Slashdot Mirror

Ok that's good because until 2017, they used only 13 loci and it was far more likely to find a false match than the FBI claimed. Even with 20 loci, the statistics can be abused when dealing with DNA fragments.

This was discussed on the Freakonomics podcast several years ago - In Praise of Maintenance. He had been doing a series on innovation and then did a counterpoint on how maybe maintenance was as much if not more important than innovation. It's a good podcast and goes into more detail than the short Economist piece.

The fare is determined by an algorithm and is gender-blind. http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

fewer school shoots

The death rate from school shootings in the US is ~20/year. (For comparison, the school-age population is 64,000,000.) That's above the crushed-by-vending-machine death rate (~3/year), but below the killed-by-dogs death rate (34/year), and far below the texting-while-driving death rate (6,000/year). (All figures for US only.)

If the risk of school shootings is a serious factor in motivating you to move to another country, you should be *far* more motivated to move to a country that lacks mobile phones.

(Numbers: 151 total deaths from school shootings in the 2010s thus far. 64,000,000 students in primary or secondary education. 1 in 112 million annual death rate from vending machines. Other death rates for dog attacks, texting while driving, etc.)

There's a great podcast about Esperanto on Freakanomics Radio...

http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

Apparently there's a huge benefit in having mandatory voting in Australia because candidates can't pander exclusively to the base in an attempt to get out the vote, as it is now in the US. I'm all for trying mandatory voting and seeing how it would change things.

http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

OK, yes some toddlers die in gun accidents. But many, many more die in swimming pool accidents. Once you get a smart pool figured out, then you can tackle smart guns, OK?

In the meantime, you sound like a person without the faintest idea how to handle a firearm for self defense. So I agree you should not have one, or buy a smart gun and throw away the watch. Would make a nice paper weight.

Reference: http://freakonomics.com/2006/0...

Here's the relevant excerpt from Ballmer's recent Freakonmics interview:

BALLMER: Hoopers, hoopers, hoopers. It's a little more, running a basketball team. I mean, I own a basketball team. I actually have people who run the basketball team, which is great. In the case of Microsoft, you are worrying every day about the future of the enterprise. Are you going to grow? You got 100,000 people who work for you - are they going to be stable in their jobs? There's no question: a basketball team is not going out of business. It really isn't. You can do better and you can do worse. But at the end of the day, it's not really about people's lives. Except the players, where there's always issues about who stays and who goes. That's both the players choice as well as the team's choice.

DUBNER: We should say, one reason it's not going out of business - just to get to the nitty gritty of it - is that you are lucky enough to belong to what some people might call a cartel, right? When you own a pro sports team, you own a piece of the league and only you guys get to decide if there's added competition in. Obviously, there's competition among the 30 teams in the league. But that's a little bit weird, isn't it?

BALLMER: There's good reasons why - in this country, at least - there's been a clear regulatory framework with the sports leagues to promote the competition and excitement that people want in the U.S. Will these teams go bankrupt? They can, but they're not going to go bankrupt next year or the year after. The TV contracts are by and large locked in. There's a fan base that's very exciting. It is a little bit different than launching a new product at Microsoft. You hold your breath and say, "We put billions into this thing and will anybody buy it?" At the Clippers, what's the worst case? We overpay on payroll, we pay a bunch of luxury tax and we don't win a championship. Or our fans start getting angry and calling for heads, including mine. They say, "Come on boys we can win this thing." I'm not saying that's fun. But it's all different.

Sports teams and tech companies are fundamentally different - so spaketh the horse.

I'm not in the US and safety regulations don't allow convertible car seats like that. All of ours are fairly big and bulky. This leads me to believe your convertible ones were less save than they could have been in the event of an accident.

I would be suprised if there were huge differences in safety between the various designs. The vast majority of protection comes from keeping the body flying around - the difference between seatbelts and child-seats is remarkably small:

http://freakonomics.com/2005/0...

With that said, even a 1% difference in crash outcomes can seem like a huge deal, even if we are talking about a rare event.

the one that will extract the most profit from consumers' wallets

Oh, dear, an article by a Marxist still living in 1860. They love them class warfare vocabulary.

The online shopping sites are not trying to get the highest price they can for every product. They are trying to get the optimal price for every product.

Often times the optimal price can be the lowest price, or close to it. One only needs to look at Walmart's position at #1 on the Fortune 500 to understand this is true.

The optimal price is one that enables the highest overall profit for the company. Keeping customers coming back is absolutely one requirement for maximizing profit. Low prices directly benefit consumers and producers in many markets.

What Marxists fail to understand is that profit is the information signal that is sent through the economy from consumers to producers to indicate that they approve of what they are doing. A 'Like button' in the parlance of our times.
  Profit is a very good thing, and it benefits consumers by constantly refining the goods available on the market and the prices of those goods.

Granted, Marx didn't have the benefit of game theory or information theory to work with, but modern writers have no excuse for ignoring modern learning (that's already 60-80 years old). Here's a recent Freakonomics episode on price elasticity that might help some aspiring writers (or even economists) who don't even want to take the time to read.

Great, more tipping. New York can soon have:

- more sexual discrimination
- more beauty discrimination
- more racial discrimination
- more age-based discrimination
- more obsequious in-your-business workers

Tipping sucks. It isn't statistically tied to anything good, particularly better service. To read/listen to more about the negative effects (and correlations) of tipping, the Freakonomics podcast has got you covered: http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

"The insurance business is completely screwy now.
You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"
"Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?"
Trillian frowned.
"What do you mean, offense?"
"I see."

We've gone off the rails and nobody wants to accept the pain necessary to fix it.

Governments recognize the need to incentivize intellectual achievement. We want inventors and creators to have sufficient incentive to create the things we all benefit from. The problem is that not all intellectual property creations benefit the public equally. Lawmakers are rightfully wary of creating a mess by valuing them on a case by case basis. As a result, we give the same value to a company's patent on an ink cartridge design necessary to work in the company's printer as we do to a replacement for a carburetor that cuts fuel cost and emissions.

If I own a printer company and I design a novel ink cartridge that I can get a patent on and I make all of the printers I create require said design of printer cartridge, I've given myself a monopoly. That's not really a bad thing in itself, because that cartridge design really is novel. The problem is that the public only benefits from maybe five years of protection on that patent, but we give twenty because we don't want the hassle of determining which inventions are worth protecting for twenty years and which are worth protecting for one year.

There is a fix, and it's simple. The problem is that it will piss off a lot of companies that sway public opinion and thus re-electability of politicians. If you're the politician who removes the profit from a thousand successful companies, your time in office is suddenly curtailed. Still, if we can elect enough politicians who care more about doing public good than getting reelected, they should make patents and copyrights default to one year, with a special hearing needed to extend it to five years and another to ten and a final one to extend it to the max of twenty (with grandfathering to ensure the economy doesn't flip out immediately.) Ditto for copyright and other forms of intellectual property protection.

And while we're on the subject of electability, it seems that every commenter I've seen in recent times agrees that getting money for a campaign determines who gets elected, but that's confusing causality with correlation. (If you're one of them, you've probably already stopped reading and are getting your angry rant and insults keyboard plugged in, but read on so you can insult my arguments properly.) Popular politicians win elections and popular politicians get campaign money. It's not one because of the other, it's a correlation. I doubt most people who believe money buys elections will bother to learn more, but there is some good info and links at http://freakonomics.com/2012/0... .

If Mr. Adams were writing the line today, I suspect it would be patent lawyers instead.

Freakonomics podcast is awesome:

http://freakonomics.com/archiv...

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also quite funny (although the Trump jokes are getting old at this point):

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/34...

http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

Interesting stuff.

A few articles have pointed out this paradox, including an episode of Freakonomics. It's been noted by various historians and economists that as efficiency improves, consumption tends to increase. This known as the Jevons Paradox.

The most famous example of this was 19th century locomotives. As engines became more efficient, it made the use of locomotives more economical and spurred an increase in the use of locomotives, leading to ever-higher consumption of coal.

The Republican Party is finally putting Trump on a leash. I understand the frustration of the voters. Heck, they even gave Trump the House and the Senate! There should be no excuses and he should be able to follow through with every promise, right? If Trump wants to govern though, he will have to play along with the party.

This is simply an example of all the checks and balances in our political system working properly. Do you remember all the doom and gloom headlines after he was elected? People forget that our system does limit the powers of the President. Freaknomics had an interesting episode about this.

http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
^
Interesting talk on the subject.

Women's bias seems less about stability and more about work flexibility:
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

Uber "Technologies" is kind of a misnomer. They are more of a overvalued hedge fund than anything else.

They lost a billion dollars last year, so not the best hedge fund ever. And no other traits of a hedge fund.

What they are is a tech startup that has created an efficient market that is disruptive to an extant rigged market. Listen here - you'll learn something, guaranteed.

Are you incapable of using Google?

http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...

http://journals.cambridge.org/...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/21...

So you're saying increasing the minimum wage would increase per person productivity and make it so fewer people are wasting their lives flipping burgers... I don't really see the downside. As long as technology keeps getting cheaper/better and people stay the same price automation WILL happen where it can happen eventually. The question is only "when it will happen". If we try to slow automation then that just give places like China who will automate every chance they get a greater comparative advantage than they already have. Yes in the short run fewer people will have jobs but that issue is also solvable by automation.

It's easy to say "this is how its always been so this is how it's always going to be". But it's much harder to ask "why has it always been that way and why will it continue to be that way? Or Why are things going to change". This question gets closer to the truth of what the future might look like than just assuming that the future will be just like the past. Because the future will probably be somewhat like the past but not exactly. Human productivity is an aspect of the future where things could change because humans have engineered machines that can do everything humans need better and more efficiently than humans can. For a much more insightful view about the future of automation from an actual economist check out this podcast. Freakonomics Radio - Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?.

Interesting listen

What about the fuel needed for farming equipment?

The cost of fuel as a percentage of deliverable product is insignificant and you don't have the efficiencies of mechanization.

http://freakonomics.com/2011/1...

I think there’s no doubt that [bargaining abilities] contribute to some degree. But let me tell you why I don’t think that they go the real distance. Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their M.B.A. — all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then. So if men were better bargainers, they would have been better right then. And it doesn’t look as if they’re better bargainers to a degree that shows up as a very large number. But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles, and a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder. And I know that there are many who have done many experiments on the fact that women don’t necessarily like competition as much as men do — they value temporal flexibility, men value income growth — that there are various differences. But in terms of bargaining and competition it doesn’t look like it’s showing up that much at the very beginning.

Their interpretation of the data suggests that we see much of the remaining unexplained portion of the pay gap as a result of different preferences between the sexes. Men typically prefer to earn more money, whereas women typically prefer to have a more flexible work arrangement. Men tend to make choices that maximize the amount of money that they earn at the cost of flexibility or other amenities, whereas women tend to make choices that give them more flexibility with their time at the expense of making more money.

One can argue whether that's a characteristic largely inherent to the sexes themselves or a consequence of how men and women are raised or the cultural expectations of modern democracies, but that's really getting into understanding the cause of the cause. Probably a bit of both, but not really relevant for understanding why there is still a ~5% gap after accounting for most other factors that we are able to control for.

Sad truth: the messenger matters to how we get the message. We've seen a slew of stories along those lines -- physics tests lower if gender is known, violin auditions need to be anonymous to be judged on sound quality, insufficient peer review given to bad ideas of famous scientists such that death is the only thing that opens up the field to opponents (I can't find my citation on that one, but it was in the news last year), and just the fact that we reject ideas that come from political opponents, regardless of facts. But at the same time, true anonymity makes people behave in a much crueler way (much better cites exist, but this one will do for today). And all those "AC" labels make it hard to carry on a conversation -- I can't tell when the same person replies to me. Also, that name eventually develops a reputation for making good comments, which makes it possible to dredge out of the morass of people who just dump inanity, attacks, or lies -- those get recognized over time. The pseudonym of Slashdot seems to me to be a pretty good compromise. Pick a number to be your screen name, something large and random to avoid any connotations. But give me something to see you as a source of information.

Most American women don't know anything about the history or the current market situation of diamonds. It's not very complicated to explain (audio). Go ahead and try - if your woman is interested then that's good. If she still wants a diamond afterwards, unless she's really specifically enthralled with the way the light reflects around inside the diamond (it's pretty impressive with a high quality gem), then perhaps it's best to move on. You don't really want to spend your whole life with a woman who values diamonds just for the price.

Yours is a fine theory but it needs some testing. There are a whole lot of factors that changed our culture in (roughly) 1980. The personal computer even. Many of those could be argued to be related to mass murders. But regardless of the arguments, the vast majority of these theories will be wrong. McAfee is putting forward a theory with a prediction: if anti-depressants are a cause (there need not be only one cause), one would expect the murderers to be using them. Is appears likely this is the case. This theory is still not completely believable, but it has something going for it and warrants further testing.

This kind of social science reminds me of Freakonomics, correlating Roe v. Wade with decreased violent crime. Even this study can be (and has been) criticized, but it's interesting to read about the ways their theory is tested.

it also leads to teachers cheating

Just had a look. the vCJD tests are actually a biopsy currently. There is a prototype blood screening option but it is only a prototype at this stage. There was a 2012 study on removed appendixes (32000) that showed a rate of about 1 in 2000 britons carrying the disease so it's not that rare.

On top of that the prions can remain dormant for up to 50 years without a patient developing symptoms.

As for value of your blood, there is some speculation that it is worth around about $12 per donation - http://freakonomics.com/2007/0... And according to http://health.costhelper.com/b... biopsy costs range from about $150 to $10k. So even assuming the lowest value you would need 12 donations to break even.

In the end blood is a bulk product. The main challenges to having enough volume isn't available people to donate but getting them to a centre that can collect in a time frame that works for them. Not sure how the US does it by Australia has buses that travel around collecting blood and volunteers who make appointments.

Plenty of cheapskates would drive tires with worn out treads resulting in spinarounds in wet weather and inefficient braking/skids on dry roads.

This [tax on tires] would lead to people pushing the limits of their tires, resulting in a lot more tire blowouts on the roadway. Blown out tires can cause cars to go out of control and lead to accidents, or at the very least result in pedestrians needing to leave their vehicle in close proximity to the roadway to change to a spare. Neither of these situations are safe, and we shouldnâ(TM)t implement a policy that will likely increase these instances.

user comment from http://freakonomics.com/2013/0...

Here's another inconvenient truth for you: The biggest predictor of success in life isn't how much money your family has or what your melanin count is.

Can't say about the melanin, but family money is up there.

http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...

The only expansion LGA needs is the subway.

Not exactly. As described here it's also a question of airspace. J.F.K., Newark-Liberty, and LaGuardia all overlap and cause delays and complex routing to avoid conflicts.

http://freakonomics.com/2009/0...

How Much Does Campaign Spending Influence the Election? A Freakonomics Quorum

I hope you weren't scarred for life by John Kerry's loss.

The donor companies effectively choose who will get elected.

You believe nonsense.

How Much Does Campaign Spending Influence the Election? A Freakonomics Quorum

Robert Shrum, a senior fellow at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, has been a senior adviser on many Democratic campaigns, including Dick Gephardt (1988), Al Gore (2000), and John Kerry (2004).

In politics there is certainly no linear relationship between amount of money and degree of success. Just ask the well-heeled Republican losers of presidential primaries past â" former Texas Governor John Connally, former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, and former Mayor and front-runner Rudolph Giuliani. Or how about Howard Dean, who raised and spent nearly $40 million before crashing and burning in the 2004 Iowa caucuses?

In the history of "conservation" no one has managed to turn the ability to use less of a product, into the *practice* of using less of a product. How often do you let the empty ketchup bottle "ride" in the fridge and squeeze a few faint drops on each hot dog hoping to get the last of it, while really only putting 1/10th your normal amount on? Yep. Now, you can get your full ketchup fix on time, every time. And when the bottle is gone it's gone, no more "maybe one more blob of salt-tomato-vinegar heaven, if I shake it just right!" instead, it's on to the next new bottle, and the next full load of ketchup on your bratwurst, and even BETTER sales for Kraft/Heinz.

Further reading: energy efficiency != energy conservation: http://freakonomics.com/2015/0...

I am sure if someone looked more carefully, more cases of cheating will be discovered almost everywhere. Here is an example: FreakonomicsIt took some data mining by some economists to expose this. Why wasn't that somebody doing their job in this case? Why did academic economists had to expose it?

Also using all caps words is moronic yelling and weak.

Yes Yes Yes! =)

Don't forget flu vaccine though! People think of the flu as like a cold, but influenza is the eighth leading cause of death among all Americans!!!
It mostly kills older people (7th leading cause among them) and young people, who often are at high risk from the vaccine and can't take the vaccine!
The flu vaccine is a huge example of the need for herd immunity to protect these people. But no one thinks about their choice not to get a flu vaccine as literally being a matter of life and death for others in their community.

Yes, yes, yes... the vaccine's not perfect at prevention, doesn't always match the strains, some people don't think it works, some people say they "get the flu" from the vaccine (which is not accurate). But the fact is, it saves lives the more people get the flu vaccine every year.

And THAT'S, one to grow on. =)

References: http://freakonomics.com/2015/0...

There are alternate payment and funding methods being explored -- but America is slow, slow, slow, slow to adapt to such things. It was discussed on NPR's Freakonomics, and there's a university that's actually trying it out -- if my Google-fu were strong today. The Obama story is saturating anything to do with free tuition atm.

Anyway, for those of you who didn't click on the link, upon graduation, the university takes a 5% cut of any money you make for the first 20 years of your working life. This creates a massive incentive for the university to place the student in the best-paying job possible -- because that means more money for the university. As such, the university is going to want the student to be as desirable to employers as possible -- which means the best training and education possible.

Personally, I'm really fond of this idea.

Classic Freakonomics. Guns vs. pools. Guess which is more dangerous? http://freakonomics.com/books/...

"don't be afraid to say "no" and "I don't know". "
never, ever, say that at work regarding an opinion. You will be seen has not being an expert.
Its sad, but true.
Radiolab did an interesting podcast on it:
http://freakonomics.com/2014/0...

I can see this type of service continuing on.

1: Parking spaces are in demand. 2: People are willing to pay cash for one. 3: Other people want money.

All that needs to happen is that the server gets moved offshore, and the app be made as a Web app so it survives being pulled from Apple's store.

I remember this exact same thing happening at a place I worked at when in college. They were such sticklers about being on time for shift that a second late on the phones meant a six month denial of promotions, and being late for any reason three times is an automatic termination. So, people from the neighborhood would fill this place's parking lot up about an hour before shift changed and demand cash... and the employees of this firm would pony up to a C-note in order to get a place, drive a car about a half mile from the office and park in a seedy neighborhood, or be late and stuck on the phones for another half-year with a freeze on raises.

I applaud SF banning this app, but in reality, it won't help, and this is just the start of it. I won't be surprised to see a black market for parking spaces, with people sitting for hours to "sell" theirs, happening soon. Especially home games in university towns or other places where people go for an event.

This could all be avoided by pricing parking at market rates.

There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.

Incorrect. The better explanation is reduction of childhood lead exposure. The correlations are extremely powerful, and map nicely down to the timing of lead reductions in individual states/provinces even in different countries.

So your claim that there is no major of model to explain reductions is simply wrong,. The lead theory works even in other countries where the dynamics around guns are very different from America. This apparent effect completely swamps the wiggle the pro- and anti-gun camps like to argue over.

Yes, it is. Leaving guns aside, it's the way logic and statistics work together.

But while a correlation does not prove cause-and-effect, a lack of correlation -- or more properly, a negative correlation -- can DISprove cause-and-effect. Example: something -- all evidence points to one animal -- has been killing your chickens. You suspect the neighbor's dog. So you start keeping tabs on when the dog is let out, and when it is in the house. It turns out, after examination, that whatever it is has been killing your chickens when the dog was locked up in the house. There is no dispute... it is indisputable that the dog wasn't there when the chickens died. This negative correlation between the dog being out and dead chickens has DISproved your theory that the dog was killing the chickens.

It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds. If your theory is that X causes Y, and you find a negative correlation, for example X goes up while Y goes down, you have DISproved that X causes Y. Otherwise, barring other outside influences, you would have (no dispute) observed that Y went up as X went up. Anything else contradicts your theory.

Except that you can't "lock the dog up" in this case. You can require strict gun control laws in the US, but you can't change the fact that guns are still readily accessible just a short drive away. You can see that crime is going down, but in fact, gun ownership isn't going up in the way you suggest - the percentage of people who own guns in the US is decreasing, but gun owners, on average, own more guns than they used to. That in and of itself disproves your absurdly simplistic attitude.

And in the gun-control debate, we have in fact had ample time and opportunity to control for other factors.

No we haven't. All policy problems are difficult to deal with because every step along the way of trying to take a scientific approach is fraught with error. Methods of collecting statistics range from government reports and medical records to random surveys. None of these have a very good margin of error, and they all are susceptible to systemic inaccuracies.

There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.

You directly contradict your own statement here. You say earlier that "we have found no other causal factors that apply to the situation", and then cite one in the next paragraph. Of course this one is highly disputed, it deals with abortion which is itself a controversial policy issue.

Lacking any other evidence of outside factors, and even allowing for the one that (maybe) was found, we are still left with the simple mathematical fact that in the U.S., prevalence of gun ownership DOES NOT cause crime.

It isn't an opinion. It's as scientific as it gets.

This is total bullshit, and you are misrepresenting math and science to try to convince yourself (and others) that this isn't an emotional crusade for you where you look for evidence to fit your conclusion. Real statisticians and scientists have long been exploring data on this issue, but it is very difficult to make progress because the argument is so charged on both sides that the chance of having a rational discourse with anyone is basically zero.

Here are some things that are true: the US has the highest number of guns per 100 people of any country in the world. Among developed countries, we have the highest level of gun homicides per 100 people. Suicides by guns are trending upwards. Regardless of the fact that crime and violence are historically low and getting lower, we do seem to have a correlation that suggests our high rates of ownership have something to do with our high rate of firearm rel

I'm pro-gun (or at least anti gun restriction), but it's hardly indisputable disproof.

Yes, it is. Leaving guns aside, it's the way logic and statistics work together.

A correlation (we see lots of accidents involving cell phones, for example) does not imply cause-and-effect. There is often some outside factor (or even many factors) that influence the things correlated. A classic example, from Darrell Huff's "How To Lie With Statistics" is: the salary of Protestant ministers in the U.S. is strongly correlated with price of rum in Jamaica.

Does one cause the other? Of course not. The more likely answer is that general inflation (an outside factor) has affected both of them similarly.

But while a correlation does not prove cause-and-effect, a lack of correlation -- or more properly, a negative correlation -- can DISprove cause-and-effect. Example: something -- all evidence points to one animal -- has been killing your chickens. You suspect the neighbor's dog. So you start keeping tabs on when the dog is let out, and when it is in the house. It turns out, after examination, that whatever it is has been killing your chickens when the dog was locked up in the house. There is no dispute... it is indisputable that the dog wasn't there when the chickens died. This negative correlation between the dog being out and dead chickens has DISproved your theory that the dog was killing the chickens.

It gets a bit more complicated when the numbers go up but the same principle still holds. If your theory is that X causes Y, and you find a negative correlation, for example X goes up while Y goes down, you have DISproved that X causes Y. Otherwise, barring other outside influences, you would have (no dispute) observed that Y went up as X went up. Anything else contradicts your theory.

And in the gun-control debate, we have in fact had ample time and opportunity to control for other factors. And it is extremely important to note that try as we might, we have found no other causal factors that apply to the situation. Yet even so, as X (per-capita gun ownership and frequency of carry) has gone up, Y (violent crime of all sorts) has continued to go down. Therefore: X does not cause Y. Q.E.D.

There has been only ONE societal factor that has been found to satisfactorily correlate with the reduction in crime (see the movie Freakonomics, and that has been widely disputed.

Lacking any other evidence of outside factors, and even allowing for the one that (maybe) was found, we are still left with the simple mathematical fact that in the U.S., prevalence of gun ownership DOES NOT cause crime.

It isn't an opinion. It's as scientific as it gets.

Large sections of our Constitution and the basis of our Representative government were designed to keep poor people from voting themselves the land that the wealthy had already claimed... There really wasn't any reason to hide it since if you were literate you were probably rich.

A dangerous assumption to make.

In 1776, one book, written in complex language, sold over 120,000 copies in Colonial America.

First convert 120,000 into a fraction of the U.S. population in 1776: compared to the population at the time of 2.5 million, 120,000 is roughly 1 in 20, or 5%. Today's U.S. population is about 300 million --- of which 5% is 15 million.

Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.

Today's equivalent is 60 million copies.

Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?. ''Every Man Able to Read''

In the late colonial and early federal era, disputes over land ownership centered on the opening of the western frontiers to settlement and the abolition of feudal tenures. The Last Patroon

The Library of America's two volume "The Debate on the Constitution" can be found in most public libraries.

For Americans this is Shakespeare, and more. Not only is it wonderful writing, it is wonderful thinking. -- Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio

That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money

Why would they want to raise more money if they didn't think it bought them more votes?
Hint: Money buys votes. The politicians themselves think so too.

Just because people THINK that pressing the elevator button more times will make the elevator come faster, does not mean that it actually does. I have no doubt that politicians themselves think that more money -> winner, that does not mean that winner->more money.

There is some good stuff at http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...

There is a nice bit at the end: "These findings may be surprising at first blush, but the intuition isn’t that hard to grasp. After all, how many people do you know who ever change their minds on something important like their political beliefs (well, other than liberal Republicans who find themselves running for national office)? People just aren’t that malleable; and for that reason, campaign spending is far less important in determining election outcomes than many people believe (or fear)."

I think it was this study:
http://www.vt.edu/spotlight/ac...

along with explanation (by study author) on this podcast:
http://freakonomics.com/2013/1...

that formed my opinion.

Adding RFID tags to equipment and encouraging people to swipe it out as it is used might be a good idea. But short of adding a supply clerk or using a badge system I don't see many other options. Maybe there's some work-study budget for a freshman to sit in the lab and check out equipment?

I heard on Freakonomics about putting up web cams and paying someone in a far-off land to ensure hand-washing compliance. Perhaps a system like that might work.