Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
I was about to start speculating about the propensity of Turn of the
Century scientists to announce major discoveries only to have the effect
sizes later turn out to vanish entirely, but then I realized I wasn't
entirely sure that this was the case here.
I'm almost certain that this belongs in the same file with N-rays, but
given the readership of this, I want to be extra careful.
From Scientific American 1907-08-24
The patient is seated on a chair inside of a spiral coil of wire which
is traversed by high-frequency currents. (Fig. 1.) The cabinet shown at
the right of the photograph contains a transformer, which gives to the
alternating current a tension 01 40,000 or 50,000 volts and a frequency
of 500,000 or 600,000 alternations per second. This treatment,
continued' for five minutes, reduced the arterial pressure from 10 to 7
inches. In a second treatment, given to the same patient a few days
later, the arterial pressure, which had risen during the inteI val to 8
inches, was brought down below 7 inches in a few minutes. Repeated
applications gradually reduce the arterial pressure to its normal value
of 6 inches. In Dr. Moutier's very interesting experiments, the rapidity
with which the pressure was lowered appeared to have no relation to the
age or. gravity of the case, or the degree of hypertension, but to
depend chiefly on the state of digestion.
Then we get to the question of the potential impact on the November
election in Florida. I’d guess it could be fairly significant. We’ve all
kind of concluded that Florida is now a red state. For Democrats that’s
understandable because it’s been the scene of so many Democratic
heartbreaks. But Trump won it by 1.2% in 2016 and 3.4% in 2020. The fact
that Trump slightly improved his margin is definitely significant. But
these are still very close margins. Winning Florida, I’ll still believe
it when I see it. But with the abortion and weed amendments on the
ballot I think the Biden campaign can at least make Trump fight and
invest real resources in what for him is an absolutely must win state.
With some trepidation, I think Marshall (who is the best political commentator we have) is missing some important points, starting with how much of a powder keg we're talking about. Marshall says "there’s at least an argument that abortion should poll better" in Florida than in Kansas or Ohio, but we can go much further. Based on pre-Dobbs polling, Florida was way more pro-choice than either of these states coming in just one spot below California.
State Mostly Legal Mostly Illegal Net support
Florida 56% 38% +18
Ohio
52%
43%
+10
Kansas 48% 47% +1
Add to this that Florida now has effectively a six week ban on abortion. As many have pointed out, that means that by the
time most women find out that they are pregnant, it will be too late to
do anything about it. Yet another reminder that Nate Cohn's argument that "Polling suggests an overturning of Roe v. Wade might not carry political consequences in states that would be likeliest to put in restrictions." has not aged well.
How about the argument that Trump will divert resources to Florida? I could see that going either way.
While it's true that Florida is a must-win state, it is highly unlikely
that it will be a tipping point. If things are going so badly for
Trump that the dubiously named Sunshine State is in play, it might well
be over. Given that the RNC has opened zero offices in key swing states while the Democrats have opened dozens, it is easy to imagine Don and Lara freezing out Florida in favor of places like Arizona that have some chance of putting him over the top.
The real consequences in that case are likely to be down ticket. For
example, more than 2/3 of the state's house delegation are currently
held by Republicans. That is a lot of previously safe seats that now
need to be defended. Add to that the statehouse and various state races.
Either way, this is bad news for the GOP. They can spread their thin resources even thinner or they can put a number of elections at risk.
Regular readers have noticed we've been spending a lot time on the
history of technology, particularly the explosive changes around the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the things I find most
fascinating about the period is the number of concepts that are now so
familiar as to be a part of our intuitive view of the world which didn't
exist until the time in question. The idea of remote control, virtually instantaneous nonmechanical action
at any terrestrial distance. You touch a button, you throw switch, and
lights go on, doors open, motors start. This went from being impossible
to completely mundane with remarkable speed.
The pushbutton age was still fairly new when Segundo de Chomón
made the groundbreaking film electric hotel. The though overshadowed by
Georges Méliès, de Chomón was, for my money, probably the better
filmmaker and his work with stop motion animation would prove more
fertile than any of the trick effects his contemporary is remembered
for.
Last Friday's post was running long so I decided to put the reproductive rights tweets in a post of their own.
Lots of political analysts argued in the wake of Dobbs that this issue wouldn't be that big of a deal. One of the many mistakes they made was assuming that support for abortion was a fixed quantity.
Support for legal abortion has jumped by 15 points since the Fox News poll conducted a few months before the Dobbs decision. pic.twitter.com/JxYtSKAZ6b
Clarence Thomas
and Samuel Alito are clearly eager to revive the Comstock Act as a
nationwide ban on medication abortion—and maybe procedural abortion,
too. That would subject abortion providers in all 50 states to
prosecution and imprisonment. No congressional action needed.
Hiltzik walks us through the history of Comstock and it's every bit as embarrassing as you'd expect.
Re-upping my
column about the Comstock Act, an antique law that Alito and Thomas seem
to think will help them kill abortion rights: https://t.co/PoNTF9x2Xj
Anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock, lampooned in a 1915
periodical. The caption read: “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a
naked child.”
Waiting for the
same people who argued that the Logan Act is a defunct law that has no
meaning because it's never been enforced to make the compelling case for
why the 1873 Comstock Act is alive and well and should be enforced
broadly
Of course, it wouoldn't be a tweet post without a weasily framing from the NYT.
The NYT tells
readers Hawley's attempt to ban abortion is part of "her longtime
interest in limiting the power of the administrative state" &
consistent with her belief "that a blue state had no right to impose its
values and rules on Missouri’s farmers." https://t.co/Zi30SeZzb4
Democratic candidates however, are feeling no need to play nice.
Jessica and her family matter.
Josh
Hawley has built his career on a control-obsessed crusade to outlaw
reproductive healthcare. It's now a threat to IVF and to women in
Missouri. We can't risk giving Hawley's crusade another six years in the
U.S. Senate. pic.twitter.com/Flhme0p8jX
Democrats from Biden/Harris down to statehouse races are running hard on this issue, particularly since Alabama's recent IVF ruling.
Speaking of which...
A pro-choice Democrat just won a Trump-won district in Alabama by *30 POINTS* after Republicans in the state went after IVF.
Republicans have no idea what’s coming for them in November.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) March 27, 2024
Given the way fundraising has been going, Democrats are on track to spend an extraordinary amount of money tying Republicans to national bans on abortion and IVF.
Fox: A Democrat
running on abortion and IVF won the special election in Alabama.
Marilyn Lands flipped a seat in the deep red state by 25 points. If you
look our poll, the vast majority of voters think abortion should be
legal pic.twitter.com/HcnaUuPqs5
A functional political party, seeing it was being dragged down by positions this toxic would back away, push moderate candidates, and generally try to avoid scaring voters (which has become a concern for the GOP), but that's no longer an option under MAGA
Marjorie Taylor
Greene says says Mike Johnson, who supports a total abortion ban and
restrictions on IVF, isn’t “Republican” enough pic.twitter.com/TcCfsCvYCp
A functional party would avoid nominating guys like this.
Greg Lopez said as Governor he’d sign a statewide abortion ban. But he cared so little about the unborn that he was arrested for physically assaulting his pregnant wife.
I just want to
see how much ketchup was thrown at the wall when Trump found out
Desantis just took away women’s rights in FL for the 6 months leading up
to the election, but when they show up to the polls in Nov they can get
them back. Thanks, Desantis!
HUGE BREAKING: The FL Supreme Court just announced that ballot initiatives on abortion and marijuana legalization will be on the ballot in Nov, providing a major boost to democratic candidates in the state. https://t.co/MxU4wh1LxF
Good luck selling that bullshit to the voters in a state that is overwhelmingly pro-choice & pro-weed legalization. You are going to get to meet a lot of new voters for the first time in Nov. pic.twitter.com/bdoKz7X87Z
Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that any statewide office is seriously in play unless something much bigger happens, but there are a lot of races in Florida and a few flipped seats of its 28 representatives could easily decide control of the House.
This could actually be a game changer in Florida ginning up a significant amount of turnout. At minimum, it means Republicans are going to have to pour a lot more money into Florida than they expected. https://t.co/F5HJnqNJi3
And as Ornstein points out, the question of resources might even be more important. Republicans have a huge disadvantage when it comes to money which is already showing up in swing state party organizations and GOTV operations. Now it looks like the GOP needs find some money places like Florida and Alabama.
Though we've never been in the prediction business, I could be persuaded to put my money on the "Dobbs will be a big deal" side of the bet,
As previously mentioned, there is a popular narrative among those trying
to explain away the apparent failure of a new technology. The story
goes that the under-performance is not due to the technology being badly
designed or serving no particular useful purpose, but instead is due to
the lack of a "killer app" that will someday appear to save the day. In
these accounts, technologies frequently spend years languishing until
someone suddenly realizes something like "hey, you could use this to
play music."
Having spent a great deal of the past year or so looking at the history
of this sort of thing, I've come to the conclusion that people normally
hit upon these killer apps very quickly, Often before the technology
itself is viable. Subscription services for broadcasting music to pubic
places and alarm clocks that woke sleepers with music were being tried
long before the tech existed to make either practical.
A couple of side notes on the first story. The evolution of synthesizers
is a bit outside of the scope of our ongoing threads but if the subject
interests you, definitely check out the history of the telharmonium.
Also note the quote from Mark Twain. Twain was fascinated by the new
technology of the era and we should probably devote some future posts to
his take on the subject.
As mentioned before, Peter Thiel's reputation as the smartest guy in the room relies heavily on the time he was alone with Elon Musk and David Sacks.
Facts:
a) U.S. counterterrorism officials told NYT that it was done by the ISIS-K; b) ISIS has claimed responsibility; c) The detained suspects are said to be Tajik nationals; d) There is no evidence pointing at Ukraine.
Yet, somehow, you are trying to involve Ukraine here
Musk... RFK jr... I'm starting to question this woman's judgement.
Just going to
note the completelyFharvard weird origin story of the woman RFKjr has made his
VP candidate in order to fund his campaign and maybe make Trump prez.
(from puck) pic.twitter.com/aLJ8ou45DJ
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) March 29, 2024
It seems to me, if you’re going to cover it at all, the headline is RFK Jr chose the donor who paid for his superbowl ad as his running mate. That ad exploited his murdered uncle’s memory and he tried to disavow it, apparently facetiously.
Also Peltz objects to "Black Panther" because he doesn't want an "all-black cast" in a @MarvelStudios
movie. He voices a similar complaint about "The Marvels," because
women. He's ok with all-white or all-male. Keep this lout away from our
movies please. https://t.co/RUD16ZhUzn
'Why do I need an all-Black cast?' ... "Black Panther" is the sixth
highest-grossing domestic release of all time, according to the site Box
Office Mojo, and was the first Marvel film to be nominated for Best
Picture.
This reminds me of an anecdote from Harlan Ellison's Watching.
Dems in disarray
RNC Research continues to be tee-ball for Democratic bloggers.
I definitely
think a Democratic infiltrator is running this account to sabotage the
RNC. Nobody can be this ineffective on purpose. https://t.co/9MKm3gj0NP
Of the
relatively paltry amount raised this year by the RNC, millions are being
set aside to fund “election integrity” lawsuits to challenge the 2024
election, headed up by conspiracy theorist Christina Bobb. Story …https://t.co/X5575XkHrb
Separate from this piece, I've been saying for a week, I'm getting more confident abt Biden - not because of any polls - but because Trump's has shifted to "It's Rigged!!!" "They're Gonna Steal It From Me!!" https://t.co/1INc9OAdPn via @TPM
*The Feb 27
date is significant bc until a few dumb retweets over the last few days
they hadn’t tweeted since the day the judge forced the Trumper chair out
of office. The former chair is still on their Twitter account &
website. /2
Remember when House Republicans occasionally didn't say the quiet part out loud?
Scott Perry
says Republicans should vote against this bill because it provides for
23,000 new Border Patrol Agents and 41,500 new detention facility beds,
and this will give Democrats something to run on in the upcoming
election. pic.twitter.com/YT4WJbyvqT
In a brilliant
moment during Wednesday's sham impeachment hearing, Democratic
Congressman Jared Moskowitz flipped the script and called the
Republicans' bluff by making his own motion to impeach President Biden
and asking the GOP to second it. The Republicans crumbled as he… pic.twitter.com/JmmdSEOErn
The NYT is still doing its best to prove its tough-on-Biden bona fides.
the New York
Times is now running op-eds insisting Joe Biden is unpopular in *another
country.* (The only current polling the op-ed cites in support of its
core premise shows Irish people prefer Biden to Trump by a 50-14
margin.) pic.twitter.com/17g41j8T8w
This is a good
point. Obviously everyone's free to start a junk polling co like
rasmussen or the Mark Penn-era version of Harris Poll if they want. But
what cash has to change hands to get a top university to endorse it? https://t.co/PibjKV46RK
Little known story. On the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, every evening a staffer was sent to find out where @tedcruz was going after work. The rest of the team would then go somewhere else. https://t.co/xY5ThQDIpf
I assumed this was a hoax account or a joke tweet, but no.
This has been
viewed 3.7 million times. Many of whom have accepted this as fact ……. It
was the Gonzaga basketball team. It was a college basketball team. Not
“three buses loaded up w illegal invaders….. with a police escort” https://t.co/aaaRqdJ4ZO
Gonzaga
basketball players are coming here, taking our jobs, going on welfare,
raping, poisoning our bloodline, cutting off heads. And some, I assume,
are good people.
Anecdotes like these may be coals to Newcastle at this point, but they still have a certain entertainment value.
Highlights of Trump's 23 "championships"... *wins 12 while being only entrant *wins a 2-day tourney despite only playing 1 *wins one in FL while he's in North Korea *wins one in NJ while he's playing in Philly. (Called in his score.) The man cheats like a 6-y-o at Monopoly. pic.twitter.com/18i5Tm3B7l
Someone sent me
this yesterday. The basic premise is that the guardrails of US
democracy are so strong that Trump couldn't turn the US into a
dictatorship even if he had 2 more terms.
But then again,
maybe they simply aren't sending their best. Perhaps he's some kind of
heterodox diversity hire or something, I don't know. https://t.co/Ucd3jCospm
— Darren Dahly - on Bluesky and Substack (@statsepi) March 25, 2024
And misc.
193,939 is a Circular Prime: regardless of what way you arrange the digits, the resulting number is prime pic.twitter.com/OzK7F0ldle
When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a
member of the championship debate team, and the urge to overpower with
evidence — and his unwillingness to suffer fools — is right there on the
surface when you talk with him.
Andrew Gelman has already commented
on the way Balf builds his narrative around Coleman ( "In Balf’s
article, College Board president David Coleman is the hero and so
everything about him has to be good and everything he’s changed has to
have been bad.") and the not suffering fools quote certainly illustrates
Gelman's point, but it also illustrates a more important concern: the
disconnect between the culture of the education reform movement and the
way it's perceived in most of the media.
(Though not directly relevant to the main point of this post, it is
worth noting that the implied example that follows the line about not
suffering fools is a description of Coleman rudely dismissing those who
disagree with his rather controversial belief that improvement in
writing skills acquired through composing essays doesn't transfer to
improvements in writing in a professional context.)
There are other powerful players (particularly when it comes to
funding), but when it comes to its intellectual framework, the education
reform movement is very much a product of the world of management
consultants with its reliance on Taylorism,
MBA thinking and CEO worship. This is never more true than with David
Coleman. Coleman is arguably the most powerful figure in American
education despite having no significant background in either teaching or
statistics. His only relevant experience is as a consultant for
McKinsey & Company.
Companies like McKinsey spend a great deal off their time trying to
convince C-level executive to gamble on trendy and expensive "business
solutions" that are usually unsupported by solid evidence and are often
the butt of running jokes in recent Dilbert cartoons. While it may be
going too far to call fools the target market of these pitches, they
certainly constitute an incredibly valuable segment.
Fools tend to be easily impressed by invocations of data (even in the
form of meaningless phrases like 'data-driven'), they are less likely to
ask hard questions (nothing takes the air out of a proposal faster than
having to explain the subtle difference between your current proposal
and the advice you gave SwissAir or AOL Time Warner),
and fools are always open to the idea of a simple solution to all their
problems which everyone else in the industry had somehow missed. Not
suffering fools gladly would have made for a very short career for
Coleman at McKinsey.
In case you haven't heard, Donald Trump's net worth just got much bigger.
Incredible.
Trump’s Republican billionaire skeptic became his Republican billionaire
friend by giving him billions of dollars in exchange for policy favors
on TikTok, Social Security, and Medicare. Right out in the open. https://t.co/cs3cvGtAJx
If
it is true that Donald Trump’s net worth just increased by more than a
billion dollars the public deserves to know why. This is likely the
biggest financial windfall for a politician in world history, so it
requires a detailed and transparent explanation.
.@chrislhayes:
Part of Trump's appeal in 2016 was the lie that his personal wealth
would allow him to self-fund his campaign and make him immune to outside
influence.
That's even less true today. Trump is strapped for cash, and his political positions are up for sale. pic.twitter.com/N9ZXnvgNoD
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 14, 2024
Reuters had a good write-up right out of the gate.
Yass, 65, was thrust into the spotlight this month after Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, reversed course on his preference for banning TikTok, saying that a ban would hurt some children and only strengthen Meta Platforms'
Trump made the comments days after he met Yass at a gathering of the conservative Club for Growth donor group in Florida.
The U-turn on TikTok amid a major cash crunch led to speculation that Trump may be trying to court Yass.
Trump says the pair only met for "a few minutes," and did not discuss TikTok but instead talked about education.
In the case of Trump, the stock could be inflated by his
supporters, although the inverse could also true. If Trump unloaded his
stock, it could plunge in value because his brand would no longer be
associated with it.
The top institutional investor
in the company is Susquehanna International Group. Its founder, Jeff
Yass, is a major donor to Republican causes and also a major investor in
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Yass and Trump actually met recently,
just before Trump reversed his previous position in favor of requiring
ByteDance to spin off TikTok. Trump said the subject of TikTok did not
come up in his conversation with Yass. Susquehanna International Group
did not return a request for comment about the company’s stake in Trump
Media & Technology Group.
Jordan Libowitz is the communications director for the
watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and
in a phone conversation, he wondered what might happen if foreign
wealth funds that have interests inthe US, like those associated with Saudi Arabia or Qatar, started buying large amounts of DJT stock.
Since so much of Trump’s wealth is now tied up in the
company, those countries could theoretically have a direct impact on his
bottom line.
“The value isn’t really in the company,” Libowitz argued,
pointing to the company’s lackluster revenue. “It’s in the Trump name.”
If you like your news concise and snarky...
[queued up to the relevant section.]
What about our paper of record? Since the news of Trump's windfall broke, The NYT has run three stories mentioning Yass, only one of which (three days after Reuters and on page B4) focused on the main issue of quid pro quo...
Mr. Trump had supported banning TikTok in
the United States, but he recently reversed his stance. A few weeks
ago, he acknowledged having a brief meeting with Mr. Yass — identified in a 2022 Wall Street Journal column as a “never Trumper” — but said the two men never discussed TikTok.
A
person close to Mr. Trump’s campaign said that Mr. Yass was expected to
give a large donation to a group supporting the former president’s
political campaign. Mr. Yass said through a spokesman that he had never
given to Mr. Trump and had no plans to do so.
If this story has the legs it deserves, the NYT will play catch-up with a big story and far too many people will be fooled into forgetting that others were there first when it mattered, but some of us will remember that, as with Bondi, the New York Times hesitated when it counted.
P.S. On the subject of the NYT jumping on the bandwagon. 5:00 today.
