Surprisingly the international edition of the German magazine "Spiegel" has a long article about the Olympic committee's "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" act when it comes to the freedom to protest that the Chinese promised when they won the games, but have--surprise! surprise!--not delivered.

Rogge's Silence: The Phantoms of the Beijing Opera.

As far as my extremely-rusty German goes, I can not find the same article in the German edition. But on Monday they did print an article about a protester that was arrested when he applied for a permit to demonstrate--this was what the Chinese government promised to allow: like in the US, the Chinese set up specific protest areas and were to allow permits to grant people the right to protest. So far, 77 applications to protest have been filed. None resulted in permits, but most resulted in the arrest of the person filing the request.

Newsweek has a similar article: Why China Sentences 70-Year-Olds

If anyone needs an example of how brittle China's Communist Party leaders think their country is, look no further than the case of Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan. The elderly women, who both walk with canes and have failing eyesight, were sentenced to serve one-year terms in a labor camp after they applied to hold a legal protest in Beijing. And if you think there was no method to this madness, that it's somehow the fault of some random thug in the Ministry of Public Security, I'd caution you to think again.

[...] So when Wang and Wu heard that, with the Olympics, authorities in Beijing had set aside special protest zones in three parks, they applied. Not once but four times. On the fourth time, they were detained and then sentenced -- by the cops, not a judge -- to a labor camp. (They haven't been incarcerated yet but will if they violate various provisions or regulations.)

Time picked up the same story about the grannies being sent to a labor camp.

The Washington Post picked up the non-existent protests too. In fact, they went along when a prominent protester invited the media with him when he went to apply. He ended up disappearing: After Friend Disappears, Ji Sizun Confronts Police and is Detained Himself.

When the Chinese government announced at the end of July that it would set up special zones where people could demonstrate during the Beijing Olympics, it seemed almost too good to be true. For months, the country had been under fire from critics who accused it of trying to kill dissent ahead of the games.

While optimists said the fact that Beijing is allowing any public protest at all is a victory for human rights, pessimists worried that the whole thing was a set up and the applications would be used to round up protesters and control their movements during the games.

Obviously, the pessimists were right.

WaPo: "The three protest zones have so far remained empty of demonstrators."

At least the IOC has made a little noise about this.

[Globe and Mail] In a tacit criticism of China's intolerance of dissent, the International Olympic Committee says the Chinese government should have allowed its official protest zones to be "genuinely used" by demonstrators, rather than letting them sit empty.

It is the latest sign of IOC discontent with China's unwillingness to permit any demonstrations at the three parks where the government had promised to allow protests during the Beijing Olympics.

Beijing announced this week that it had received 77 applications from 149 people who wanted to protest at the designated zones during the Games. Yet no protests have taken place. All of the applications were "withdrawn" or rejected for various reasons, according to the city government.

In reality, many of those who applied were detained or jailed by the authorities, human-rights groups say, arguing that China used the protest zones as a propaganda tactic to give the appearance of complying with international standards, while actually using the application process to identify potential protesters.

Other articles: Daily Telegraph (London), New York Times, AP, The Star (Toronto).

The Gold: Chicago's Dr. Bob Hartley:

The Silver: Minneapolis' Mary Richards:
The Bronze: Milwaukee's Arthur Fonzarelli :

I made it home from work with my scooter, but...I actually had to walk part of the way. I didn't know how far I could go on one charge--maximum is 15 miles, but that depends on terrain, speed and the weight of the rider. The terrain was pretty flat, my stomach is not. And I floored it pretty much all day.

I figure with an overweight rider at full speed, I got about 5 miles of range out of it.

Still good enough, and I can certainly charge it while at work.

This one is for my sister. Every Dr Who ever made is represented:



Well done! Via Scienceblogs.

Ann says: To which an old-time Dr. Who fan would likely say..."Shada"!

Steve Says: Shada at 3:36. :)

Ann says: And the walls fell.

Steve Says: Good grief. Is that a TNG reference? If so, I feel embarrassed to have known so.

Ann says: The kids wanted to get your baby this:

A letter to The Corner from someone calling himself "Palin - Jindal 2012":

Here's the bottom line for me: I strongly prefer John McCain on every issue, but not at the cost of ending the pro-life litmus test for GOP nominees to the WH and SCOTUS. (It ain't much, but it's all we've got.)

Finally, a reason to vote for McCain. I am sick and tired of Pro-Life an Pro-Choice zealots and their "litmus tests." Like the vast majority of Americans, I am ambivalent when it comes to abortion. But not the zealots. They know they have the one and only correct answer. For them, there is one and only one central issue governing any campaign. Around election time, certain bloggers at sites like the Corner seem to have little else to talk about.

Give it up people. Abortion is not going to be outlawed. It's not going to be unrestricted. Somehow, miraculously, we as a society have been able to hammer out a compromise which is not ideal to many of us, but is reasonable to the vast majority, allowing unrestricted abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, and allowing for legal restrictions it in the later stages. That's the way it's been for years now, that's the way it will be in the foreseeable future.

If McCain is able to break the GOP out of the zealots' "litmus test" stranglehold, I would feel better about voting for him.

Ann says: The issue is a pain in the butt. In particular because there is a solid consensus in the country about it. Most people want late-term abortion outlawed, except for life of the mother (and maybe rape), and most people want it rare in the middle of a term, but legal at the start.

The problem and the frustration come with the fact that no matter what the consensus is, no matter how many people agree to basically take it off the table as an issue, it can never be.

Because it is no longer an area for democratic debate and policy.

That's the problem. The Supreme Court has declared that the law is what they say it is, and no legislature can touch it. It's anti-democratic and depressing.

Most abortion zealots see the abortion issue as primary, with the Supreme-Court over-reach issue as a side effect. For me, the Supreme Court is the issue, and the abortion wars are the side effect.

This is what I was thinking...parking near the hospital runs $30 a month and a bus pass costs you the same. I've been paying cash for the bus at about $2.50 a day, or $12.50 a week. At that price, I can buy something like this:



Which I just did. It had to charge overnight, but this morning I've been testing it out. It's very cool, and at $303 should be able to pay for itself within a year.

Updated below...

It was only a matter of time, but I didn't expect the wind power industry to be referred to as "Big Wind" so soon.

For decades, dairy farmers have wrested a living from the Tug -- accepting lives of wind-swept hardship with little prospect of much change...

"Is it worth destroying families, pitting neighbor against neighbor, father against son?" asks John Yancey, whose family has farmed Tug Hill for generations. "Is it worth destroying a whole way of life?"

Similar questions are being asked across the country as more small towns grapple with big money and big wind...

So there you have it. Evil Corporate Big Wind preying on poor desperate farm families, tricking them into signing away the air rights over their land. Where have you gone Woody Guthrie? We need you more than ever.

Update

Found via Instapundit, a related story from the New York Times

But in town after town, some residents say, the [wind] companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.

Those photos have been more effective in black and white. What are they teaching in j-school these days?

This is funny and explains perfectly why I can't stand watching any NBC coverage of the Olympics:

"Athlete without Compelling Personal Drama Expelled from Olympics"

Who, I wonder, is surprised that the Chinese have flouted the rules and allowed gymnasts under 16 to compete in the Olympics?



I think the lesson to be learned here is that unenforceable laws only serve to benefit the unscrupulous.

I would advocate getting rid of this age limit. This would help to make the competition more fair. The intent of the rule, they say, was to keep girls under 16 from getting hurt. But I find it hard to believe that young gymnasts will train any less hard, or push themselves any less in the competitions in which they are allowed to participate.

The same lesson should be learned and applied in contexts beyond the Olympics. Remember the our treaty with the USSR to stop producing biological weapons? They kept right on producing them, of course, while the USA actually followed the treaty and stopped. Remember Carter's disastrous agreement with North Korea during the Clinton Administration? Who was surprised when the North Koreans took our aid money and kept right on going with their nuclear program?

Consider international environmental agreements. It doesn't seem to register with people who advocate greenhouse gas treaties that these treaties are essentially unenforceable. Does anyone believe that China's emissions could be verified by some inspection process? I don't believe that any international agency would have the manpower or funding to do so. Nor do I think that such an agency would be insusceptible to bribes.

Suppose the US and China enter into a greenhouse gas agreement. Compare what would happen in the US:

A Federal agency within the US government comes up with a plan to reduce emissions. Emitters such as power plants and factories are required to report their emissions. The agency enforces its regulations through some sort of financial penalties. Environmental watchdog groups make sure that the agency follows through, using the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of industries' reports, and suing the industries and the Federal agency if they detect non-compliance. Reports in the free press highlight failures in the system, and the people demand action. The US economy takes a hit from the additional cost associated with meeting the new regulations.

to what would happen in China:

No real actions to reduce emissions are taken. The day before the annual report is due, a bureaucrat somewhere within the Chinese government fills out a form showing that China not only met its goal, but exceeded the goal by 5%. Meanwhile, a statement by the propaganda minister is prepared for publication in China's government run newspapers heralding this great success and scolding the corrupt West for falling short.

If we feel that reducing greenhouse gasses is the right, i.e. moral, thing to do, and we are willing to let the Chinese get a competitive advantage, then let's go ahead and cut our emissions. But let's not kid ourselves about what China and other dictatorships would do under an international agreement.

From the Brookline Police Blog, via the blog at our local paper:

Victim states she sold a futon on Craig list for $250 and received a check from the buyer. Upon reviewing the check, she saw that it was made out for more money than she asked for. She contacted the buyer who instructed her to deposit the check into her account and return $3000 in cash via money gram, which she did. She was notified later that the check the buyer had given her had bounced.

No amount of governement laws and regulation will ever eliminate this sort of thing. There will always be someone this naive. $3000!?!? Live and learn I guess.

I thought, way back in the Bush I administration, that we missed a golden opportunity with Russia.

This might not have worked, of course, but we could have reminded Russia that prior to the Soviet revolution, US and Russia had long been traditional allies. Of course, we were traditional allies against the French, but that wouldn't be a bug in the new alliance, but a feature.

Anyway, it's too late now, post-Soviet Russia has defined itself as the Soviet Union without all that soviet mumbo jumbo. We're stuck with them now.

I find this pathetic. The Olympics are a multi-billion dollar industry, which at the end of the day rides on the talents and literal blood and sweat of the athletes. The Olympic committee members are wined and dined around the world with the status of heads of state.

Yet the best athletes in the world. Those who win a gold medal. Don't actually get a gold metal.

It's gold-plated silver. It must contain at least 6 grams of gold (roughly $150 on the current market.) I've seen some different statistics, one saying the medals are 150 grams, another saying roughly 250. Let's assume the last one, and assume that the Jade makes up 50 grams, that leaves 200 grams of metal. Current gold prices are about $710 for 28 grams. So a medal would be worth about $5050 in gold. According to Yahoo answers, there will be 302 gold medals issued. For a total of just over 1.5 million dollars worth of gold.

The Olympics can afford that. NBC paid more than 800 million dollars to win the broadcast rights in the US. Internationally, the bids add up to well over a billion dollars.

With all the money behind the Olympics, the least they could do is give actual gold medals to the winners.

We played Team Handball in high school gym class back in good old Wisconsin. It is perhaps the most bizarre sport I've played. Imagine soccer, but you use your hands and dribble the ball like in basketball. Rather than a basket, keep the goal as in soccer. Imagine the goalie trying to stop a guy from throwing the ball into an enormous goal. Good luck. Anyway, my impression of the sport was pretty much this guy's, from the Corner:

As my brother and I were trying to figure it out (we were watching Spain versus Poland), one of the Spanish players actually clotheslined one of the Poles — I mean he hammered this poor Polish dude. We both howled. It was cartoon funny — like when Bugs Bunny clotheslines the wolf. All that was missing was the head and body going forward while the rubber-like neck goes ten feet in the opposite direction to a reverberating “boing!”

Play stopped, but no foul was called. The poor dazed guy picked himself up, rubbed his jaw, and incredulously gestured to the referee — arm fully extended in the proper clothesline position. The ref and the Spanish clothesliner both just shrugged, like, “Sorry dude, all part of the game.”

Hilarious!

Ann adds: I would only add that at our high school...only the boys played handball. I believe at the time, the girls were outside playing field hockey.

From the AP, via the Minneapolis Star-Trib:

LUVERNE, Minn. - Randy Swaney will spend the rest of his life in prison without a chance for parole in the death of a state park worker in 2001. The 37-year-old man was sentenced Friday morning in Luverne after being convicted of all seven murder charges in the death of Carrie Nelson at Blue Mounds State Park...

The jury deliberated for six hours before returning its verdict before dawn Friday. It convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder.

Why didn't Minnesota charge him with genocide? In any case, I'm glad to hear they put him away for good.

After sitting on its hands, letting the National Enquirer take the lead on the whole "John Edwards' Love Child" affair, it's clear that the New York Times has decided that the best defense is a good offense.

Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot’s Body

But on Friday at a hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a pair of Bigfoot hunters say they will present what they contend is the most definitive proof yet of an animal that science says does not exist: DNA evidence and photographs of a dead specimen they say they found in a remote swath of woods in northern Georgia.

Yes, that should help sales. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Char has a good point, I think, about a recent report on Obama's tax proposal by Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard, which was linked by Greg Mankiw. You can read about it in Char's posts, and in the comments thereto. One of the authors of the report, Alan Viard, replied to Char's original post. I added some comments too, less snarky than usual.

However, I still disagree on a technical point, which is the claim that you can increase marginal tax rates across the board and still lower the total tax.

Char writes:

I don't have the tax code in front of me, so I'll have to use a cartoon example (again). A firefighter with two kids earns $50,000 per year. Under the current tax code (let's say) after taking the personal exemption and so on, she pays taxes on $30,000. She's in the 20 percent tax bracket, so she pays $30k x .2 = $6000. She has two kids, so she gets a tax credit of $1000 x 2 = $2000, so her final tax burden is $4000.

Under Obama's plan (again, I'm making up numbers here just to demonstrate the point), say the marginal tax rate is raised to 25 percent while the child tax credit is doubled. She pays $30k x .25 = $7500 minus the tax credit of $4000 = $3500. She pays less in taxes despite the fact that she pays at a higher marginal tax rate.

Brill and Viard's point is that the higher marginal tax rate will reduce peoples' incentive to work and therefore will reduce growth. Debatable, but not an outlandish speculation. To avoid confusion, they should have made clear that low and middle income earners will at the same time be paying less under Obama's plan than they do now.

I understand his point, but since people who currently make no gross income pay no taxes, marginal rates can only decrease across the board while total taxes fall if there is to be negative taxation, i.e. if a person with two kids and no income gets a $2000 check in the mail. I assume marginal rates are non-negative under any plan..

Specifically, let T(y) be the average tax collected from everyone making y dollars gross income, and suppose m(y)>0 is the marginal rate, so that

T(y)= ∫₀^y m(z) z dz

and in particular T(0)=0. If a new marginal rate comes along, say with Obama's plan, and m₀(y)>m(y) for all y, then clearly T₀(y)>T(y) for all y.

I conclude that marginal rates must fall somewhere below $25k, the region not shown in the orginal graph of Brill and Viard. If the marginal tax rate falls for people earning less than $25k, then they will have more incentive to work. That's the basis of Brill and Viard's analysis after all. Perhaps it's better to provide such incentives to the poor than the rich? One could argue that incentives for the rich are more effective, because they will start new businesses which will help everyone. But then perhaps it would be better to fiddle with corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes instead.

Unfortunately, Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard don't provide a graph for the marginal rates under $25,000. Let's guess at what it might look like. In the first scenario, let's suppose Obama's plan lowers the marginal rate under $25k as shown, so that near zero income the marginal rate goes down by about 6% from a current level 10%. This seems to be in line with what the plan's goal is. I've guessed that the current rate decreases to 10% at zero income. Here is the graph:




It's easy to calculate the effective total tax by income, and the percent change in after-tax income, shown here:





You can see from the graph that with Obama's plan under scenario 1, people will be paying more taxes if they make $40k or more. That's not what the plan will do, according to the analysis in the report Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard cite. Let's guess again, making Obama's plan more progressive. Suppose the marginal tax rate under $25k is zero, under scenario 2. We get the following graphs:





Under this scenario, people making over about $67k will be paying more taxes. It doesn't seem to me that this is in agreement with the Obama plan either. My understanding is that the income level where people will be paying more tax is higher than that.

Something doesn't seem to be adding up right. It is unfortunate that Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard didn't provide all the data.

Update

Greg Mankiw posts a note from Alan Viard:

Given some confusion on the blogosphere, I want to reiterate that my and Alex' article does not find an increase in average tax rates, or in tax payments, at the income ranges shown in the chart. On the contrary, our article makes clear that Obama's proposed tax cuts would cause average tax rates and tax payments to decline throughout this income range...

Ok, this is not possible. Even if Obama's plan calls for 0 taxes below $25k and the current plan has a constant marginal rate of 21% from $0 through $40k, average tax rates go up at the $105,000 dollar point. This scenario clearly over-estimates of the tax break Obama will be giving to low-income people, so I don't think Mr. Viard's data and conclusion are in agreement. See the graphs below.

This site claims that the "Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" was banned by the Federal Government:

The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, written by Robert Brent and illustrated by Harry Lazarus, is a children's book published in the 1960s that was intended to explain to kids how they could set up a home chemistry lab and conduct simple experiments. Supposedly the US government had the book removed from libraries and banned for sale on the grounds that the projects were too dangerous for its intended audience. I would have to agree that you probably don't want your kids making and igniting hydrogen in the garage, ...

Well, I made and ignited hydrogen in my bedroom. What's the big deal? Some electrolysis and a match gives you get a little 'pop.' It would be difficult for a kid to make enough to hurt himself.

You can download "The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments" here. Share with a child in your life.

This being the heat of August, naturally thoughts turn to Christmas air fares.

They are ridiculous this year. Within a couple days it went up several hundred dollars for the 4 of us to travel from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. In the end, for my sister to fly Sun-Sun around Christmas, and for me and the kids to fly Sun-New Years Eve is costing about $2,100.

That's what comes from airlines cutting millions of seats.

Book now, or forever stay on the ground!

My wife Jui and I went to the pediatrician's office today to get our daughter Shivani's ears pierced. Shivani is seven months old. Like my wife, practically all little girls in India get their ears pierced, so it sounded like a good idea. I was pretty nervous though.

In the waiting room, Shivani was looking up me and smiling. She looked so trusting!

In the exam room, when the nurses held her down and marked her ears with ink, Shivani started wailing. When they were done marking, and Shivani started to calm down, it was clear to everyone that I was having second thoughts. The nurses gave my wife and me a minute alone to discuss it. In the end, we decided not to go through with it. Thanks to Jui for being so understanding.



I don't want my little girl to suffer, even something as minor as ear piercing. She can get it done later, if she wants. Besides, wouldn't giving her earrings be gilding the lily?

I've written a few posts [1,2,3,4] on economic growth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Essentially I've pointed out that energy conservation plans, and the energy plans of both McCain and Obama are not going to help us for long, because with economic growth will come ever-increasing demand for energy.

Now there is this report from the UK on Greens who see GDP growth as the real root cause of the problem:

John Barrett, one of the authors of the reports by the Stockholm Environment Institute at York (SEI-Y) for the government and campaign group WWF*, was quoted by the BBC today:

"We are constantly battling against increases of wealth... There's a very fundamental problem here that no one really wants to talk about..."

Stuart Bond of WWF told the Beeb: "Our claims on emissions are simply a big lie.

"There is no way the government can hope to achieve any of its emissions targets without cheating unless it changes its policies on encouraging flying and hoping to satisfy people's insatiable demands for buying more and more stuff."

As to how that should be done, Bond was reluctant to give specifics. But he said there was a need for a "strategic plan to set out very clearly how the UK will become a low carbon economy by 2050... at the moment there is no central priority for environmental issues. Consumers' consumption of goods is the driver of emissions. The continued pursuit of GDP, of economic growth - that is a mantra that we must question."

So with one hand, I salute them for their honesty and recognition of economic growth as a factor. With the other I point to my temple and move my finger in small circles, the universal symbol for "cookoo."

Frozen water found near Mars' polar ice cap!

Now if only NASA would launch a probe to see if the Sun is really hot.

Found in The Corner:

"Now the world will watch and remember what we do here" Barack Obama, Berlin

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here" Abe Lincoln, Gettysburg

Update:

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

Obama is getting a little scary.

Erratum. There was a mistake in my code. I have re-done the figure and the text in this post to reflect the correction. We are doing a little bit worse than I thought, compared to Western Europe and Japan.

In an earlier post, I wrote

... energy conservation of say 20% would only buy us about 7 1/2 years before we are right back in the same boat. This is assuming a modest growth rate of 3% for the economy. My guess is that 20% is a lot, in that it would take a lot of effort and belt-tightening to gain that sort of efficiency.

I would like to go back and try to get a handle on that 20% conservation, which I said was a lot. I recently found this very nice graph at the Wikipedia page on "Energy Consumption."



to which I have added the colored rays shooting out of the origin and the legend at top right (click image to zoom).

The underlying graph plots per capita energy consumption vs. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The first thing that stands out with this graph is how much GDP per person the US produces vs. nearly every other country. Yes, the US uses a lot of energy, but that is mostly because we produce a lot of stuff per person. More than twice what Spain produces per person. Roughly 50% more per person than Germany. Only Japan has higher per capita output. The second thing to notice is that the US is not that inefficient. There are many countries that do worse than we do, and we are better than the world average. We are roughly as efficient as Spain. If we could get by with 90% of the energy we use, without decreasing GDP, we would be like France. That would buy us 3.6 years before we were consuming as much energy as we are today. Conserving 20% would make us as efficient as Germany, and buy us 7.5 years. The UK is doing well. We would have to cut about 32% of our energy use to get their level of efficiency, and we would gain 13 years in doing so. All of these calculation assume 3% annual growth in our GDP. Japan is doing very well in this regard. Cutting 50% of our energy would get us to where they are, and gain us 23 years. That's not nothing.

Japan and those western European countries have an advantage in that they are not as spread out as we are. They have less transportation costs, for people and freight. They may also have milder weather, I'm not sure. I doubt that many Americans would be willing to adopt a Japanese style of living. Very high population density, with a high percentage of people living in small (by American standards) apartments.

So the bottom line, I think, is that we can do better with our energy use. I still think that 20% would be an ambitious goal, gaining us about 7.5 years. Not earth changing, but not bad.

An interesting article at Forbes.com "The Wiki-Hacker Strikes Again"

By matching users' IP addresses with the public database of addresses registered to different corporations, Griffith's "Wikiscanner" revealed widespread corporate meddling on Wikipedia, as companies attempted to add marketing pitches to their own entries, or hide controversies.

[...] The new Wikipedia-mining tool set allows users to not only filter Wikipedia edits, automatically pinpointing corporations who edit articles about their company or products, but also reveals the corporate affiliation of users whose business and personal IP addresses had been previously masked.

I agree that the anonymity of Wikipedia causes problems with conflict of interest. But this problem is certainly not limited to Evil Corporations. Should a person be allowed to edit his own biography? Should Sierra Club or the NRA or Planned Parenthood be able to edit their entries? Should Democrats edit the article on the Democratic Party? Or the Republican party for that matter? Should members of the McCain campaign be allowed to edit their candidate's page?

Suppose you have some beef with Dow Chemical. Perhaps you are a disgruntled former employee, suing Dow for mistreatment. So you go into the Wiki page, put in a few paragraphs describing poor employee treatment by Dow. Why shouldn't Dow be able to go in and provide some balance?

When this guy's software becomes widely available (in about a week), you will hear a lot from anti-corporate types about corporate abuse of Wikipedia. But corporate abuse is only the very tip of the iceberg.

I wasn't paying much attention to the recent controversy surrounding a paper on global warming that appeared in an American Physical Society (APS) publication. It seems that The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley wrote an article that was critical of the IPCC's conclusions. This made it seem like the APS had pulled back its "the science is settled" stance on anthropogenic global warming.

This was quickly picked up by the Right side of the blogosphere. I saw several sites pointing to this publication as being big news. However the APS quickly added a disclaimer to the top of the article:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

So it seemed like the Right blogosphere had been suckered.

But now, in a really fascinating development, the Viscount has fired back! He's demanding an apology from the APS in an open letter. It turns out the paper was in fact peer reviewed (by one reviewer, typical I think of review papers), accepted pending revision, revised and then published. It starts out polite, then quickly takes of the gloves!

19 July 2008
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley Carie, Rannoch, PH17 2QJ, UK

Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,President, American Physical Society,Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.

Dear Dr. Bienenstock, Physics and Society

The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.

I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to all of the reviewer's requests for revision (see the attached reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC evaluates climate sensitivity - a method which the IPCC does not itself clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC's viewpoint. Some days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website of Physics and Society:

"The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions."

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it;
an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000
words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur's findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a
copy of the text of the Council's decision, together with the names of those present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo,that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the "overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community"; and, tertio, that "The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's
conclusions"? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what
scientific grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?
Yours truly,

THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

Give 'em hell Viscount! You are 100% correct. The APS has no business putting that statement at the top of the article. They certainly shouldn't lie about it lacking of peer review. If the article wasn't sound, then they shouldn't have accepted it. Rebuttals to the article may appear in issues of the publication that follow, naturally; that is the proper channel for scientific debate.

Or has the APS declared War on Science?

Pew research has an online poll to test your news knowledge. Some of the questions are very easy, some slightly less so. None are terribly hard, though I did think I might have gotten one of them wrong (I didn't.)

After taking the quiz, you can see how it broke down along gender lines. The average man had a percentile rank of 56%, meaning the average man scored above average (men pulled the average up by 6%.)

Women on the other hand scored far below, at 39%.



Pew also showed the breakdown by question. The only question on which women outscored men was the one with the answer "Oprah Winfrey".

Pew did not ask people for general party affiliation. I would love to know if Republicans outscore democrats in very basic knowledge.

Steve Says: I got 'em all right too, but like you wasn't really sure about one or two. It's interesting too to look at the percentages of people getting each question right. (Spoilers ahead!) More people know Ben Bernanke than Harry Reid. Only 28% know we've lost 4000 service people in Iraq, but 46% percent know it was Kosovo that split from Serbia recently. Of course, 84% know O is campaigning for Obama.

Ann says: The two examples you state--the number of troops killed and Kosovo independence--were also interesting for other reasons. Those with college degrees scored worse on those questions, than people with less education. The Kosovo imbalance surprised me, but not the troop numbers. I think, again, that would be a good question to be able to see political demographics. My guess is that Democrats believe the death toll is considerably higher than it is--and since the college educated are disproportionately Democrats, it would skew their data.

A month or two ago, I poked around on the web to see if anyone played Irish traditional music on harmonica. I really didn't find much. It seemed to me that "harp" would be good for that, having a reedy sound not unlike an accordion. The absence of much stuff out there made me think that perhaps it was too hard to play that style on that instrument.

But I was wrong! I ran across this guy on my blog rounds (at LGF I think):



Awesome! Those tunes are "The Drunken Landlady", "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" and "John Stenson's Reel," standards all. I play them on Irish flute, at a fraction of the "goodness" of this guy.

His web site is here.

Perdue has investigated a researcher for misconduct, finding two instances. One if its misconduct findings:

"The committee also found that Taleyarkhan added another person as an author even though the person did not substantially contribute."

I am shocked, shocked! to hear that such a thing continues to happen. It's a sad day for Perdue. It's a sad day for science.

I live in West Los Angeles, which means I am surrounded by die-hard liberals. I also work at a Jewish hospital, most people I work with are Jewish, and live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

The buzz I'm picking up is that Obama has major problems in the Jewish community.

A friend of mine said she attended an Obama event, where he appeared before a group of liberal Jews--which should be a natural constituency. In her words:

"He basically told them F.U....You could practically hear the gasps."

When talking of the Middle East, she said he mostly talked about the suffering of the Palestinians. Not a word about the suffering of Israelis.

I think there's a video of the event online; I'll have a look for it.

The Jewish vote will come down to a simple question: do they want liberal economic and social policies more than they want a sane Middle East policy?

And travels back in time 40 years!

China could beat US to Moon, says Nasa chief.

Jim Manzi continues to write interesting articles over at NRO and its Corner blog. His take on science is pretty interesting, and is a breath of fresh air when the Corner (too often) seems to be dominated by all things Catholic.

However, I would argue with him regarding Genetic Algorithms. My opinion of them is much lower than his.

So-called Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are computer-software implementations of the same kind of mathematics that takes place in the biological process of evolution. [...] Today, GAs are widely deployed in artificial-intelligence computer programming to solve such prosaic engineering problems as optimally scheduling trucks on a delivery route or identifying the best combination of process-control settings to get maximum output from a factory.

In a surprisingly technical detail, he describes a method for toggling 100 switches at an industrial plant to maximize output:

Our goal, then, is to find the “genome” that will lead the plant to run at maximum output. The algorithm creates an initial bunch of guesses — genomes — by randomly generating, say, 1,000 strings of 100 zeros and ones. We then do 1,000 sequential production runs at the factory, by setting the switches in the plant to the combination of settings indicated by each genome and measuring the output of the plant for each; this measured output is termed the “fitness value.” (Typically, in fact, we construct a software-based simulation of the factory that allows us to run such tests more rapidly.) Next, the program selects the 500 of the 1,000 organisms that have the lowest fitness values and eliminates them. This is the feedback measurement in our algorithm — and it is directly analogous to the competition for survival of biological entities.
Next comes the algorithmic process for generating new guesses, which has two major components: crossover and mutation. These components are directly modeled on the biological process of reproduction. First, the 500 surviving organisms are randomly paired off into 250 pairs of mates. The GA then proceeds through these pairs of organisms one at a time. For each pair it flips a coin. If the coin comes up heads, then organism A “reproduces” with organism B by simply creating one additional copy of each; this is called direct replication. If it comes up tails, then organism A reproduces with organism B via “crossover”: The program selects a random “crossover point,” say at the 34th of the 100 positions, and then creates one offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism A up to the crossover point and those from organism B after the crossover point, and an additional offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism B up to the crossover point and those from organism A after the crossover point. The 500 resulting offspring are added to the population of 500 surviving parents to create a new population of 1,000 organisms. Finally, a soupçon of mutation is added by randomly flipping roughly every 10,000th digit from zero to one or vice versa.
The new generation is now complete. Fitness is evaluated for each, the bottom 500 are eliminated, and the surviving 500 reproduce through the same process of direct replication, crossover, and mutation to create the subsequent generation. This cycle is repeated over and over again through many generations. The average fitness value of the population moves upward through these iterations, and the algorithm, in fits and starts, closes in on the best solution..

Whew! Indeed, this is the sort of thing that GA practitioners do.

I think it's nonsense. There is no guarantee you will find the optimum setting this way. Further, there is absolutely no reason to believe a priori that this procedure will work any better than a much simpler non-GA greedy approach would work:

1) Start with an initial random positioning of all 100 switches.
2) Put your finger on the first switch.
3) Toggle the switch.
4) If production decreases, toggle the switch back.
5) Put your finger on the next switch (loop back to the first if you are at the 100th switch), and go back to step 3.
6) Exit when you can't increase production by toggling a switch.

It's clear that this algorithm increases production and must terminate. But like the GA algorithm described, it doesn't necessarily find the best setting. You could run it several times with different random initial states, but even then you are just hoping that you are not getting stuck short of the best setting. You could try flipping 2 switches at a time, or 3, or N. But without more information on the function you are minimizing, it's pretty much hopeless. Only checking all 2^100 possibilities guarantees you will find the optimum setting.

GA has always seemed to me to be hocus pocus. When more is known about the function, you are likely better off with standard descent methods. When nothing is known, GA is likely no better than any other way of repeatedly guessing.

Wow. Just when I thought I couldn't have a lower opinion of government, I find data for this:
U.S. crude oil production has been plummeting since 1970. Why? What has been done about it? Tell me our oil troubles are "Bush's Fault." How many Presidents and Congresses have we had since 1970?

Ann says: It's also remarkable that this takes place after the 1970's oil embargo by OPEC. Just when we were given a vivid demonstration of the power of OPEC to slam our country, we decided, year-after-year, to strengthen their power.

It really makes no sense whatsoever.

No, not the physics-kind of conservation of energy. The kind where we save energy by using efficient light-bulbs, driving at 55mph, and wearing a sweater like Jimmy Carter wanted us to. I think it is over-rated.

I don't want to sound like too much of a crank here; I am not in any way opposed to conservation. There really isn't much of a downside. I just don't think that conservation programs are likely to yield any lasting improvement in our energy situation.

One reason for this is that part of the savings in energy that might come from more efficiency will be offset by increased consumption. Take compact fluorescent bulbs for example. In our home we are gradually replacing our incandescent bulbs with these more efficient models. They save money and energy in the long run, but not as much as you might think. Rather than replace a 60Watt incandescent with at "60Watt equivalent" CFL, I often use a "100Watt equivalent" CFL. This allows me to get more light out of fixtures in dingy areas of the house. There is still an energy savings, since a 100Watt equivalent CFL uses fewer than 60Watts, but there is not as much savings as proponents claim. Similarly, someone who buys a car that gets better mileage may well drive more, thereby lessening the fuel savings.

Finally, and most important, energy conservation of say 20% would only buy us about 7 1/2 years before we are right back in the same boat. This is assuming a modest growth rate of 3% for the economy. My guess is that 20% is a lot, in that it would take a lot of effort and belt-tightening to gain that sort of efficiency. See the graph below which shows how many years we "buy" for percentage gains in efficiency. What's more, I don't think this sort of conservation can be thought of as a resource we can keep tapping into. With decreasing marginal returns, each additional belt-tightening measure will gain us less and less.

So the bottom line, I think, is that conservation is not a panacea. It doesn't hurt, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that we "just need to get by on less." That's not going to cut it.

Tony Snow, jazz flutist, has died.



Rest in peace Tony. Sorry to see you go.

I posted in the comments section at The Reference Frame:

I have to side with yorick over Pierre on this one. You have two faces of Obama. One is the Obama who's senate votes show him to be the most liberal of senators. The other is the new moderate Obama who is running for president in the general election. Which is the real one? I find it remarkable that people believe the latter is the better estimate.

Yorick is also right about people reading things into Obama. Again and again I hear people say "Oh, I'm sure he doesn't really believe that." Point out his membership in that nutty church. "He's just doing that for respect in the black community." Point out his anti-trade rhetoric "Oh, he's just doing that for union votes. I'm sure he is for free trade." Point out his Iraq pullout
statements. "He's just saying that to appease the hard left. I'm sure he will finish what was started there." On and on and on, issue after issue. Obama says something, people interpret it to mean whatever they want to hear.

It's bizarre, to say the least.

(*) From that old Ray Bradbury story, of the same name.

Harvard's president Drew Faust sent an email around yesterday:

"We will need to make the concern for environmental responsibility a more conscious and systematic consideration in many aspects of how we plan, build, work, and live -- while redoubling our commitment to education and research that contribute to sustainability."

The email announced the "Statement on the Report of the Harvard Greenhouse Gas Task Force." I, for one, am thrilled that we will make concern a consideration. For far too long we have only been considering making concern a consideration, and that has always concerned me.

The report itself is a nothing more than bureaucratic nonsense, just page after page after page of meaningless jargon.

How exactly does research and education contribute to "sustainability." Sustainability of what? I know Harvard is committed to sustaining it's endowment. Maybe that's what she means.

My sister makes an excellent point below. I also wonder how much of that $4000 would show up as higher tuition.

I think the whole idea of forced service is appalling. Who does this guy think he is, wanting to force labor out of young people? Check out this quote from his speech on the subject (hat tip LGF):

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

That's more than a little creepy, isn't it? His vision is some sort of youth brigade serving the State. Oh Fearless Leader! Guide us on the path of hope and change to a glorious future as first among equals!

There has been some talk in the blogosphere about Obama's wish to see college kids put in 100 hours of community service. (Jonah Goldberg in the LA Times and Steven Bainbridge are two.)

Most of the articles discuss the involuntary servitude aspect, but I want to talk about something else.

Go to any of the main state schools, or especially go to the minor city colleges, and you will find one thing stands out: a very large segment of the student body is returning adults who work full time, have families full time, and go to college in the evenings and on weekends, and whenever they can find time in their hectic schedules to fit in a class. These are people who may have dropped out of high school, or out of college after a couple years. After years in the workplace and leading grown-up lives they realize that to get a promotion, or to get a better job, they need to have two little letters on their resumé: B.A. These are people who take 10 years, one class a semester, to get their degree. These people don't have 100 minutes of extra time, much less 100 hours. If they did have extra time, they'd probably use it providing for their family or taking another course to get through faster.

[Back to College] (The Department of Education recently reported that 13 percent of students now enrolled in college were single parents, up from 7.6 percent in 1993.) Economic reasons are a strong factor: students want to change careers or update professional credentials. Some adult students continue to work while returning to school while others attend part-time.

[…] Millions of adult students successfully return to college to obtain a degree. However, they often have numerous responsibilities to consider when making the decision. These responsibilities can include marriage, children, work, community obligations, or care of elderly parents. The time and commitment needed to complete a degree program and balance these responsibilities can be a challenge.

[…] Recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that adult students are the fastest growing educational demographic, and these numbers are steadily increasing. In 1970, 28 percent of all college students were 25 years of age or older. In 1998 the number of adult learners had increased to 41 percent. The number of students age 35 and older in degree-granting institutions has soared from about 823,000 in 1970 to an estimated 2.9 million in 2001 — doubling from 9.6% of total students to 19.2%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

The Department of Education currently lists the percentage of college students over the age of 24 at 39% of all students.

Are these the kind of students Obama has in mind? Or is he thinking of Ivy League residential colleges which make up a tiny fraction of total college enrollment, but make up the entire fraction of his experience?

Is he thinking of the single moms who have real jobs and can't make up the 100 hours in the summer? Or is he thinking of Ivy League college kids who kick around their parent's house all summer bored and lazy, and can spend the whole summer in "community service" if they wanted to?

Adult learners can't afford to lose 100 hours of their time to make liberals feel better. Their community service is in the gainful and productive employment they perform and the child care they provide to their own kids. Their service is done keeping their own house picked up and getting dinner on the table.

To me, this shows how out of touch Obama is with the realities of many people's lives. He lives in an upper-class world where the ends always meet.

Then there's this little tidbit from his proposal:

[ Rocky Mountain News ] For college students, I have proposed an annual American Opportunity Tax Credit of $4,000. To receive this credit, we'll require 100 hours of public service. You invest in America, and America invests in you - that's how we're going to make sure that college is affordable for every single American, while preparing our nation to compete in the 21st century.

According to that same DoE page, there will be 18,839,000 college students in 2010--the first possible year that Obama's proposal could take effect.

At $4,000 a pop we're talking: $75,356,000,000! That's a brand new $75 billion dollar (or divided by 5 years of college = $15B) entitlement.

That's also $40/hour, which is higher than most people will ever make in their lives. That's also over $500 for every individual tax return filed with the IRS.

Good lord. Spare us.

T. Boone Pickens, billionaire, has a plan to address America's energy problems. He put together an interesting video:



He's using his own money to promote this; his commercials on t.v. say "paid for by T. Boone. Pickens." (Is that a great name or what? )

The plan itself seems to put a lot of emphasis on wind power and natural gas. I'm a little skeptical about the wind part, but the natural gas part sounds good for the short term. I would like to look a little closer on the practicality of wind power.

I remain a nuclear man.

I see Anthony Cordesman is mentioned today over on The Corner. I can't think of him--a fairly prominent foreign-affairs talking head, and a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Affairs--without thinking of this:

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE “BUFFY PARADIGM”

It's a 41-page fully-footnoted paper on what we can learn about national security from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Considering it was published September 29, 2001, Cordesman either started this paper as a response to 9/11, or was actually working on it before. Here's a taste:

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation – and planning for it -- is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or “chaos” theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the “Buffy Paradigm,” and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the “Buffy Syndrome.”

I realize that those of you who are workaholics or who are simply mature and without
children or younger relatives may never have seen this show. It is, however, about a teenage vampire slayer who lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one.

Yes, he actually takes the show and the concept very seriously, and it's actually a pretty good paper.

I just threw out my last 5 1/4" floppys.



They date back to a computer I got in the early 90's, which was probably one of the last machines to come with a big floppy drive. I think they were obsolete way back then, and I know the machine also had a 3 1/2" drive--I threw out those disks too.

Remember when software came on a stack of floppys and you had to sit there swapping them for an hour or so to get your software loaded? I still had those disks!

I also kept the hard drive from that computer. It had 52MB's of space on the entire drive--that's for software as well as documents. Today that's the size of a lean Microsoft program. (Sorry, did I say lean Microsoft program? I forgot that there is no such thing in existence.)

Steve Says: That's not a big floppy! Why, in my day, floppy disks were 8 inches and held 286k! And we liked it that way.

Ann says: That's less memory than my credit card.

China has decided to ramp up its nuclear power program. It wants to have 100 Westinghouse nuclear reactors in operation or under construction by 2020.

If China follows through on these and other nuclear plans they should have 200GW of nuclear power completed by 2025. This would be double what the USA has now.

While China steams ahead to a nuclear future, here in the USA the talk is all about "alternative energy." I'm afraid we are stuck on stupid. Suppose we were to try to build a 200 gigawatt photovoltaic solar power plant, by scaling up a cutting edge plant, the Serpa solar power plant. This plant, in sunny Portugal, was completed last year and is one of the largest in the world. The solar panels in this plant rotate to track the sun as it moves across the sky.

It occupies about 0.234 square miles of land, and is expected to produce about 20 gigawatt-hours per year. That works out to an average power output of about 2.28 megawatts. How much land would we have to cover with these panels to get 200 gigawatts?

200,000 / 2.28 x 0.234 = 20,526 square miles.

That's like covering all of Massachusetts 2.5 times over. Compare the footprint of the proposed drilling in ANWR

3.13 square miles

The plain truth is that solar power plants on this scale are not going to happen. It would be nice if we had some political leader out there who understood that. Instead we get fantasies about solar, biofuels and wind. I suppose this is what politicians have always done, promising the impossible to win votes. I'm reminded of Bart Simpson, running for class president:

My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say, he's not looking hard enough!

At what point does a lack of a realistic energy plan compromise national security? How long can we keep putting off taking the necessary steps to avoid a catastrophic energy shortage? The time to drill for more oil is now. The time to get our nuclear program back in gear is now.

Making the rounds in the Blogosphere:



New York Times, Dec. 21, 1924.

Jonah Goldberg:

JFK's Youth Fitness Song.

Scary? No. Creepy? A little. Weird? You betchya.

Weird?? No way! This was a real favorite in elementary school gym class. I still find myself singing it once in a while. I didn't know who Robert Preston was back then, of course. Follow the link and have a listen.

If it's the end of the first week of the start of the month...it's time for the BLS!

Every month we get the employment data, and every month I am amazed at how it is reported.

The bottom line is this: according to the household survey (basically calling people up and asking about their jobs) absolutely no jobs have been added in the last year and a half--actually 19 months.



We actually have lost an average of 1,842 jobs a month for 19 months.

The employers' survey (a poll of big employers' hiring and firing) shows a similar trend. It has a slight increase through October 07, the begins going down. From the high in October to today's report, we've lost 722,000 jobs.

I do think there are some non-economic reasons for some of the drop, and much of the rest probably comes from the highly-cyclical building industry, but it is still a big loss.

A comment I posted in response to Half Sigma's suggestion "Republicans should support socialized medicine:"

$140K [for doctor's salaries, set by the government]? You are out of your mind. Medicine will hemorrhage its best and brightest. That means no innovation. No new procedures. No progress in medical science.

That is the real, never-mentioned problem with all of these government take-over plans. Socialized medicine in the USA would be a death blow to medicine, because the USA the only major market left on earth where investing in medical research has the potential to pay off. No profit motive means no new devices, no new drugs, no new procedures, no new technology. Spare me your vision of the noble NIH-funded scientist sweating away in his lab to save humanity. His goal is to produce journal papers. Spare me your point about European drug companies doing well. Where do you think they make their money?

If we had adopted socialized medicine decades ago, where would medicine be today? Decades behind.

and another on a followup post:

Obviously, other countries have lower medical costs because their governments strictly control prices. The only major relatively free market left, the USA, ends up footing the bill for medical research by way of high prices. In effect, countries with socialized care are not paying their fair share, they are passing the costs on to us.

What if the USA adopts socialized medicine like other countries? Then all would be on equal footing. But, as I pointed out in my previous comment, it would be a disaster for the advancement of medicine.

We can debate the pluses and minuses of health care policies, but to ignore the effect of said policies on the advancement of medical science is foolish and likely dangerous.

Half Sigma is an interesting blogger, and I read him often. I sometimes wonder though if he makes incendiary statements just to get a rise out of people. He dedicates a lot of posts to the question of race and intelligence. Some will surely find it offensive. I am not much offended by it, but I don't agree with the level of importance with which he seems to rate the topic.

Below, I posted a note after my brother's comment on empty playgrounds. I believe it's mostly due to hyper-paranoia that has infected parenting. Parents buy the line that there is a predator behind every tree.

I went looking for some stats, and found this from 2002 (UCLA Bruin)

But, like last year’s “summer of the shark,” the current “summer of abduction” is more hype than fact. If parents waded through the media frenzy, they would see the number of child kidnappings by strangers has actually been decreasing in recent years. According to FBI reports, there were 115 cases in 1998, 134 in 1999, 106 in 2000, and 93 in 2001. This year, the drop has continued as 46 cases have been recorded in the first half of 2002.

As it turns out, the actual probability of a child being snatched up and murdered is about one in a million. To provide perspective lacking in the media, a child is twice as likely to fall victim to accidental shooting, 10 times more likely to drown in a backyard pool, and 100 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed on a bicycle. As Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at USC puts it, “It’s hard to imagine any serious danger to children that is less likely than kidnapping by a stranger.”

I found a national report on juvenile crime statistics which compared the two-year period from 1991-1993 to 2001-2003, and found that for kids 12-14, the rate of non-fatal victimization tanked:

Nonfatal violence –59%
Robbery –66%
Aggravated assault –69%
Simple assault –57%

And that's in a period of less than 10 years, and crime rates have been dropping for much longer than that. I'd also imaging that if you control for socio-economic level, you'd find that the victimization rate for middle class whites is almost non-existent.

Also this from the same report:

Contrary to public perceptions, NISMART–2 found that the majority of victims of stereotypical and other nonfamily abductions were teens—not younger children—and most were kidnapped by someone they knew somewhat—not by strangers or slight acquaintances. The NISMART–2 researchers point out the implications these findings have for prevention efforts, which have tended to focus on “stranger danger” and have targeted young children.

Here's one of the down-side risks (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In 1972, 87 percent of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13 percent of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a significant parallel, before 1980, only 5 percent of children were obese; today that figure has tripled, says the CDC.

The next generation of grandparents won't even need to harangue their progeny with tales of walking seven miles to school in the snow; it'll be impressive enough to say that they walked at all.

Here's the Justice Department:



It's a little hard to read, but it looks like the crime rate for young teens was about 80 in 1973, and is now down around 40--meaning that violent crimes against young teens have dropped in half since I was a kid.

There is a comments-section discussion going on at Ann Althouse's blog about the apparent lack of kids playing outside in the suburbs. I've noticed this too, for example in my parents' neighborhood, an outer suburb of Milwaukee. It's a fairly well-to-do area, with large houses on large plots of land. Many backyards and schoolyards have playground equipment in them, but it's rare to see many kids using them.

I think it's probably because these areas don't have many kids per square mile, i.e. the kid density is low. This is due to the large distance between houses and the relatively low kids-per-family that these days comes with wealth and education. I think that unless a certain critical kid density is reached, you are not likely to see groups of kids playing around the neighborhood.

Fortunately, it's a different story where we live, here in Brookline MA. The population here is fairly wealthy and educated, but the population density is very high. The two park areas nearest our house, one connected to the High School and the other a couple of blocks away, are small, but usually alive with kids and adults. It's quite nice to see kids playing on the playground equipment, or playing baseball or soccer. For little kids they have nice fountains to play in. During the summer there are kids playing in those fountains all day long. Adults play with their kids or play softball or basketball. All that activity keeps the "chronically inebriated" and other undesirables away too.

So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.

Ann adds: I think the biggest problem is hyper-paranoia on the part of parents. Our 8 year old girl isn't even allowed to walk around the block by herself. When I said something about it to our 6 year old boy, he said, "No, I might be taken!" I found that very depressing. This is what we teach our kids?

We do have a lot of homeless around here--Los Angeles has a ton, and Santa Monica once invited all the country's homeless to come. They can be creepy, and you figure that most are either mentally ill, alcoholics or addicts. So you do wonder about kids' safety around them, but the fact remains that very, very, very few kids ever have anything happen to them. And the vast majority who do are either "taken" by non-custodial parents, or are abused by family members. The danger to kids is more likely to be your friends and family--people you trust--than the bum on the street.

I think this woman has the right idea: "Why I Let My 9-year-old Ride Subway Alone". She assessed the real dangers, and realized that the threats parents usually fear are mostly paranoia-induced, and that there is the hidden threat of overly-coddled kids who are taught to be afraid of the world around them.