Steyn, oblivious [Pharyngula]

One of the nice thigs about the Internet and blogs is seeing people with knowledge destroy the arguments of those with little knowledge. That is one reason I like to read Pharyngula.  9:54:32 AM    

Cattle not helped by UK badger cull. Latest findings show that killing badgers causes more cattle tuberculosis than it prevents [News from The Scientist]

The transmission of infectious diseases is not simple. These non-intuitive results demonstrate that. This is why 'conventional wisdom' must be viewed with a skeptic's razor until actual facts emerge.  9:48:10 AM    

A biased look at media bias. Our media is broken. For years, far-right-wing foundations with large budgets have been funding ostensibly independent academics and pundits to produce work that appears on its face to be legitimate but is actually intended to promote a radical conservative agenda. This dishonest research sneaks into the mainstream media with depressing regularity. (For details, pick up a copy of David Brock's excellent book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy.)

Today's example comes courtesy of the normally astute Lost Remote blog, which uncritically reprinted this press release from UCLA's Office of Media Relations. It's one of the slickest pieces of right-wing propaganda to come down the pike in years, as I'll explain shortly:

Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said coâo[OE]author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Shocking!

Too bad that most news organizations that innocently pick up this story will be unaware of its author's extraordinary biases.

The methodology of the paper is bizarre to say the least. The paper (you can read it for yourself in PDF format here) tries to measure liberal or conservative leanings of a news organization by measuring how many times they quote organizations that are deemed liberal or conservative. To create that correlation, the authors count the number of times an organization is quoted approvingly by members of Congress. They then take the ADA rating ("liberalness") score of those members of Congress, assign those scores to the groups in question, and conclude that the more often a news organization quotes a group the more it must approve of that group.

So, if Ted Kennedy (the most liberal member of the Senate according to the ADA) approvingly cites the NAACP and the New York Times regularly quotes the NAACP, then the New York Times is as liberal as Ted Kennedy.

I could spend hours debunking this flawed technique. But let's not get bogged down in details. This is a classic "guilt by association" technique. Reporters are punished, in this paper, for reporting the ideas and statements of activist organizations, many of which are actually in the news. So let's try the same technique on Professor Groseclose. According to the professor's curriculum vita, he's received the following "honors and fellowships":

• Hoover National Fellow
• Olin Faculty Fellow
• Lambe Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies
• Dissertation Fellow, Center for the Study of Public Choice, George Mason University

Hmmm. Olin Faculty Fellow? That's funded by the (now-defunct) John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.

The New York-based John M. Olin Foundation, which grew out of a family manufacturing business (chemical and munitions), funds right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Hoover Institute of War, Revolution and Peace. It also gives large sums of money to promote conservative programs in the country's most prestigious colleges and universities. [emphasis added]

Lambe fellow? That one's funded by the Koch brothers:

David and Charles Koch own virtually all of Koch Industries, an oil, natural gas, and land management firm and the second largest privately owned company in America. The brothers have a strong interest in libertarian theory; the three family foundations operated by the Kochs (the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundations) made possible the libertarian Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy ($6.5 million and $4.8 million contributed between 1986 and 1990, respectively).

Oh, and the Kochs are behind that outfit at George Mason as well:

[T]he Kochs share with these foundations the conviction that the advancement of their philosophy is contingent upon investment in academia. In addition to their interest in influencing current public policy, they channel funds into fellowships, grants and scholarships to conservative university programs such as the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University to develop future proponents of their cause. Said John Blundell, former president of the institute (which received $2 million from Koch between 1986 and 1990, and is also supported by the Bradley and Olin foundations), the Institute "looks for good young people who are going to become academics and journalists and writers and novelists and clergymen and other dealers in ideas, who have shown some interest in the ideas that interest us." [emphasis added]

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is another far-right group, as can be seen by the fact that Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D'Souza, and Thomas Sowell are prominently affiliated with it.

Professor Groseclose has been accepting grants exclusively from far-right foundations for more than a decade. His work is backed by organizations that are also backing the most extreme-right organizations on his list (the number in parens represents the paper's ADA rating of each group, on a scale of 1 to 100, where lower is more conservative: the Cato Institute (36.3), the Heritage Foundation (20.0), American Enterprise Institute (36.6), the Manhattan Institute (32.0).

Using the same "guilt by association" techniques that the professor uses in his paper, I conclude that he is far from unbiased. In fact, taking the average ADA score of the four groups in the previous paragraphs, which are all supported by the same foundations that have funded the professor in his research, results in a score that ranks the professor as more conservative than any of the news outfits in his rankings. More than the Drudge Report, more than Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, more even than the Washington Times.

Co-author Jeffrey Milyo was a Salvatori fellow for the ultra-right-wing (by their paper's own numbers!) Heritage Foundation. He and Groseclose wrote their first article together in 1996 for the far-right scandal sheet The American Spectator.

Like I said, breathtaking. By noemail@noemail.org (Sid the Fish). [Sid's Fishbowl]

Just shows you can get anything published in economics. To use such indirect measures for liberal/conservative is pretty poor 'science'. But I guess he must be getting a pretty nice paycheck from some conservative groups. This article says he has gotten many grantsfrom conservative groups. They have certainly not shown themselves to be timid when it comes to buying words.  9:30:54 AM    

Also in the WaPo.

A prettty depressing op-ed piece by Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent a number of years in Soviet prisons:

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

Read it.

[Balloon Juice]

The fact that we are having this discussion at all is what is troubling. The Germans surrendered to the Americans rather than the Soviets in WW2 because they knew the difference between the way each treated their prisoners. I wish that difference was as well-defined today as it was then. The fact that this Administration wanted exceptions to the no torture laws speaks volumes about the degradation of our national character by the current office holder. Now we have secret laws that no one knows about, secret tribunals that judge without review and warrant-less searches. And we are just supposed to believe that these guys are somehow immune to the same impulses that plagued every other human being in history that was given these sorts of powers over their fellow man? We are supposed to trust them. Well, our government was set up by men who really did not trust the impulses on men given too much power. They set up a divided government to keep power from being concentrated and misused. Too bad the American character is so far degraded that it stands by while an imperial Executive branch decides for itself which laws to ignore and then tells us just to trust them. Sorry, I would not trust EITHER party given this much control and power.   9:22:44 AM    

Death to IE on Mac! Long live Safari!.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Internet, Internet Tools

All support for the Macintosh version of Internet Explorer will cease on December 31, 2005 and all official distribution of the browser will cease on January 31, 2006. In other words, IE is finally dying. You won't be able to download it from Microsoft anymore. Instead they will recommend that you use Safari or Firefox.

On a broader note, this means that fewer sites can justify having IE only versions of their sites. They cannot say, "Well, get IE for Mac and it should work." No. Start clean-coding your sites for Firefox and Safari compatibility or lose 6 percent (and growing) of your customers. 

Read	Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

[The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

How much longer before MS drops working on Office and such? Well, since IE is free, there is no reason to give it to Mac users. But Office brings in some real money, so I expect them to keep this one going a while longer. I just expect them to slow down development.  9:03:21 AM    

The economic tide is going out, not up What struck me most about the workshop I went to last Saturday ("The Growing Divide -- Inequality and the Roots of Economic Insecurity") was not the facts, but the general ignorance of those facts. The past three decades have been a period of stagnation for most of America, while an an obscene concentration of wealth has grown for the few at the top. At the same time these past three decades have been a period of low growth overall. (Had it not been for the 1990s, it would have been worse.) Contrast this to the three decades prior to 1980 when there was a general sharing of prosperity and a simultaneous enormous increase in overall total growth.

Between 1947 and 1979 real family income doubled for every quintile (one-fifth). In fact, it was better at the bottom ( 116%) than at the top (99%). In the years 1979 virtually all the growth has been at the top. The bottom quintile even lost 2%. The top gained only 51%, but that was more than the other four-fifths combined.

What struck me most at the workshop, as I said, was not the facts themselves. What struck me was that most of the people attending were largely unaware of them. Why? Part of the reason, I think, is that as we get older, our incomes tend to go up as a result of promotions and increasing skills. The general stagnation is masked by our individual advancement. The fact that the lower end seems to keep dropping has been concealed by the migration of people upward and we don't realize people are starting out further and further behind. Previous to 1980, young people had a significant head start on their parents. But even mobility over one's lifetime is now decreasing, and people are more and more stuck.

This is part of the reason for the lack of awareness, but I'm convinced that most it is our quaint American way of blaming ourselves. The better education, more strategically positioned manufacturing, and generally weak international competition of previous times are ignored in favor of the idea that "I screwed up." (Many of our families assist us in this evaluation.) But I can tell you the comfort level has dropped significantly since I came up. As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s I traveled around a lot "getting experience." It was pretty easy to find work that paid. If I tried to do the same thing today, I'd be sleeping on a grate and living out of the mission.

Be that as it may, and before I list some of the interesting factoids from the workshop, one connection needs to be repeated and reemphasized. The "winner take all" economic mentality that is today's accepted wisdom has not led to overall prosperity, while the "share the wealth" tendency that followed World War II created strong, consistent and widespread growth. Everybody did better, even the top (in terms of income). It's just that they didn't do exponentially better than the rest of us.

Material for the workshop I attended is available at United for a Fair Economy. Another set is at the Economic Policy institute. Their The State of Working America is the definitive publication. There is a list of fact sheets excerpted from the book there on income, wealth, poverty, CEO pay, and so on.

Did you know?

At the same time that income has risen to the top, taxes have fallen to the lot of the middle class. Today federal taxes paid by a middle quintile family are 50% more than they were in 1948. For the top 1%, federal taxes are one-third of their 1948 level.

The share of income held by the top 1% in 2000 was "the largest since the run-up to the Great Depression," according to EPI.

CEO pay in large US corporations was 42 times that of the average worker in 1980. In 2004, CEOs carried off 431 times as big a paycheck as the average worker.

38% of all household wealth is held by the top 1%. The top 10% own 85% of all stocks and mutual funds. (Fit that into dividend and capital gains tax cuts and see who benefits.)

These are only a few. Check out the links for more. Be aware, we are in transit. This is not a static situation, it is a historical trend, a tide. Things are getting worse. They could get much worse before they turn around. - Alan [Northwest Progressive Institute]

In real-life, all boats are not raised by the tide. The boats at the top do much better while those at the bottom sink. This is something that has only happened since 1980. Before that, all boats did rise. History will really look at the voodoo economics of the last 25 years with an unjaundiced eye and wonder how in the world so many people voted AGAINST their own self-interests. Well, it was not the people at the top who did this. It was those at the bottom. It will be fascinating to read about it, if we are allowed to without people showing up at our door asking questions.   7:37:21 AM    

The action-hero presidency
. I used to wonder, back when George W. Bush was doing things like flying in a fighter jet onto aircraft carriers while wearing well-endowed jumpsuits, and then getting action figures made to commemorate the event, how many times he had been watching Air Fo [Orcinus]

Unfortunately, the President as action hero model is a work of fiction and does not work in the real world. We are finding that out to our detriment. Well, at least some of os are learning. Many continue to live in fantasy.  1:04:15 AM    

Iran-contra, for which I can nnever forgive Reagan or Bush I, was the obvious attempt of the Executive branch to take supreme power. It explicitly ognored the will of Congress, finding ways around the Constitutional separation of the Executive branch from the purse strings and doing pretty much what it wanted to. We see the progression of this philosphy today. Yet, to some people, a blow job is worse than losing 8 billion dollars into the pockets of crony corporations and war profiteers. That is why I am angry. I predict that in 20 years, it will turn out that no one will admit voting for Bush. Just as no one was a member of the Nazi party after WW1, no one will admit they voted for Bush II. That is, assuming we still have a functional democracy then and that Oceania is not still at war, with Eastasia or Eurasia.   12:44:54 AM    

Cancer vaccine has strong response in young girls. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Girls aged 10 to 14 who received GlaxoSmithKline Plc's vaccine to prevent infection with the virus that causes cervical cancer had immune responses twice as strong as women 15-25 years old given the vaccine, the company said on Saturday, describing results of a late-stage trial. [Reuters: Science]

This is the vaccine idiot wingnuts want to prevent being given to girls. A vaccine that will prevent cervical cancer. See, because the risk of getting cervical cancer will keep girls from having sex. If they have the vaccines and no fear of getting cervical cancer, all the girls will become sluts.QED. Idiots. No wonder they like Bush.  12:34:21 AM    

The Probabilistic Age. Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing? A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.... [The Long Tail]

This is absolutely right. And People who can not deal in probabilities are the ones most afraid today. They are afraid of Wikipedia, of Google of Blogs and of terrorists. None of these can absolutely be defined but by understanding probabilities, you can get closer to the truth faster. Wikipedia is a great place to start for most things. Blogs cover a wide range of material faster than papers do and terrorists do really well at localized destruction but can not run a country (al Queda's direct effect on running the US is no more likely than Timothy McVey's. Dangerous, yes. But neither was ever going to be running a country. And the probability of being killed by either McVey or Al queda is very small. Yet so many people want to give up almost every single civil right this country has created in 200 years just to stop terrorists. Hand over power to people who CAN actually cotrol our country. In ways that would make our Founders shudder. People who had lived through a Revolution against the concentration of power that so many people today want to just hand over to the President.   12:29:34 AM    

Harry, the Senate, The President. Harry Reid is tearing his fellow senators a new one on C-Span2 right now. The Senate almost never works on Sunday. This is to get at ANWR, Harry is saying. "This is a dark day in our history." (ANWR drilling likely to be in defense spending bill") You can expect numerous voice votes. If votes require a roll call, they'll be held tomorrow, the C-Span voiceover announcer said. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid called the Republican-led Congress "the most corrupt in history." The Minneapolis Star... [Booman Tribune]

Well, I would not say the most corrupt in history. It is still early yet. One of the most is certainly right. And mix corruption with power-hungry and what do you get? Perhaps we can have some people actually stand up and fight for our rights in this country.12:21:59 AM    

Impeach Attorney General Gonzales for Lying to Congress. Impeach Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress. Impeach him now: Think Progress: According to President Bush's radio address today, as White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales personally approved Bush's program for warrantless domestic wiretaps. By circumventing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, those wiretaps violated federal law.... During his confirmation hearings for Attorney General in January 2005, Sen. Russ Feingold asked Gonzales about this precise issue: SEN. FEINGOLD: I -- Judge Gonzales, let me ask a broader question. I'm asking you whether in general the president has the constitutional authority, does he at least in theory have the authority to authorize violations... [Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

Nothing wrong with lying to Congress when you represent the imperial Presidency that can do othing illegal during a time of war. See, doesn't that make things so much easier.  12:15:11 AM    

Bush Admits Administration Misled On Number of Trained Iraqi Troops.

Bush tonight:

Reconstruction efforts and the training of Iraqi Security Forces started more slowly than we hoped. … At this time last year, there were only a handful of Iraqi army and police battalions ready for combat.

Rumsfeld, 12/8/04

Their security forces, as I mentioned earlier, are ' oh, they're now up to something like 110[000], 120,000 - up from zero. And they are putting their lives at risk as well. Indeed, a large number of security forces- Iraqi security forces have been killed. But they're being trained rapidly…

[Think Progress]

They just make up numbers as they go along. No respect for anyone because most people just do not follow what is happening. Perhaps a few years of criminal government will get some people's interest up.  12:07:48 AM