enemies of shills and hacks, and the best are. Unfortunately, the press, especially the political press, has more than its share of shills and hacks.

I’m not sure if you’ve been following the Nate Silver hullaballoo this past week or so, but the short version is this: he has used statistics to show that Obama had (at the time of the linked article) a 75% chance of winning, based on a model that weights different polls according to past accuracy, instead of using the very blunt national polls. Advanced stuff. But because those on the right don’t like the answer, they are crying, “foul!”

A) this isn’t surprising, given how the GOP tends to treat science the way a baby treats a diaper. But B) this is actually an example of how science works. (A and B being somewhat related)

Taken by itself, a 75% chance of winning isn’t testable for a single-outcome event like an election. You can win even if your probability is low — unlikely events happen all the time. (and 1 in 4, or the current 1 in 6, is not all that unlikely. Clearly, you can roll a 6 on a standard die, even though there’s only a 1 in 6 chance of doing so) In the long run we see truly unlikely events because there are a lot of events. But that’s what you need in science in order to test your model — lots of events, so that you may gather statistics. This is why it’s important that Silver not only uses his model(s) to predict the result of the presidential election. There are more results

In 2008, he correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election in 49 of 50 states, and accurately identified the winner in all 35 Senate races.

So there’s more to it than simply picking an overall winner. When your model accurately predicts outcomes, you have confidence that the model is a good one. Just like in science. We aren’t satisfied if all we can do explain past events; it’s the predictive power, and the possibility that the model can be falsified, that is one of the things that sets science apart from any wannabes.

Science and Math and Politics

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Eight causes of the deficit “fiscal cliff.” Which party is most responsible?

As we approach the US election, mentioning politics is not entirely avoidable. But not blind rhetoric — this has some science and math discussion in it.

[H]ow have we Americans been able to afford the endless trade deficits that propel world development? Simple. Science and technology. Each decade since the 1940s saw new, U.S.-led advances that engendered enough wealth to let us pay for all the stuff pouring out of Asian factories, giving poor workers jobs. Jet planes, rockets, satellites, electronics & transistors & lasers, telecom, pharmaceuticals… and the Internet. How I’d love to see a second “National Debt Clock” showing where we’d be now, if we (the citizens) had charged just a 5% royalty on the fruits of U.S. federal research. We’d be in the black!

The first decade of the 21st Century — the Naughty Oughts — was the first (since the 1940s) that saw no such technological tsunami, making America rich enough to buy from the world. As the internet boom petered out, we could have made sustainable energy our Next Big Thing. It was proposed, and the rate that China and Germany are getting rich off solar and wind is most impressive!

By coincidence, that was also the decade when the Fox War on Science hit full stride. When science became the right’s enemy number one.

If not for that, and Bush cuts on R&D and all the rest, would we have had another renaissance and tech-driven boom by now? I cannot prove might-have-beens. But it is no accident that this failure of the expected decadal innovation wave happened in the wake of an epochal and telling event. When the GOP banished from Capitol Hill all of the advisory panels on sci and tech that had helped Congresses to legislate wisely for 60 years.

The math part is pretty straightforward:

Remember, we paid for Big Bird and the other stuff just fine, under Bill Clinton. If you’re serious about looking for the reasons we’re in a mess… look at what changed.

And the conclusion

The bad news? Unbelievably, in the present election, the citizenry might actually re-hire the gang that did all this to us. Proving that hypnotism and incantations can trump facts — fooling some of the people, all of the time. Enough of the people.

The lesson is simple: do not re-hire the dopes who made the mess. Who committed the first half dozen travesties. If you do, future generations will have you to blame.

Seriously: do not re-hire the dopes who made the mess

Visa, Visa, Who's Got a Visa

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I’ve linked to some articles on H-1B visas before and it’s fair to say I’m not a huge fan because it seems obvious to me that the system has morphed into a loophole for letting businesses hire cheap foreign labor and drive down wages under the pretense of the lack of domestic workers. I have a hard time reconciling the arguments that we have a scientist glut with the cries of businesses who can’t find STEM workers and need to import them.

Well, it seems that IBM is one of the more blatant abusers of the system

More Proof that Visa Abuse Is Instinctive at IBM

IBM: “The Cost Difference Is Too Great for the Business Not to Look for” H-1B Workers

Companies are willing to ignore available Americans even when they say they “urgently” need workers.

H-1B workers are cheaper than Americans — “and the cost difference is too great” for IBM not to look for foreign workers first. The H-1B statutes are designed to allow employers to legally pay H-1B workers less than Americans and IBM (and a lot of others) is taking full advantage.

The H-1B visa quotas are important — IBM would only hire Americans when “visa-ready resources” were not available. The quotas put in place a stopping point where employers can no longer ignore American applicants.

Uncle Mitt: I Don't Want You

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(Sorry, it’s politics-induced spleenvent time)

For all his wealth, Mitt Romney can’t buy a clue. If you live in the US and not under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now, what Mitt Romney said at a fundraiser about the roughly 47% of people who pay no federal income taxes.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Most full-time students don’t make enough to pay federal income tax, so they are included in that 47%. If you are a student and don’t pay federal income tax, Mitt Romney thinks that you are not taking personal responsibility and care for you life. Let that sink in for a moment — pursuing higher education, to him, means you aren’t trying to care for your life. It’s not a responsible thing to do. If you have to take out a loan and get some federal assistance with that, like a low interest rate, you’re a mooch. A loser.

On top of all this is the math-challenged implication that he thinks that this 47% is a static group of people — nobody moves in or out each year, depending on their circumstances — and that it’s the same 47% that support Obama. These victims, these entitlement freeloaders, none of whom take personal responsibility and for their lives. You students. You, who paid into social security all your life and are now retired. You, who got crushed by the economic situation Obama inherited, or devastated by not being able to get insurance, and ended up not paying income tax. You’re irresponsible, and not worth the candidate’s time or representation, should he be elected. He doesn’t want you, and doesn’t want to be your president.

Wow.