Understanding Polls and Probabilities
Jonathan Last defends Nate Silver, but it’s really just explaining what “probability” means. HT: Dispatches.
Jonathan Last defends Nate Silver, but it’s really just explaining what “probability” means. HT: Dispatches.
I have thought since 2004 that if John Kerry had managed to appear to have an actual policy on terrorism, a strategy for how to make a safer United States and world, he would now be president. As it was, he was perceived to be proposing pretty much what Bush was doing only less of…
I’ve previously said a few good things about fact checking operations such as Politifact, but I’ve also noticed a few questionable items where opinion interfered with facts. But today I read the article Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’, and having looked into this a bit further, I must say that the few issues I…
It seems that some people in the military have noticed the fact that we don’t really understand the territories and the countries about which we so glibly pontificate. And much of the pontification is official, which makes the ignorance more egregious. In an BBC article received via e-mail, I read the following: But that is…
In an article on the Huffington Post, Aaron Taylor suggests a variant of the famous saying, All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. His variant? “Sometimes evil triumphs not when good people do nothing, but when good people fail to distinguish between hypothetical evil and real evil,…
I found this Washington Post article interesting. GM has a reputation for producing gas guzzlers here, but as a leader in fuel economy over in Europe. Why is this? “We could sell the OPC here and make money because gasoline is near $6 a gallon,” Lutz said. “If we had $6 gasoline in the United…
In the middle of a speech on commitment to special needs children, Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin chose to take a pot shot at some pork–research into fruit flies. It was a particularly good political shot, because the research is taking place in Paris, France, and obviously, “real” Americans don’t want to pay for anything that…