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Good morning, everyone. Despite the prevailing narrative, I don't think that we're suffering any sort of end of the printed book. It is difficult when Harper Lee can't find someone to reprint To Kill A Mockingbird, though.
As I'm sure more than a few educators and parents know, the way you frame a task helps to determine which students will actually want to do well at the task - things that are "fun" can get the slackers to join in and do quite well, but things that are "work" will only capture those who want to succeed. So, yeah.
Out in the world today, First World meets Third World - African farmers are struggling to keep enough land to feed themselves while biofuels companies search for more land to grow their fuel crops.
An audit done of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found several deficiencies in structure, methodology, and leadership of the panel and made several recommendations on how to strengthen the body so that it would not run into the same problems that developed when others investigated their reports on climate change.
The following would be farcical if it weren't for the fact that someone might still be stoned as a matter of it - Iranian state media called Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, First Lady of France, a "prostitute" over her public calls for Iran to not stone Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.
Here in the United States, what is likely a story of the system working - suspicions, extra security, nothing dangerous actually in the luggage, and then an arrest because it looks like someone might have been trying a dry run of terrorism. Since nothing blew up, of course, this will only be a blip on the radar.
31 August marked the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq by United States troops that started in 2003. On the occasion, President Barack Obama made a speech from the Oval Office, giving credit to the members of the military who have served honorably in executing their duties, championing a turn of the focus to Afghanistan, and lightly touching on the cost of the war, in money and in lives. In relation to those remarks, and the end of OIF, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department returns after some amount of a furlough with context-free data - the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was about $100 billion USD less than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Now, the implication is that you're supposed to say, "See! The war that all you liberals were bitching about still cost less than your much-touted and utterly-suelesss timulus plan!" but one notes that this is the total cost of the war in things that can be measured in dollars and cents, things that were bought, people that were paid. It could also be looked at as "Well, had we not gone to war in 2003, we could have just about paid for all the stimulus!" And the costs of that war are also being felt in the military themselves - some troops may find their health insurance premiums rising, or themselves out of a job now that combat operations in Iraq have ended, and may lose access to some other benefits as the military looks for ways to cut its own budget. Paying for all the soldiers and their health after combat is something we need to do. We could speculate about how much better off we might be if there hadn't been a second land war in Asia, but for now, we're going to have to look hard about how to raise the revenue to ensure that the soldiers aren't left alone, on the streets, or otherwise discarded now that they've been shot at repeatedly. If you want statistics with more context to them, iCasualties, through MaddowBlog points out the breakdown of wounds and deaths in Iraq over the 7.5 years of war, a war that was sold to the public on false and shifting principles, first the lie of Iraq and al-Qaeda, then the lie of Iraq and WMD, then the fragile and possibly fragmenting goal of stable democracy in the Middle East, with brief interludes of "exploiting the oil for food program" and "Saddam was a Bad, Bad man" along the way. 7.5 years of people and money in the actual conflict, with about 50,000 troops in advisory roles still there. We can only hope we can bear the appropriate costs of those soldiers care for the rest of their days.
Well, now. He who would be Speaker of the House, John Boehner, thinks that inviting along someone who thinks the President is secretly Kenyan, secretly Nazi, secretly The Beast of the Apocalypse, and makes openly racist remarks about the President to his election night room. And we complained when the candidates when to the openly anti-homosexual Rick Warren for their debates in 2008. Apparently, it's not just in Texas where everyone goes big.
Technology and the sciences peer into our brains and note when our brains aren't focused on a task, they're still doing important things, like building our sense of self, constructing the handy shortcut of "me" that's then useful later on. And then they turn their eyes to the question of how not having social connections can increase the likelihood of anthropomorphizing other things to make that connection, which might help explain why some parents are so worried about imaginary friends and other people maintain very strong religious connections to the deity of their choice. They also note, near the end, that having lots of social connections may actually result in dehumanization of people not inside the monkeysphere, which we also have empirical examples of. Finding the balance is apparently important for both our health and our ethics.
Turning toward the darker side of medicine, it is apparently common practice for medical students to practice pelvic examinations on anesthetized women, which makes me wonder what other sorts of things are done to patients without their consent while they're out.
In opinions, The Daily Caller profiles John Bolton, one-time amabassador to the United Nations and someone who had thrived in the current culture of criticizing all the President does and calling him extreme in his (remarkably centrist) positions.
For a perfect example of this, from the Making Active Volcanoes out of Molehills department, The Washington Times takes a United States report that the U.S. does actually violate the human rights of its people and makes it into a weapon for authoritarian governments to criticize the United States with, while also expressing skepticism that the government can fix the problems that it describes, instead saying that the American populace (which has, thirty-one times out of thirty-one opportunities, said that some people do not deserve the privileges of marriage because they're not a singular XX/XY combination, as well as a long history of saying that people who aren't white and/or aren't Christian aren't real Americans and should be second class) are the only people who can fix any alleged problems (which don't exist because this is America, F--k Yeah, and we fixed all those discrimination problems already). Although, if you believe as Mr. Phillips does, anyone talking about race or class or anything about how america relates to people of different races and classes is clearly trying to remake the country into something communist or pit people against each other for their own gain. The solution? Focus solely on the ideals of America and how they're intended for everyone. Actually, not a bad solution. Now if we could only agree on what those ideals are.
And then, back in Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, there's something funny abouy the following paper, but I can't quite figure it out - what I think is happening is that Mr. Barro is saying that if we had just let people's unemployment insurance expire at 39 weeks, instead of extending it, the official unemployment number would be down to 6.8%, because all the people who are still on it now would have fallen off the official number by then. I think his implication is that, when confronted with the end of their benefits, all of those unemployed people would have found jobs that magically appeared to them because they stopped thinking certain jobs were beneath them and took any job they could get their hands on. Despite the, y'know, 309 people applying for the one library assistant job. What I'm not sure about and need help with is whether people that have run out of their unemployment insurance are still considered unemployed, one, and two, what would be a reasonable expectation of the percentage of people who simply gave up after their benefits ran out and were not on the official numbers any more? I'm sure that 6.8% figure could be achieved, but I see it as people giving up in waves of mass frustration and despair, not because they suddenly find magic jobs that weren't there before.
I'm more inclined to believe Mr. Krugman's offering about how the supposed bad effects of low interest rates and a high money supply haven't materialized yet, because they're thinking about the wrong kind of recession than someone claiming the unemployment rate would magically drop in a positive way by cutting off people's unemployment insurance benefits.
If Glenn Beck wanted to convince the people of an evangelical bent that he was offering a call to return to faith and religion, in at least one corner, his denomination works against him, and his message resonantes of secular, state religion instead of the calling of Christianity - or, the people he's trying to reach may not want to listen to him at all, because of all the other messages he was promoting before then, and has gone back to today.
Finally, Mr. Rubin attempts to convince us that our concerns about the use of our data and our privacy are mostly overblown, and that we benefit greatly from our data being shared around. After all, when a company knows everything there is to know about you, and then shares it with other companies, you benefit through targeted ads, personalized services, and they're really only collectign anonymous data, anyway, so you don't have to worry that a grocery store will use your past history of wine purchases to exonerate themselves from responsibility if you should slip on their grounds and hurt yourself. Oh, and All Hail the Inherently Superior Free Market, All Praise To Its Name, which works best when it has all the information it can get its hands on.
As I'm sure more than a few educators and parents know, the way you frame a task helps to determine which students will actually want to do well at the task - things that are "fun" can get the slackers to join in and do quite well, but things that are "work" will only capture those who want to succeed. So, yeah.
Out in the world today, First World meets Third World - African farmers are struggling to keep enough land to feed themselves while biofuels companies search for more land to grow their fuel crops.
An audit done of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found several deficiencies in structure, methodology, and leadership of the panel and made several recommendations on how to strengthen the body so that it would not run into the same problems that developed when others investigated their reports on climate change.
The following would be farcical if it weren't for the fact that someone might still be stoned as a matter of it - Iranian state media called Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, First Lady of France, a "prostitute" over her public calls for Iran to not stone Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.
Here in the United States, what is likely a story of the system working - suspicions, extra security, nothing dangerous actually in the luggage, and then an arrest because it looks like someone might have been trying a dry run of terrorism. Since nothing blew up, of course, this will only be a blip on the radar.
31 August marked the official end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq by United States troops that started in 2003. On the occasion, President Barack Obama made a speech from the Oval Office, giving credit to the members of the military who have served honorably in executing their duties, championing a turn of the focus to Afghanistan, and lightly touching on the cost of the war, in money and in lives. In relation to those remarks, and the end of OIF, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department returns after some amount of a furlough with context-free data - the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was about $100 billion USD less than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Now, the implication is that you're supposed to say, "See! The war that all you liberals were bitching about still cost less than your much-touted and utterly-suelesss timulus plan!" but one notes that this is the total cost of the war in things that can be measured in dollars and cents, things that were bought, people that were paid. It could also be looked at as "Well, had we not gone to war in 2003, we could have just about paid for all the stimulus!" And the costs of that war are also being felt in the military themselves - some troops may find their health insurance premiums rising, or themselves out of a job now that combat operations in Iraq have ended, and may lose access to some other benefits as the military looks for ways to cut its own budget. Paying for all the soldiers and their health after combat is something we need to do. We could speculate about how much better off we might be if there hadn't been a second land war in Asia, but for now, we're going to have to look hard about how to raise the revenue to ensure that the soldiers aren't left alone, on the streets, or otherwise discarded now that they've been shot at repeatedly. If you want statistics with more context to them, iCasualties, through MaddowBlog points out the breakdown of wounds and deaths in Iraq over the 7.5 years of war, a war that was sold to the public on false and shifting principles, first the lie of Iraq and al-Qaeda, then the lie of Iraq and WMD, then the fragile and possibly fragmenting goal of stable democracy in the Middle East, with brief interludes of "exploiting the oil for food program" and "Saddam was a Bad, Bad man" along the way. 7.5 years of people and money in the actual conflict, with about 50,000 troops in advisory roles still there. We can only hope we can bear the appropriate costs of those soldiers care for the rest of their days.
Well, now. He who would be Speaker of the House, John Boehner, thinks that inviting along someone who thinks the President is secretly Kenyan, secretly Nazi, secretly The Beast of the Apocalypse, and makes openly racist remarks about the President to his election night room. And we complained when the candidates when to the openly anti-homosexual Rick Warren for their debates in 2008. Apparently, it's not just in Texas where everyone goes big.
Technology and the sciences peer into our brains and note when our brains aren't focused on a task, they're still doing important things, like building our sense of self, constructing the handy shortcut of "me" that's then useful later on. And then they turn their eyes to the question of how not having social connections can increase the likelihood of anthropomorphizing other things to make that connection, which might help explain why some parents are so worried about imaginary friends and other people maintain very strong religious connections to the deity of their choice. They also note, near the end, that having lots of social connections may actually result in dehumanization of people not inside the monkeysphere, which we also have empirical examples of. Finding the balance is apparently important for both our health and our ethics.
Turning toward the darker side of medicine, it is apparently common practice for medical students to practice pelvic examinations on anesthetized women, which makes me wonder what other sorts of things are done to patients without their consent while they're out.
In opinions, The Daily Caller profiles John Bolton, one-time amabassador to the United Nations and someone who had thrived in the current culture of criticizing all the President does and calling him extreme in his (remarkably centrist) positions.
For a perfect example of this, from the Making Active Volcanoes out of Molehills department, The Washington Times takes a United States report that the U.S. does actually violate the human rights of its people and makes it into a weapon for authoritarian governments to criticize the United States with, while also expressing skepticism that the government can fix the problems that it describes, instead saying that the American populace (which has, thirty-one times out of thirty-one opportunities, said that some people do not deserve the privileges of marriage because they're not a singular XX/XY combination, as well as a long history of saying that people who aren't white and/or aren't Christian aren't real Americans and should be second class) are the only people who can fix any alleged problems (which don't exist because this is America, F--k Yeah, and we fixed all those discrimination problems already). Although, if you believe as Mr. Phillips does, anyone talking about race or class or anything about how america relates to people of different races and classes is clearly trying to remake the country into something communist or pit people against each other for their own gain. The solution? Focus solely on the ideals of America and how they're intended for everyone. Actually, not a bad solution. Now if we could only agree on what those ideals are.
And then, back in Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, there's something funny abouy the following paper, but I can't quite figure it out - what I think is happening is that Mr. Barro is saying that if we had just let people's unemployment insurance expire at 39 weeks, instead of extending it, the official unemployment number would be down to 6.8%, because all the people who are still on it now would have fallen off the official number by then. I think his implication is that, when confronted with the end of their benefits, all of those unemployed people would have found jobs that magically appeared to them because they stopped thinking certain jobs were beneath them and took any job they could get their hands on. Despite the, y'know, 309 people applying for the one library assistant job. What I'm not sure about and need help with is whether people that have run out of their unemployment insurance are still considered unemployed, one, and two, what would be a reasonable expectation of the percentage of people who simply gave up after their benefits ran out and were not on the official numbers any more? I'm sure that 6.8% figure could be achieved, but I see it as people giving up in waves of mass frustration and despair, not because they suddenly find magic jobs that weren't there before.
I'm more inclined to believe Mr. Krugman's offering about how the supposed bad effects of low interest rates and a high money supply haven't materialized yet, because they're thinking about the wrong kind of recession than someone claiming the unemployment rate would magically drop in a positive way by cutting off people's unemployment insurance benefits.
If Glenn Beck wanted to convince the people of an evangelical bent that he was offering a call to return to faith and religion, in at least one corner, his denomination works against him, and his message resonantes of secular, state religion instead of the calling of Christianity - or, the people he's trying to reach may not want to listen to him at all, because of all the other messages he was promoting before then, and has gone back to today.
Finally, Mr. Rubin attempts to convince us that our concerns about the use of our data and our privacy are mostly overblown, and that we benefit greatly from our data being shared around. After all, when a company knows everything there is to know about you, and then shares it with other companies, you benefit through targeted ads, personalized services, and they're really only collectign anonymous data, anyway, so you don't have to worry that a grocery store will use your past history of wine purchases to exonerate themselves from responsibility if you should slip on their grounds and hurt yourself. Oh, and All Hail the Inherently Superior Free Market, All Praise To Its Name, which works best when it has all the information it can get its hands on.
