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Three cheap books readers of my blog might want to grab

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A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley “… offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options—both to rise in the military and to explore other careers—she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life.”

1968: The Year That Rocked the World by “Salt” author Mark Kurlansky is about 1968. Say no more.

You may have heard of 2010 (Space Odyssey) by Arthur Clarke. Get it now for Kindle for three bucks. I know, I know, it is already 2017 and we accidentially went into the past instead of into the future. Just pretend it is 3010 (Space Odyssey).

Donald Trump’s Science Adviser will be …

Politics, , ,

… announced in the very near future. Or never.

I swear, if you told Donald Trump that scientists said don’t lick the metal railing in the dead of winter, he’d lick the metal railing. Then, he’d get stuck, and he’d blame Obama.

At this point, according to Nature, Donald Trump has gone longer sans science adviser than any recent president, by a good margin. The previous record was held by … wait for it … Continue reading Donald Trump’s Science Adviser will be … →

Flying While Black #BLM

Race and Racism, , ,

This just came across my desk. This is bad at any time, but with Jeff Sessons as Attorney General, it is worse; People are sort of on their own at the national level. This is about white supremacy, and American Airline’s policy, or lack of policy, or culture, or lack of training, supporting it.

NAACP ISSUES NATIONAL TRAVEL ADVISORY FOR AMERICAN AIRLINES

(October 24, 2017) – The NAACP, the nation’s original and largest social justice advocacy organization, has released the following statement today announcing a travel advisory warning African Americans about their safety and well being when patronizing American Airlines or traveling on American Airlines flights: Continue reading Flying While Black #BLM →

When translations go bad, bad things can happen

Anthropology, ,

The gift shop had a key chain with a miniature hominid skull (KNM-ER 1470) on it. I saw the price tag, and it looked very expensive. I’m not sure if it looked expensive because I had just arrived in-county and had not yet adapted to the local currency, or if was because I had just spent the last 10 months living in an economy where you could literally purchase ownership of a prisoner for about five bucks (ransom? human trafficking? maybe there isn’t much of a difference). In any event, the price looked high, so I turned to the cashier and said, in a language that we both knew and that should have allowed a mutually intelligible conversation, “This useless object just grabbed me and threw me violently to the ground!” Continue reading When translations go bad, bad things can happen →

Nicaragua Poised To Embarrass America

Climate Change, , , ,

We, and by “we” I mean “Donald Trump and his Republicans,” are already in a position of disdain by most of the rest of the world for being only one of three nations not signed on to the Paris climate pact.

The other two countries were a) Syria, not really a country any more, and b) Nicaragua.

Nicaragua is now joining the pact, according to Vice President Murillo, reported here:

“It is the only instrument we have in the world that allows the unity of intentions and efforts to face up to climate change and natural disasters,” Murillo said.

…

Nicaragua, a poor Central American nation that is often threatened by hurricanes, was the only nation to reject the agreement in 2015, and has argued for far more drastic action to limit rising temperatures.

The latest round of negotiations take place after a string of powerful hurricanes ravaged Caribbean island nations and caused billions of dollars in damage along the Texas and Florida coastlines.

Climate scientists have said warmer air and water resulting from climate change may have contributed to the severity of the storms. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has disputed such claims as an attempt to “politicize” natural disasters.

Man Bites Dog: Republican Senator Admits Climate Change is Real

Climate Change, War on Science, ,

Alaska Public Media reports that Alaska Senator and Republican Lisa Murkowski, while speaking at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, broke with the anti-Science Trump/Republican position on climate change. Specifically, she said: Continue reading Man Bites Dog: Republican Senator Admits Climate Change is Real →

Fox News Lies, Dawchestah Rules!

Politics, , , , ,

I am not from Boston, but I moved there and lived in Dorchester for about six months.

From Dorchester, I moved to Cambridge, then Somerville, then somewhere else in Somerville, then Lexington, then Cambridge, then Somerville then Somerville then …. and so on. The entire time I either worked for, was a student at, or taught at Harvard, which is in Cambridge.

Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Alltson, etc. are all mushed together as one big urban zone around and including Boston. And, historically, the smaller cities around Boston have been absorbed into the Beantown Borg over time. Charlestown, where the Battle of Bunker Hill happened (on nearby Breed’s Hill) used to be separate. South Boston was created out of neighboring communities in 1804. East Boston was annexed in 1855, Roxbury in 1867. Then Dorchester, West Roxbury, Brighton, Charleston, and Hyde Park by 1913. Over historical time, a lot of people grew up outside of Boston in a community that, by the time they died, was in Boston. Continue reading Fox News Lies, Dawchestah Rules! →

Falsehood: “Voters are kept from political involvement by the rules”

Falsehoods and Skepticism, Race and Racism, , ,

Voting is not party involvement.

We hear a lot of talk these days about “voters” being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform — why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us — that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call “problemetizing the concept.”

We can start with the statement that in the primary system, “Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic (small “d”) process.” That sentence seems reasonable, even important, and is essentially a call for open, instead of closed, primaries, or in some cases, for replacing a caucus with a primary. Continue reading Falsehood: “Voters are kept from political involvement by the rules” →

Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”

Falsehoods and Skepticism, Palaeoanthropology, , ,

It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea wrong in a few different ways. People often:

1) confuse life expectancy with lifespan;

2) underestimate the life expectancy of many past populations; and

3) think of the past compared to the present as a dichotomy, the present being one way, the past being the other way, failing to recognize diversity and variation in life history variables across our species and across time … life expectancy is seen as a measure of quality of life (which it may well be) that has tracked the one way progress of the human condition from a widespread past condition of short-lived misery to the present and much improved condition of living long and prospering.
Continue reading Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now” →

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, Must Read Book

Books, Climate Change, , , ,

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Changeis everyperson’s guide to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC issues a periodic set of reports on the state of global climate change, and has been doing so for almost two decades. It is a massive undertaking and few have the time or training to read though and absorb it, yet it is very important that every citizen understands the reports’ implications. Why? Because human caused climate change has emerged as the number one existential issue of the day, and individuals, corporations, and governments must act to implement sensible and workable changes in behavior and policy or there will be dire consequences.

Continue reading Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, Must Read Book →

Study says: Police Body Cams Have No Effect. I Expected This

Violence and Guns, , ,

You have cops everywhere doing cop things. Every now and then a cop does something really bad and someone gets killed. That is not going to show up as a statistical effect when looking at the overall behavior of the cops, unless you do some very specialized Bayesian statistics, which no one is going to do on that sort of data.

So, the just released study, summarized here by NPR, is not a surprise.

Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers’ use of force, at least in the nation’s capital.

That’s the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts.

“We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.

“I think we’re surprised by the result. I think a lot of people were suggesting that the body-worn cameras would change behavior,” says Chief of Police Peter Newsham. “There was no indication that the cameras changed behavior at all.”

Perhaps, he says, that’s because his officers “were doing the right thing in the first place.”

The purpose of the body cam is to find out what happened in this or that extreme event, when there is a death, or a plausible accusation of wrong doing. Another likely effect of the body cam is to cause bad behavior to be more rare, just because the cameras are there. But bad behavior is often the result of out of control emotions, or of bad training, or some other thing that the presence of a cam is unlikely to detect. I would not be surprised if body cams did have this effect on some police forces, but not most.

There are statistical ways to see if the body cams are having an effect on behavior but they have to assume that the behavior is a) really there already and b) of a certain specific form. Then you can subset your data down to the sensitive parts of it, and see if, say, before or after body cams you get a difference. But really, the best way to do that is to pair up the cops (statistically) so you have one set of cops match, with respect to relevant characteristics, another equal size set (on the same police force) where one set is wearing the cams, the other not (there are some added difficulties in doing this, like matching patterns so neither or both have the cams, etc). This sort of approach could identify an effect. But the methods that would normally be used won’t unless it is dramatic.