Tactics May be the Issue

The Republicans are bemoaning, and the Democrats celebrating, the third straight Democratic victory in a strong Republican congressional district. Three does make it look like a significant trend. The nature of the trend is debatable. While most pundits are arguing for a change among Republicans of message or viewpoint, I suspect too little is made of effective Democratic tactics. In each case, and in many of the seats the Democrats picked up in 2006, the Democrats ran a candidate who had many conservative aspects, often using a service veteran.

The juxtaposition of the most recent congressional triumph of the Democrats, running a DINO, with a recent Wall Street Journal piece from Pat Toomey defending RINO hunting among Republicans is telling. Either party can ably contest districts more sympathetic to the main message of the other, if they run candidates appropriate to the district. As long as the Republicans shun RINOs and the Democrats woe DINOs the US Congress is likely to remain Democratic.

Grading Teachers; Should Student Results Count?

There is a lot to laugh about in this title's question. Laugh-so-you-don't-cry kind of laugh. The Wall Street Journal published an article by John Merrow a few days ago covering the basics of teacher evaluation based on student test performance. My laughter comes from the subsequent letters.

Today's WSJ had a set of these. A couple are logical, straightforward comments saying that results must be the basis of any evaluation. The laugher was caused by a reply from a teacher with 20 years of experience, Karen Fisher, in New York. She writes: "Blame the teachers and the unions--how often do we have to hear the same old tired arguments as to why the American educational system is failing? ... Sorry parents--when your kids don't do well in school, it is usually due to lack of discipline at home."

What is, sort of, funny is that one of the folks engaged in teaching America's young how to think flunks elementary logic. Karen, even if, as you suggest, home-discipline is an important part of the problem, it does not follow that teachers are not an important part of the problem too. This analysis suggests that teachers account for 15%-30% of the variance (that's a lot in a social science setting).

Now, I strongly suspect home discipline is important. I also think innate talent is important as well as peer culture. There is not a lot of good data, but what there is (summarized nicely by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption) suggests that peer culture and genetics are both more critical than home environment.

Sadly, teachers and their unions seem to be in step with Karen on all this, sailing down deNial.

What the Libertarian Party and Barr Should Do

BThe entry of Bob Barr, former congressman from Georgia, as a candidate for the Libertarian Party's Presidential nomination may have generated record coverage for that party. The exposure provides the Libertarians with a chance to sell the "product."

Here is what I think they should do. Run only in Georgia. That's it. Focus all effort on Georgia where the results of the (probable) McCain/Obama contest is not in doubt. Voters there will feel free to vote Libertarian. The advantages of such a focus are: Barr is best known in Georgia; this, novel, one-state strategy will accrue further attention to his candidacy; the limited resources available will go much farther spent in one state only.

The disadvantages are slight. The party would pass up the opportunity to battle Nader and the Greens for the "Top of the Irrelevant" crown. Instead, the Libertarians should try to enter the national political consciousness by getting some 5% or even 10% of the voters in Georgia. That would get them, and their ideas, talked about.

Why is This Man Alone?

Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace. In a recent speech in Boise, he re-affirmed his support for a major expansion of nuclear power. The Idaho Statesman's Rocky Barker reported:

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore says there is no proof global warming is caused by humans, but it is likely enough that the world should turn to nuclear power - a concept tied closely to the underground nuclear testing his former environmental group formed to oppose.

The chemistry of the atmosphere is changing, and there is a high-enough risk that "true believers" like Al Gore are right that world economies need to wean themselves off fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gases, he said.

Ignoring the silly "...nuclear power - a concept tied closely to underground nuclear testing ..." from the reporter, Barker, (about as closely tied, incidentally, as ordinary munitions testing is to hydrocarbon power plants), this should be the main policy position of sensible greens. He is right about anthropogenic global warming, "unproven but likely" is the actual scientific consensus. Nuclear power is safe (another scientific consensus), and is the only practical substitute for coal/gas/oil (economists' consensus as I read it).

Support for Patric Moore's position, somewhat oddly considering that it has a strongly environmentalist aim, is from folks like Lemuel Calhoon on the right rather than from the left. The fact that Moore is something of a lone voice among greens, suggests to me that the main motive of most supporters of severe greenhouse gas limitations is to punish industry or capitalism rather than to limit warming.

Double Digit Numerology: Clinton won by 9%

Hey, I don't much care, but the standard passing around as a marked victory for Clinton in Pennsylvania was 10%. I don't care, that is, about Clinton much. I do care about numbers.

The way to maximize accuracy in performing arithmetic is to retain all the accuracy practical and then round off at the end. If you need to convince yourself of that, take a few examples and experiment. You will find if you round off first then add (or whatever) you will often have some inaccuracy.

According to the Pennsylvania state election site, with 99.51% of precincts reporting Clinton has 1,238,351 and Obama has 1,030,805 votes. That's 54.5732% for Clinton 45.4268% for Obama. That is a difference of 9.1464% or 9.146% or 9.15% or 9.1% or 9% depending upon how you want to express it.

If we want to engage in numerology and set a 10% threshold, she didn't make it. She won by 9. I haven't seen this pointed out elsewhere. Wonder if I am in the first 100,000 sites to report it, do I get anything?

I attempted to criticize science journalists yesterday for their groupthink regarding global warming. I should probably have been more understanding as the enforcement of this groupthink can get rough.

About a week ago NPR had a feature on a 16 year old blogger, Kristen Byrnes, who has a (currently flooded) website, PonderTheMaunder, which is quite sophisticated for a 16 year old. Amazingly, NPR has been attacked rather viciously from the left because the website is strongly skeptical of the evidence backing much of the global warming idea.

David Appell is a science journalist who is a prominent blogger (QuarkSoup.com) who leads the way with this post that was the first Google search hit with opinion on the subject (third overall). He writes:

Yesterday NPR published one of the most atrocious, absolutely embarrassing pieces of scientific journalism I have ever witnessed. [wow, reminds me of the "simplify then exaggerate" dictate of sensationalism, not the scientific approach -jim]

David Kestenbaum -- who I thought was hired by NPR because he had some scientific training -- profiled a girl in Maine with a Web site that questions the canonical view on global warming:

Ms. Byrnes' Web site is an absolute joke, full of errors, entirely unscientific. For example, her graph of CO2 levels in the atmosphere showed it flat until about 1950, which is simply wrong. I corresponded with her for months and months about this, as did many other bloggers, until she finally hid her error without acknowledgement of what was correct. [wow again, Mr. Appell spends months harassing some teenager about her web site, actually gets some change but wants acknowledgment. Sounds a little like school yard stuff -jim]

.....

Profiling a high school girl as if her science stands up to the best peer-reviewed results from professional scientists and academic journals, as if she matters one iota, is a joke and reflects very, very poorly on NPR, and especially on their science desk. ...
Kestenbaum should be ashamed. Personally, I will never be able to believe anything he ever reports again, and, for that matter, the entire NPR Science Desk. This is pathetic.

The emotionalism in the comments is even worse.

This is a 16 year old kid. She got some stuff wrong. So did Al Gore despite serious scientific advisers. So, NPR wants to do a human interest piece on a kid's science site, focused much more on the kid than on global warming ideas, and Appell concludes "Personally, I will never be able to believe anything he reports again, and, for that matter, the entire NPR Science Desk." The imagination boggles at the thought of the reaction if NPR actually did a piece featuring the serious global warming skeptics.

Earth Day, Food Riots from "Fighting" Global Warming

Earth Day. Trees, photons and electrons are being sacrificed today to catalog the damages that may follow a 2 to 4 deg (C) warming over the century. Did the environmentalist lobby buy the biggest ad spread in history? If there is any discussion of the cost of fighting global warming it will likely take the form of "less than 2% of world income" or some such offhand attempt to downplay it.

Meanwhile, there are food riots across the world. No, this is not caused simply by the ethanol-for-fuel effort but that effort has strongly contributed.

My interest here is to observe just how selective the global warming coverage is. The mainstream media's coverage of the food riots often mentions (as it obviously should, summarized here) the contribution of alternative-fuel use bidding up the price of crops. It would be appropriate to see it mentioned equally in discussion of global warming. Do your own research. I have not seen much (actually none in the 5 pieces I picked to sample from a Google search on "global warming" and "earth day"). Bloggers, of course, have not been reticent (Robert Rapier, John Ray, Southchild have all been caustic).

We have an early read on the success, or not, of a tentative baby-step in the US effort to fight global warming. The step was typical ham-fisted government action. One evident result was higher food prices and probably famine. On this "Earth Day" the possible costs of doing nothing about global warming are dwelt upon constantly. The costs of doing something are not. These latter costs need far more attention from the public.

Science Debate 2008

Yesterday was the day the "Science Debate 2008" was supposed to be held. The lack of interest was marked. I find two ways of looking at this. On one hand, it would be nice to see Presidential candidates focusing on concrete science-related issues which a science debate might help. On the other hand, any politician on the right would be a fool to step into anything run by the "Science Debate 2008" group.

The group labels itself nonpartisan and trots out a few Republicans to make that point. Token Republicans. Window dressing. The ScienceDebate2008 site seems to be under deconstruction now, but my random sampling of the bloggers listed on the site (e.g., Coturnix, Kriswager, Stoller & Bowers, David) shows a strong left lean. The science Professoriate, which is the core of American science, is also heavily weighted to the political left. The agenda will be set by their beliefs. The questioning would have been nonpartisan in the sense that these folks would focus on what their concerns are, not necessarily the talking points of the Democratic National Committee. Unfortunately for the right, there is not that much difference.

The issues chosen, and the emphasis within the issues will reflect these biases. If you were a candidate from the right would you trust the ScienceDebate2008 "nonpartisans", when discussing the inadequacy of US science education, to focus on the results and education experimentation allowed by vouchers, charter schools and home schooling, or would you suspect the emphasis would be on spending more money at public schools?

Another example is embryonic stem cell research which is widely mentioned as an important debate topic. Here a key point will be how much we could help sick and dying patients if only this research were allowed. This is a big winner for the left. When focus is on the research, most opinion polls show Americans want stem cell research. Instead, why not focus on the moral issue causing not just this fight but the larger one on abortion? When does life begin? Science has a lot to add to that conversation.

By rough analogy one could discuss the issue of organ transplantation. Medical science is expanding the range of possible organs and improving the outcomes for those transplants currently done. The biggest hold up is a lack of donors. A (partly) free market for donations would bring many thousand forward, saving many lives and improving the quality of many others. Here, however, the moral hesitancy preventing this is (mostly) from the left and so a Science Debate controlled by the left would not judge this to be a health issue but a moral one. Not, coincidently, there is little mention of organ transplantation as a ScienceDebate2008 issue.

Given the political bend of the scientists and journalists likely to control a Science Debate, a candidate from the right side of the political spectrum ought to be very wary indeed before straying into that den.