Month: November 2012
Eloquent Obama is back: The Victory Speech
And here, for good measure, is Mitt Romney's concession speech:
Barack Hussein Obama wins
Why 40 percent of Americans won’t vote
From MSNBC:
Voting inconvenient
“Part of the issue is we have too much democracy,” McDonald said. “We're just voting a lot in the U.S.” With state, local and national races, as well as mid-term elections, most Americans have a chance to cast a ballot about once every year. Other Western democracies may only have an election every five years, McDonald told LiveScience. That frequency makes voting a hassle, he said.
More here.
Are your political views hardwired
From Smithsonian:
Right brain, left brain
The latest research came out last week, a study at the University of South Carolina that concluded that the brains of self-identified Democrats and Republicans aren’t hard-wired the same. Specifically, the scientists found more neural activity in areas of the brain believed to be linked with broad social connectedness in Democrats (friends, the world at-large) and more activity in areas linked with tight social connectedness in the Republicans (family, country). This was in line with what previous studies have suggested, that people who say they’re Democrats tend to take a more global view on issues while those who call themselves Republicans tend to see things through more of an American filter. But the findings also ran counter to previous research suggesting Democrats are, by biological nature, more empathetic souls than Republicans. Not so, according to the South Carolina study; it’s just that Republicans are more likely to focus their empathy on family members or people they know.
More here.
How Other Animals Choose Their Leaders
You think our elections are tough? Tell it to the wolves.
Rob Dunn in Slate:
The idea that ants, honeybees, or other social animals might do a thing or two better than we do is ancient. The Bible, Torah, and Quran all invoke insect societies. In the Amazon, Kayapo children were once advised to follow the brave, social ways of the ant (and to eschew the more vulgar ways of the termite).
Most recently, Cornell University entomologist Tom Seeley has written a lovely and compelling book titled Honeybee Democracy which suggests we turn to the bees to see how they make decisions. Thanks to the work of Seeley and his collaborators, it is now clear that honeybee hives really are democratic. When it’s time to look for a new nest, options are weighted by the evaluations of many different bees about a site’s qualities—its size, its humidity, the density of surrounding flowers. Individual bees vote with dances, and when the number of dances in favor of some particular site is high enough, the masses are swayed. Together, citizen bees choose, if not perfection, the best possible option.
More here.
Election Preview from n + 1
Mark Greif in n + 1:
More here by Greif as well as others. [Scroll down to continue reading the piece by Mark Greif.]
Correcting the math of journalists in Ohio
Robert Wright in The Atlantic:
That wording suggests that Obama's two-point edge has no meaning. And that's a common way for journalists to interpret results that fall within the “margin of error.” For example, in September a conservative columnist in the New York Post asserted that Obama's lead in state polls didn't matter because the “polls separating the two candidates are within the margin of error — meaning that there is no statistical difference in support between Obama and Romney.”
Explaining why it's wrong to say there's “no statistical difference” in such cases will take a couple of paragraphs, so please bear with me (unless you recently took a stats course, in which case you can skip these paragraphs if not more).
Here's what pollsters never tell you, except maybe in the fine print: When they say there's a margin of error of X, they don't mean there's no chance whatsoever that the poll is off by more than X. Typically, their margin-of-error calculations are based on a confidence level of 95 percent, which means the chances of the poll being off by more than X are 5 percent.
In the Columbus Dispatch poll, X was 2.2. So if the poll had found Obama was ahead by 2.21 points, the finding would have been “outside the margin of error” and thus treated with great respect — but the fact is that there would still have been a 5 percent chance that, in the actual voting population, Romney was ahead. (I'm assuming the Dispatch followed convention and used the 95 percent confidence threshold in calculating its margin of error — see postscript below.) The flip side of this coin is that the Obama lead of 2 points in the poll, though less than the margin of error of 2.2 points, is by no means devoid of significance. If you did the math — which, many years after taking quantitative analysis in college, I lack the brain cells to do precisely — you'd find that there's a probability of somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent that Obama is ahead in the voting population as a whole.
More here.
Pakistani Power Play
If the United States wants to curb terrorism and nuclear proliferation, it needs to fundamentally rethink its relationship with Pakistan.
C. Christine Fair in Foreign Policy:
The self-proclaimed “land of the pure” has used Islamist militants as tools of foreign policy since its earliest days of independence. In the fall of 1947, tribal marauders from Pakistan's Pashtun areas, benefiting from extensive government support, rushed into the princely state of Kashmir in hopes of seizing it for Pakistan. Leaders of the newborn Pakistani state feared that the king of the Muslim-dominant state of Kashmir would seek independence or agree to join India. The strategy triggered the very event Islamabad was trying to prevent: The king, watching with apprehension as his own security forces failed to stave off the attackers, sought India's help. India agreed to come to his aid, provided that the maharaja join India's dominion. Indian troops thus joined the fight to defend its newly acquired territory. The eventual ceasefire left the princely state divided between the dominions of India and Pakistan.
To wrest all of Kashmir from India, Pakistan has since then raised and nurtured numerous Islamist militant groups. In 1989, an indigenous insurgency erupted in Kashmir in response to gross Indian malfeasance. Pakistan swiftly took advantage of the surge of so-called mujahideen who had trained in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. Pakistan's “foreign” militants overtook the Kashmiri insurgency. By the mid-1990s, the violence in the valley was mostly conducted by Pakistani terrorists — predominantly ethnic Punjabis — ostensibly on behalf of Kashmiris.
More here.
David Byrne Speaking and Singing
And also a song from David Byrne and St. Vincent's new album (which I highly recommend buying–have been listening to it non-stop for some time now) Love This Giant:
money, art
In the Gilded Age, many of the banks that have recently played important and devastating roles in our financial life—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers—were guided by men who had a passion for painting. J. P. Morgan’s collection was legendary. Paul Sachs, an early partner at the family firm, left banking to become a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, and to found the program in curatorial studies at Harvard. Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, each of whom ran Lehman Brothers, together assembled one of the great collections of Florentine and Sienese art outside Italy. Even the bank established to bail these other banks out, the Federal Reserve, had at its inception Paul Warburg. Warburg, often referred to as the “father” of the Federal Reserve, was the brother of Aby Warburg, one of the greatest scholars of the Italian Renaissance. In much the same way that aptitudes for math and music seem to descend together in families, so do there seem to be lineages for those gifted in the representation of value: the bankers and the painters. Not only did Gilded Age bankers study and collect art, their financial inventions were structurally quite like those of painters working at the same time. In particular, the financiers, as was true of Cézanne and his followers among the cubists, were interested in new representations of the future.
more from Rachel Cohen at The Believer here.
The Crushing of Eastern Europe
When the Red Army reached Poland, in the summer of 1944, it waited on the banks of the Vistula, just outside Warsaw, while the S.S., under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, killed fifteen thousand Polish partisans, who had staged an armed uprising, and more than two hundred thousand civilians. At the end of the fighting, half a million Poles were sent to camps, and the rest were deported as slave laborers to Germany. On Hitler’s orders, the city was razed. When the Red Army finally entered Warsaw, in January, 1945, the streets were filled with dead bodies. No one living remained. Except in Bulgaria, which has cultural ties to Russia, Soviet soldiers not only looted but raped, almost systematically, in the countries they passed through. In eastern Germany alone, up to two million women are believed to have been raped by Soviet soldiers. But, apart from complaining about Stalin’s refusal to come to the aid of the Warsaw Poles, Britain and the United States did nothing to stop the pillage of Eastern Europe.
more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.
a relatively clean story
Science and its practical consort Engineering mostly come out of this week with enhanced reputations. For some years now, various researchers have been predicting that such a trauma was not just possible but almost certain, as we raised the temperature and with it the level of the sea—just this past summer, for instance, scientists demonstrated that seas were rising faster near the northeast United States (for reasons having to do with alterations to the Gulf Stream) than almost anyplace on the planet. They had described, in the long run, the loaded gun, right down to a set of documents describing the precise risk to the New York subway system. As nature pulled the trigger in mid-October, when a tropical wave left Africa and moved into the Atlantic and began to spin, scientists were able to do the short-term work of hurricane forecasting with almost eerie precision. Days before Sandy came ashore we not only knew approximately where it would go, but that its barometric pressure would drop below previous records and hence that its gushing surge would set new marks. The computer models dealt with the weird hybrid nature of the storm—a tropical cyclone hitting a blocking front—with real aplomb; it was a bravura performance.
more from Bill McKibben at the NYRB here.
Tuesday Poem
Bait Goat
There is a
distance where
magnets pull,
we feel, having
held them
back. Likewise
there is a
distance where
words attract.
Set one out
like a bait goat
and wait and
seven others
will approach.
But watch out:
roving packs can
pull your word
away. You
find your stake
yanked and some
rough bunch
to thank.
.
by Kay Ryan
from Poetry, Vol. 192, No. 5
A bad few weeks for girls’ schools in Pakistan
From New Statesman:
Blasphemy is an extremely inflammatory issue in Pakistan. Insulting the Prophet or the Quran can carry the death penalty, while even the suggestion that blasphemy has taken place is enough to trigger violent outburst of public anger. Not a single newspaper has specified exactly what the alleged blasphemy is – indeed, to do so could lead to fresh charges being directed at the publishers. On this basis, accusers can even refuse to repeat the blasphemy in court, leading to a situation that would be farcical were it not so dangerous. The light burden of proof means that the law is often used to settle scores – indeed, it has been suggested that this charge could be a plot against the school, which is one of the most successful in Lahore. The complaint was lodged by Abdullah Saqib, the vice principal of Jamia Kareemia Sadidia, a religious school in the same area. Possible conspiracies aside, what does this incident tell us? First of all, women and girls are ready to defend their right to be educated. Following the violence of the mob reaction, around 2,000 students, parents and teachers took to the streets on Saturday to demand that the school reopen. The crowd, predominantly made up of teenage girls, carried placards and chanted slogans including “release our principal”. Just like the reaction to the Malala shooting, this demonstrates that society is not willing to compromise on its right to educate its daughters, whether the threat is coming from armed militants or from an angry mob.
Secondly, it shows that the tide has not turned against blasphemy laws.
More here.
Blind mole rats may hold key to cancer
From Nature:
Three years ago, Gorbunova was involved in another study that described the unusual way in which the cells of the naked mole rat behave in the lab2. The authors say that this hints at how the rats resist cancer. When cells from most animals are grown in a culture dish, they divide until they form a single layer of cells covering the base of the dish. At this point, healthy cells stop dividing, whereas cancerous ones continue. But the cells of naked mole rats behave as if they are 'claustrophobic', ceasing to divide much sooner than cells from other species. “We thought the blind-mole-rat cells would use the same mechanism as those of naked mole rats,” says Gorbunova, “so the fact that they do not was a big surprise”. Rather than ceasing to divide, the cells of blind mole rats reach a point at which they die en masse in a bout of cell suicide that Gorbunova and her co-authors call “concerted cell death”. This seems to be triggered by the collective release of a signalling molecule called interferon-beta, although what causes this is unclear. “The cells have some way of sensing when they are overproliferating, but we still don’t know precisely how they sense that,” Gorbunova says. “This is what we need to find out next, because it could provide some clue as to how we could activate the same process in human cells.”
More here.
Color Spaces
by Rishidev Chaudhuri
I have a child's affection for color, for broad swathes of bright saturated colors, for unapologetic reds and greens and blues and yellows. And yet this strong visceral and emotional reaction often feels immature and undifferentiated. I never really learned the names of the colors properly. This is partly from an artist mother, who would always give me very specific answers when I asked for the name of a color (burnt sienna, cerulean), so that i never quite figured out the broad categories correctly, didn't really remember the specific terms, and came to experience the names of the colors as magical incantations that descended upon sensory impressions according to uncertain principles. And this is partly the result of decreased red-green sensitivity, so that while I can tell pure reds and greens apart easily, and can distinguish expanses of color, I start to stumble at blue with a little bit of red or green added, or at intermediate points along a red-green mixture, or at thin lines of color1. Recently, I've been making graphs that require a large number of data traces on the same figure, and I need each trace to be a sufficiently different color that I can easily tell them apart. And so I've found myself paying more attention to the way colors are described and how to get them on a computer.
There are all sorts of complexities and caveats of course.
Seven Lessons of Sea Kayaking
Dark cumulus crowded overhead, but a rainy departure didn’t bother me—a baptism of sorts and reminder that elemental immersion and climate exposure are a kayaker’s default mode. The East coast hurricane season was at its peak, and I’d be tracking storm developments on a weather radio. The draws of an autumn trip were cooler air temperatures and less solar intensity, with coastal waters retaining their summer warmth. The clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies would have thinned, the noisy summer beaches vacated. Raptors and Monarch butterflies had begun their southern migrations down the coast, and fauna would be fattening up for the winter—autumn is a time of preparation and epic distance. Deep winter with its quiet frozen landscape is my idea of perfection, but autumn offers clement temperatures, crisper air and favorable tradewinds for long distance kayaking. It was my final window before the big freeze.
The hatches were near capacity and a last-minute triage became necessary. Crouching to gather what wouldn’t fit in the boat (running shoes, books), several pairs of muddy boots shuffled into my peripheral field. I craned my neck to find I’d been surrounded by a mini flash-mob of weathered, disheveled characters—local fishermen curious about my hurried preparations and bright blue kayak. Murmuring amongst themselves and staring down at me, one finally spoke.
“Where you goin’ in that thing?” The Outer Banks.
“All the way to Carolina?” Yep.
A long silence. “Shee-ut.”
More silence. I was being assessed.
Finally an utterance, matter-of-factly: “Ballza steel.”
“Yep. Boy’s got ballza steel.”
The matter was settled. The group peeled away, still mumbling about my endeavor. An elderly man lingered at a distance, a solitary observer enjoying the river at this early hour. His large stooped frame was neatly dressed, graying afro cropped close to his skull. His clear eyes watched me from behind 70s era chrome-framed lenses. What did he see in me? I continued with final adjustments to bulkier cargo, securing them on deck with elastic webbing. When I looked up again, my observer had repaired to a nearby truck.
The Pearl of Africa
by Namit Arora
A few years ago, my partner and I spent twelve days in Uganda. We visited two national parks to see chimpanzees and other animals, the Ssese Islands of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, the town of Jinja, and Kampala. As far as possible, we used the average citizen's mode of transportation and made no advance hotel reservations—choices that I think foster a greater engagement with the locals. As I often do when I travel, I shot some idiosyncratic video footage mostly as an aid to memory, akin to keeping a journal. Watching it again recently, I thought: why not make an amateur documentary? That's just what I did and here is the result (20 mins; also check out some pictures).
Why “Pearl of Africa”? Apparently, Winston Churchill, visiting Uganda at age 33, was so impressed by its mountains, valleys, greenery, lakes, wildlife, and friendly natives that he called it the “pearl of Africa”, and the name stuck. I have a rather low opinion of Churchill but I find nothing to quibble about in this case. I too loved my time in Uganda.
How not to abolish the Electoral College
by Jeff Strabone
Another U.S. presidential election is upon us, and once again the electoral college looms large as a threat to the legitimacy of government and people's faith in democracy. On the eve of what may be another split between the electoral college and the nationwide popular vote total, we are no closer to a direct popular election than we were twelve years ago when the winner was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But that may not be such a bad thing for those of us who want to see the electoral college abolished. In fact, the best chance for abolition may lie in sharing the pain by reversing the party polarity of the 2000 split: i.e., for President Obama to win the electoral college and Mitt Romney to win the popular vote. With the likelihood that the electoral college will favor the Democrats for at least the next few elections, our best hope may lie in a split that infuriates Republicans so deeply that they would clamor for reform as Democrats did after 2000.
Perhaps the worst idea out there for ending the reign of the electoral college is an effort called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The NPVIC reminds us of all that's wrong with the clause in the Constitution that leaves the choosing of the electors to the states. The more we mess with the state statutes governing the awarding of electoral votes, the more we may regress to a past when popular votes for U.S. President were not held at all by the states.