The Science Behind Why Oregon is #1 in Football

What if Political Boundaries Were Based on Social Connections?

H/T @spatialanalysis

Slow to Change

Ezra Klein has a nice short post quoting an academic involved in developing "metrics" to measure the effectiveness of government programs. This is all to0 sadly true:

Many academics--myself included--have participated in efforts to produce these numbers. GPRA- measures are quite valuable to document that you have done the work, and to characterize the populations an intervention serves. These measures do not provide the kind of program evaluation information policymakers really need to understand which programs are most effective or cost-effective. Funders generally require too many numbers and reports, which have a way of being collected in a nice binder that sits on a shelf, pleasantly undisturbed.

It's not enough just to count things and measure things, that counting and measuring has to actually mean something, it has to actually have a purpose, and generally speaking for program management purposes, performance information should facilitate better decision-making so that programs and agencies become more effective and efficient. But 250 year-old organizations that face no competition are slow to change.

A little clarity on the Julian Assange Case

If these charges are true, then Julian Assange is a rapist.

• Used his body weight to hold down Miss A in a sexual manner.
• Had unprotected sex with Miss A when she had insisted on him using a condom.
• Molested Miss A "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity".
• Had unprotected sex with Miss W while she was asleep.

There's been a lot of debate on this point recently on the internet, but these charges make it pretty clear what we're talking about. There isn't a lot of ambiguity there. Last week Salon had an interesting post discussing the differences between Sweden and the U.S. rape laws, which sadly highlights the many ways in which U.S. rape laws are not sufficient to protect rape victims, but I think that what is described above would still fit the U.S. definition, at least I hope it would.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

Don't Ask Don't Tell Might Finally be Repealed!

Senator Reid announced tonight that he is bringing the Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal bill up for a vote this weekend.

Senator Lieberman already confirmed earlier today that he had over 60 votes for the repeal bill, which is enough to pass cloture in the Senate, and therefore assure passage.

Obama may be able to sign this thing before Christmas, which would be very merry indeed.

RIP Bob Feller 1918 - 2010

Hardest thrower in Baseball History? American hero. Hard to be greater than Rapid Robert.

The Importance of Seeing the Larger Context

This is a great post by Nate Silver on how helpful bayesian statistics is in maintaining our focus on how important the underlying context of a given situation is in determining events. In this case Silver is talking about the arrest of Julian Assange, and how unlikely it is that his arrest is unaffected by his actions in releasing classified government documents.

But Silver's point is larger than that. He notes out how bad people are at understanding the importance of the underlying context or major drivers in determining the course of events. We overestimate the importance of information that is readily at hand, and don't look beyond that to see what the larger forces determining events are.

For some reason this reminds me of the movie All the President's Men when Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward is down in the parking garage talking to Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, and Woodward is sort of fixated on Donald Segretti, who he and Bernstein had just learned had been part of a dirty tricks operation for the Nixon campaign known as "rat-fucking." And of course Holbrook in his masterful portrayal of Deep Throat says something like "Don't concentrate on Segretti. You'll miss the overall," (with that sly knowing lilt at the end) meaning that Segretti was obviously just the tip of the iceberg. This was corruption on a massive scale, the kind that would send the highest law enforcement officer in the land to jail. But on his own Woodward couldn't see the forest for the trees perhaps because it was too unbelievable. This is what the major academic fields on inquiry all have in common, they each emphasize the importance of seeing the real forces driving change, not just the forces at hand.

Today You Tomorrow Me

Great comment on Reddit by rhoner responding to the thread "Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker?" We are all connected no matter how hard we try and divide ourselves.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

You Are How You View Time

H/T Andrew Sullivan

What does Wikileaks Portend?

This is I think a very perceptive insight from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions.

I think it is certainly fair to question the wisdom of Wikileaks in disseminating all of these government cables that while often interesting in some of the specific details they provide, have so far failed to reveal any double-dealing or unknown corrupt behavior by the U.S. or any other country's government. In general many of the revealed facts were known or easily assumed. And yet the harm that these documents have caused to some very important relationships between countries and individuals may be incalculable. Certainly the U.S. government will at least in the short-term likely become less transparent and less willing to share some important information internally, which in and of itself has far-reaching consequences.

But there are also consequences to the actions now being taken against Wikileaks as Greenwald points out. There is indeed a war going on for the control of the internet. Information most assuredly wants to be free, but there are a lot of people that want information to be controlled, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons, but either way there is always going to be this inherent tension between those who want the information and those who control it (if only for a time).

I think that the internet should never be seen as a panacea, as a means for bettering our society. I think that the internet is a means for changing our society, bettering our society involves making sure we live up to our highest ideals. Change is very difficult, it cuts and pulls in ways unimagined before, and that cutting and pulling can cause a society to move away from its ideals if it's not careful. The internet has this amazing power to connect people, to allow them to share lots of information, to mass together across shared interests and beliefs and change the world. But there is a trade-off in allowing all of that information sharing, you give up a lot of the control of how information flows in a society, and also what kind of information is flowing through the system. It is incredibly scary to give up that kind of control, especially when it can affect something as important as international diplomacy, or even national security.
The question is does the fear of this loss of control and the continued emergence of a world in which information with its potential to both bind us together and tear us apart cause the U.S. and other countries to attempt to take greater and greater control of the internet, escalating the war over the freedom of information. Wikileaks is most significant as a harbinger of what our future will bring. Information is now so easy to share, and that sharing is such an essential part of our system now that it will be impossible to go back. But there will be more and more attempts at control. The question is, where will this conflict finally settle into balance? We're not there yet, maybe we never will be. But this will be an essential conflict of our emerging future. Information, and all the issues around it from privacy to democracy to security, all of these issues are going to help define the new century. Can we continue to serve our ideals while finding a balance between all of these competing concerns over information?

320 Million Trees

In Katrina's Wake - short film about Hurricane Katrina by NASA

I've been reading the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program's report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States recently, and I came across this rather startling statistic referenced in the video above

Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged over 320 million large trees. As these trees decompose over the next few years, they will release an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that taken up by all U.S. forests in a year.

The report also notes that powerful hurricanes (those of category 4 and 5) like Katrina have increased in intensity over the last 30 years. One can only imagine what that will mean in the future, but it doesn't look good.

One in Twelve!

Ta-Nehisi Coates with some troubling statistics on how disproportionately large the American prison population is compared with the rest of the world, and how disproportionately Black it is.

Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans--males and females--make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males--alone--make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.

H/T Andrew Sullivan