Tuesday, August 16, 2005
People and animals respond to novelty
Put a new object into an animal’s cage. It will be investigated immediately. Some species, like apes, will play with it for a while. A new restaurant comes to town and everyone wants to go there. Sometimes a new car model that is very different, like the retro looking Chrysler PT Cruiser or the new Morris Minor will attract buyers due solely to their novelty. I call these novelty cars. Often, enthusiasm fades after a time and the car is pulled from the market. In what passes for pop culture, often driven by TV and magazines, novelty is king. The new pop stars, the new look, the new sound etc. draws people like moths to a light. Often, novelty is the only asset and the ‘buzz’ dies down and people move on to the next novelty.
Your own facts
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts," said the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Facts are what separate good political reporting and analysis from hot air.”
The frog experiment
The frog experiment...Put a frog into a pan of hot water and he will jump out. Put a frog into a pan of cool water then gradually raise the temperature to a boil. The frog will stay in the pan and die.
Jury selection
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
- Mark Twain
- Mark Twain
Model High School
CBS had a story on 60 minutes about the most highly rated High School in the country, located in southern California. Children from as far away as India and Taiwan attend the school. There is a waiting list to get in and academic standards are very high. Video showed mostly oriental faces in the class room. They noted in the segment that this shows there is hope for American education and this school could serve as a model. How absurd! Let’s see them take gang-bangers from east L.A. and have the same success! When your students are pre-screened , well prepared and from highly motivated homes you cannot claim the school is a “model” for other schools who have to deal with the real world. Note also that the U.S. spends more per capita on education than any other nation. The Washington, D.C. schools have the highest spending per student in the country.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Is it Real Science?
NY Times reporter Paul Krugman comments on how we lay persons can be deceived by fake "science".
"There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that non-scientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitist who think they're smarter than the rest of us."
As a co-author of technical papers I experienced the peer review process. Journals that publish peer reviewed papers are called refereed journals. In legitimate science research the researcher writes an outline of his findings with enough detail for other experts in the field to judge if his work is worth publishing. His outline is sent to several experts for comments and these comments are reviewed by a committee. The committee is conscious of their Journal's reputation for quality research and decides if the full paper will be accepted for publication. The full paper is then available to anyone interested, usually only other people working in the same field. This process is called peer review and usually weeds out poorly done research. Also, researchers are very conscious of their reputation and do not want to risk ridicule from their peers.
"There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that non-scientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitist who think they're smarter than the rest of us."
As a co-author of technical papers I experienced the peer review process. Journals that publish peer reviewed papers are called refereed journals. In legitimate science research the researcher writes an outline of his findings with enough detail for other experts in the field to judge if his work is worth publishing. His outline is sent to several experts for comments and these comments are reviewed by a committee. The committee is conscious of their Journal's reputation for quality research and decides if the full paper will be accepted for publication. The full paper is then available to anyone interested, usually only other people working in the same field. This process is called peer review and usually weeds out poorly done research. Also, researchers are very conscious of their reputation and do not want to risk ridicule from their peers.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Show horses and work horses
Sen. Trent Lott (r-Miss) has the gift of gab. When he was leader of the Senate a reporter asked him why some Senators were on TV so much more than other Senators. He said the Senate has show horses and work horses. The work horses are off camera getting the people's work done. Senator Lott has that 'gentlemanly' southern accent and expression that is pleasant to the ear. He also is outspoken and candid...rare qualities in Washington. That and a moment of poor judgement at Strom Thurmond's retirement party cost him his Senate leader job.
In my career in the civil service I knew some "show horses" who looked good and sounded good in meetings but did not do the hard work and never got their hands dirty. They got promoted to management.
U.S. Senator Trent Lott
In my career in the civil service I knew some "show horses" who looked good and sounded good in meetings but did not do the hard work and never got their hands dirty. They got promoted to management.
U.S. Senator Trent Lott
Monday, July 18, 2005
Dilbert cartoons featuring Wally
Wally is such a worthless employee he is funny. I knew some like Wally in my civil service career...it was not funny in real life.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution
Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer prize author and columnist for the New York Times. He has shown insight into the Muslim terrorist problem. Here are some excerpts from his columns:
"Why are young Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to Baghdad, so willing to blow up themselves and others in the name of their religion? Virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry Norwegans. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?
Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this question any longer. This is especially true when it comes to people like Muhammad Bouyeri - a Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin who last year tracked down the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a critic of Islamic intolerance, on an Amsterdam street, shot him 15 times and slit his throat with a butcher knife. He told a Dutch court on the final day of his trial on Tuesday: "I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion."
It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. In the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia. The Muslim worldÂ’s silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against...
Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a ShiiteÂ’s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governorÂ’s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization. At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as 'resistance' to occupation.
It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village. What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.
Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider. The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst. "
Note from Bill: There are many local and satalite TV stations in the Muslim world that stream constant propaganda that demonizes America, Israel and the non-Muslim world. Terrorist activities are overlsanitizedsanatised. Film of Americans arresting Iraqis will be shown over and over with angry commentary but innocent victims of car bombs are ignored. The Muslim public is taken in by this and the Clerics add their own lies and inflammatory rhetoric. The result is a lot of misinformed, angry people.
"Why are young Sunni Muslim males, from London to Riyadh and Bali to Baghdad, so willing to blow up themselves and others in the name of their religion? Virtually all suicide bombers, of late, have been Sunni Muslims. There are a lot of angry people in the world. Angry Mexicans. Angry Africans. Angry Norwegans. But the only ones who seem to feel entitled and motivated to kill themselves and totally innocent people, including other Muslims, over their anger are young Sunni radicals. What is going on?
Neither we nor the Muslim world can run away from this question any longer. This is especially true when it comes to people like Muhammad Bouyeri - a Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin who last year tracked down the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a critic of Islamic intolerance, on an Amsterdam street, shot him 15 times and slit his throat with a butcher knife. He told a Dutch court on the final day of his trial on Tuesday: "I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion."
It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. In the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia. The Muslim worldÂ’s silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we are up against...
Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a ShiiteÂ’s being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites in Alabama would have felt about a black governorÂ’s being installed there in 1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are indifferent to their brutalization. At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually sanitized as 'resistance' to occupation.
It is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village. What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.
Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider. The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst. "
Note from Bill: There are many local and satalite TV stations in the Muslim world that stream constant propaganda that demonizes America, Israel and the non-Muslim world. Terrorist activities are overlsanitizedsanatised. Film of Americans arresting Iraqis will be shown over and over with angry commentary but innocent victims of car bombs are ignored. The Muslim public is taken in by this and the Clerics add their own lies and inflammatory rhetoric. The result is a lot of misinformed, angry people.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Muslims killing Muslims
3/25/2004 7:34 AM
Muslims: (letter to H-T)
Radical clerics have hijacked the Islamic movement worldwide and are turning their followers into murderers. Muslims are killing Hindus in India, Jews in Israel and murdering Christians all over the Middle East. These sinister Emirs preach death and destruction to the infidels (non-Muslims). The Nazis exterminated people based on race. The Communists murdered millions based on their supposed class. Now, the Emir’s are urging genocide for all people who have the wrong religion. For the (male) suicide bombers, the Emirs promise martyrdom in heaven with 72 virgins. This thinking is primitive, superstitious claptrap that should have been left behind in the middle ages. Where are the moderate Muslims? Why are they silent? Why have there been no letters in the H-T on this subject from Muslims.?
Muslims: (letter to H-T)
Radical clerics have hijacked the Islamic movement worldwide and are turning their followers into murderers. Muslims are killing Hindus in India, Jews in Israel and murdering Christians all over the Middle East. These sinister Emirs preach death and destruction to the infidels (non-Muslims). The Nazis exterminated people based on race. The Communists murdered millions based on their supposed class. Now, the Emir’s are urging genocide for all people who have the wrong religion. For the (male) suicide bombers, the Emirs promise martyrdom in heaven with 72 virgins. This thinking is primitive, superstitious claptrap that should have been left behind in the middle ages. Where are the moderate Muslims? Why are they silent? Why have there been no letters in the H-T on this subject from Muslims.?
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