"The report also said MacDonald "misused her position" by disclosing confidential documents to "private sector sources" such as the Pacific Legal Foundation and the California Farm Bureau Federation, both of which have challenged endangered-species listings."
Government regulatory agencies should work with private industry. I agree that scientific research should not be altered, but I don't see why it was wrong for her to disclose a draft report to the private sector. I can understand why law enforcement agencies have confidential information, but a draft report on scientific research should not be confidential.
The word capitalists use is free market. In a free market people would be free to exchange goods and services whenever both sides of the equation wanted to. In a free exchange, both parties gain and neither loose.
Lack of information does lead to mistakes, and it should be illegal for one side to mislead the other. But, I see no reason that any contract should be illegal so long as each party understands what they are getting into, and does so willingly. I don't see how greed enters the equation. If one side is too greedy, the other will simply refuse the exchange.
"Hemp would potentially be a great resource atm for replacing many hydrocarbon products currently used, so you can bet that the oil companies might join in any attempts to legalize hemp production. Hemp has a wide range of very good uses if you bother to research for them. Far too many to discuss here."
No, hemp does not have a lot of very good uses. You can make clothes out of it, if you don't mind being uncomfortable. You can make paper out of it, if you don't mind it being fragile, and brown. It makes great rope and twine. That's why you can buy hemp rope and hemp twine almost anywhere, but only retarded hippy stores sell anything else made from hemp. No, hemp is not a replacement for any petroleum based products. Yes, I know that there is "research" that shows that we can use hemp to replace every aspect of modern life. While this may be "technically" true, it is far from actually being true.
Please don't call Missoula a small town, it is one of the largest cities in Montana. I've lived in small towns before, Missoula is not one.
I wish people would stop acting like Marijuana is so completely benign. Sure, it's not as toxic or addictive as cigarettes, but smoking anything is bad for your lungs. People with dependent personalities can become addicted to anything with a strong psychological effect. Don't get me wrong, it shouldn't be illegal. I'm just sick of people acting like it's some king of magic wonder drug that can solve all of our problems.
"The last eruption was 640,000 years ago... so the next is overdue."
That's kind of like saying "it hasn't rained in a couple weeks, so it'll probably rain today". There is a very small chance this thing will erupt in your lifetime. We should be prepared anyway, though.
"What's important is figuring out why this supposed culture of poverty continues, and what can be done to fix it."
A culture of poverty persists for the reasons you've already laid out: It is easy. People live life the way they were taught to by their parents and their piers. People are taught that victimhood is a way of life and embrace it. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about these reasons. You could forcibly sterilize the poor, but that wouldn't do anything to stop poor people who come from wealthy backgrounds from just building the whole culture all over again. You could take peoples children away at birth, but that would probably end up raising even more victims, because few people would be raised with care and compassion. You can't really make being poor any harder.
There are lesser reasons, which you haven't touched on, but about which something can be done. Higher education is a big problem. Many "skilled" jobs require college degrees. But, people from poor backgrounds have great difficulty obtaining degrees. This is because there is no "culture of poverty" to make them feel welcome in a university setting. Poor people can get there on scholarships and grants, but then become disillusioned and give up when they fail to fit in. Not to mention that poor people often try to start families and careers sooner than the college culture allows. You wouldn't believe how many of my friends have been told flat out that they can not work a job while they attend their professional program. That works fine for people whose parents pay for everything, but it doesn't work out so well for people from poor backgrounds. Curiously, the same college professors who complain about the plight of the poor do very little to fix this. Part of the problem is the lack of incentive for universities to increase admissions. These non-profit and public institutions maintain prestige by admitting few students, and have no mandate to meet the needs of the population at large. No standards exist to make coursework mobile, which commits students to relocated to another area of or school staying in that college community until their degree it completed, regardless of how a student's personal circumstances change. It it impossible to begin your four year degree in one state and finish it in another without repeating oftentimes, a great deal or previous coursework.
Another is common misconceptions in the media. If you tell people enough that they are helpless, they will eventually believe it. For example, minorities are repeatedly told that their minority status precludes them from success, even though there are minority groups that are very successful (such as asian americans) despite general prejudice which still exists against them. The message that minorities need special help to escape poverty is insulting and ignorant.
"Did you ever consider the fact that they're both major centers of poverty?"
Hummm. . . It sounds like banning poverty would be a better way of solving the problem then. Or maybe you should just try to do something more proactive than arbitrarily banning shit to piss people off. I mean, there was crime long before there were guns, why would you think banning them would reduce crime?
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different" That reminds me of my own education somehow. Lets see, of 128 required credits, less than half were engineering related. Somehow, I doubt my employer cares about all those humanities.
You can mod that funny, but eugenics was considered a scientific endeavor at during the '30s when the KKK was at it's peak. Many people simply took it as fact that white people were genetically superior to other races. It is an apt comparison, though most people wouldn't agree because global warming is "real" and eugenics is "fake".
Power and battery(6) Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery Playback time (30GB model) Music playback time: Up to 14 hours when fully charged . . . Playback time (80GB model) Music playback time: Up to 20 hours when fully charged
So there you have it, 20 hrs for the 80GB and 14 for the 30GB. Just another reason to spend a little extra for the high end model. The 80GB ipod is thicker (.55" vs.43") and heavier(5.5oz vs 4.8oz), so it must have a larger battery along with it's (physically) larger hard drive.
Technically speaking, you are correct. But, the main advantage of selling at a lower price than other resellers is increased sales. Of course, if you can't advertise a price that is lower than your competitors, it is very hard to gain any benefit from the reduced price (people wont buy something they don't know about). The effect is that you can't buy an Apple product priced significantly below the MSRP. Of course, there is a small range in sale prices. But it is not worth shopping around to find the best price.
"Last I looked - these things ran for $150 each at Costco for the 2GB model."
I'm not nitpicking your comment, but I would like to point out that it does not matter where you get your iPod. It will always be the same price. Apple does not allow resellers to sell at any price other than the MSRP. They enforce their policy be cutting off or fining resellers that fail to comply.
Speaking of Apple's sales policy, did anyone else notice that the 2GB model is only available in "plain" silver, and the only black iPod is the 8GB model. I don't think I've ever heard of a company charging people so much for specific colors! Their strategy is brilliant though, by bundling the more attractive colors with larger amounts of memory they make it easier for people paying extra to justify the purchase to themselves. It's easy to see how a technophile who was only looking to spend $150 could be persuaded to put out another $100 for the black iPod they really want because it has four times the memory! Hopefully they will revisit their MacBook pricing and make the "black fee" less obvious as well.
"Positive correlation between technological advancement and energy generation/consumption has been true throughout human history"
True, but that that doesn't mean a more advanced society will always use more power. For example, using polymers instead of glass and metal uses less energy, but polymers are generally considered more advanced. The same could be said about computers, modern desktops and servers consume less power; or cars which become more energy efficient as technology advances. I don't think there's any reason to believe that more energy must be consumed as technology improves. The only reason this correlation has existed in the past is the lack of scarcity of energy resources compared to labour. Or course, as energy resources become more scarce, this trend should reverse.
Why even have the planet earth if we either a) are all dead or b) don't live on it. If saving the planet means removing ourselves from it, then there's truly no point to saving it because we won't be able to use it! I think perhaps the Kardashev scale if fundamentally flawed.
"the reason why companies include that handy pre-paid envelope to "recycle" the ink carts is that they make a lot of money from it."
No they don't. Strictly speaking, recycling the cartridges costs them money. So why do they pay to take them back, and more importantly why are other people willing to give you money for the cartridges? Because HP (or whoever else) has patented the cartridge's print heads, or pin configuration's and they are the only ones legally allowed to manufacture them. But, other people can take the used cartridges and "re-manufacture" them. HP (and all other printer manufactures, for that matter) sell the cartridges at a huge profit as a way to make money on their zero-margin printers. Did you ever think it was strange that it costs almost as much to refill a printer as is does to buy it? That's no coincidence, they price the cartridges just enough lower than the printers that you will chose to refill it rather than buy a new one. The irony is that it is probably more harmful to the environment when a company remanufactures a cartridge, than it be would be if they just made a new one (it's also 3-4 times as expensive as making a new cartridge, and produces a vastly inferior product). Of course, remanufacturing cartridges is more profitable than manufacturing them because remanufactures don't have to develop, sell, and service printers.
Here's the best advice for the environmentally aware, don't buy remanufactured cartridges. They are bad for the environment (as stated above) and they are much lower quality (it's not worth the savings if you have to deal with bringing back defective cartridges, or live with streaking or other problems you will encounter). Don't send your cartridge back to them. Just throw it away and buy a new one, there's nothing in it bad for the environment, but giving it back to them hurts the environment. Definitely don't give it to a re-manufacturer, that is even worse for the environment.
When you're buying a printer, look at the cost per page and the print quality (and the print speed in laser printers). The ticket price, the cartridge price, and the print speed (for ink-jets) are made up numbers and shouldn't factor into your decision. When they realize that people are looking at cost per page, they will start selling low volume printers that are more expensive out the door, but have lower cost per page. Maybe then we can put this horrible cartridge recycling thing behind us.
So you have electronic ballots instead of paper ones, what's difference. On the surface, a large number of false electronic ballots may seem easier to produce than a large number of paper ones, but in reality, either method is only limited by how many fake ballots you can enter before you get noticed. There is simply no way to be completely sure any election was not stolen without compromising the anonymity of the voters.
"unlikely unless the "sample" tended to systematically lie to the pollsters"
No, it is not unlikely. As I said before, voter averages vary significantly from polling location to polling location. Say, for example, that exit polls were taken at only one or two of a dozen or so polling locations in a precinct. You would almost expect the exit poll from that precinct to be different from the actual election result. Especially if exit polls were only taken at urban or rural locations rather than a mixture of the two. This wold be like taking a few core samples from only one hemisphere of the moon, and then assuming that the entire composition of the moon is represented by the samples you took. Sure, there's millions of molecules of lunar material in the samples, but it doesn't mean that you took millions of random samples.
"My first answer to you was that yes, discrepancies in polling locations, random samplings, etc.--every significant thing that could skew the results--were all responsibly incorporated in the analysis"
No, saying that "common sense says we can discount this factor" is not the same is responsibly incorporating it into an analysis. That would be a proof by condescension (i.e. this factor is trivial and will be disregarded).
The point of my argument is that since not every polling place was sampled, and only a small number of polling places were sampled, the polling was not random. She says that this is a "small factor" but it isn't. Her paper lays out her assumptions in the equations she lists. She simply calculated the odds that the mean of a random sample of the size taken would differ from the actual mean. She then looked at three factors that could have caused a difference between the two results (listed above). The problem is that error resulting from differences in the mean from polling place to polling place was not considered.
If, for example, the general election results, or even the exit poll results indicated the number of polling places, how many people were polled at each place, and who the typical voter voted for at each location, it would be possible to calculate the odds that the observed difference would occur given a random sample of polling places (the odds of this would undoubtedly be much higher, because of the smaller number of polling places). But, as the author indicates, that data was not collected, so such an analysis is impossible.
And as a side note, it is puzzling to me that that people see the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual numbers and seem to question the actual election results because of the exit poll results. The actual data incorporates the entire population in its data, and was collected transparently, with a great deal of oversight to assure that it was collected properly. The exit polls, on the other hand, used a small, semi-random sampling of the population and was collected with no transparency and no oversight. Certainly the actual election data is more reliable than the exit poll data.
"P.S. I'm not a mathematician, either, just a lawyer, which is why I tend to adopt Kennedy's approach and appeal to more knowledgeable authorities in order to promote an argument."
I think that whenever someone is considering a report which is highly technical in nature, they should try to develop a basic understanding of the subject matter being dealt with. I'm not saying that this kind of understanding is good enough that you'd be able to spot false or unreasonable arguments that an intellectual authority might have made, but it will help you put their results in context and may help you better understand the claims they've made.
"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a 5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selecting voters as they leave the polling location."
No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. ..). Of course, I could tell that she made this assumption without even reading the paper, because it is literally the only assumption you can make with the amount of data they have. She goes on to say:
"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit poll discrepancy are produced by 1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voter response rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidential discrepancies), 2. vote miscounts, and 3. random sampling error. There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enough data has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect an analyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares. Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we do not know."
Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).
"According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)"
The problem with this claim is that the one in three billion number is calculated by assuming that the exit poll was taken by a completely random sampling of voters. Of course, exit polls are not collected at every polling station, and we expect to see different results at different stations. Even if they were taken at every polling station, certain voters might be more willing to take an exit poll than others. Random sampling is well understood, and it is possible to remove uncertainties about the "randomness" of a sample, but exit polls are not conducted this way because of the time and difficulty involved (it would not be possible to collect enough data in one day). To account for this, pollsters normalize their exit poll results to the real election results and use the data to say which groups of people voted for with candidates.
Almost all education spending is done on the state level, and therefore is not reflected in the federal numbers. Federal spending happens in the form of grants to schools and students, and is usually associated with specific, nation-wide initiatives.
There isn't an overriding definition of value. We each assign it in our own way. To a furniture manufacturer, a chair has very little value (since they have more chairs than they can use). So they exchange the chair for for something else (usually money) which they feel has more value than the chair. But the person who bought the chair didn't get ripped off. They felt that the chair had more value than whatever they exchanged for it (usually money). I the end, both parties gained form the exchange, and wealth was generated on both ends of the exchange.
So the claim that Vista will "Cost" the EU is a false one, since europeans purchasing it will do so because they feel it has more value than the money they pay for it. In the end both the EU and Microsoft will benefit from the exchange. Clearly, the author of the article has no understanding of free exchange, or how wealth is generated. And yes, looking at the price Europeans will pay for it is a good way to judge the benefit to the EU, because Vista has at least that much value to European citizens. Of course, you may think that their money would be better spent elsewhere, but in a free society(not that we actually live in one) people are allowed to make their own decisions.
This is not a scientific paper. I don't know what a "bioethologist" is, but it's not a biologist, and it's not a neurologist, and I don't think that jsut because someone was published in some scholary journal makes them an expert on everything.
The artical claims that dolphins have "very few" neurons. Well, how many do they have? How does that compare to the number in other, supposedly smarter animals? They claim that dolphins won't jump out of the water to escape from nets, but where's the proof? No research has been done. No science has been done. The artical is just a bunch on meaningless, unsubstantiated claims.
Slashdot Mirror
"The report also said MacDonald "misused her position" by disclosing confidential documents to "private sector sources" such as the Pacific Legal Foundation and the California Farm Bureau Federation, both of which have challenged endangered-species listings."
Government regulatory agencies should work with private industry. I agree that scientific research should not be altered, but I don't see why it was wrong for her to disclose a draft report to the private sector. I can understand why law enforcement agencies have confidential information, but a draft report on scientific research should not be confidential.
The word capitalists use is free market. In a free market people would be free to exchange goods and services whenever both sides of the equation wanted to. In a free exchange, both parties gain and neither loose.
Lack of information does lead to mistakes, and it should be illegal for one side to mislead the other. But, I see no reason that any contract should be illegal so long as each party understands what they are getting into, and does so willingly. I don't see how greed enters the equation. If one side is too greedy, the other will simply refuse the exchange.
"Hemp would potentially be a great resource atm for replacing many hydrocarbon products currently used, so you can bet that the oil companies might join in any attempts to legalize hemp production. Hemp has a wide range of very good uses if you bother to research for them. Far too many to discuss here."
No, hemp does not have a lot of very good uses. You can make clothes out of it, if you don't mind being uncomfortable. You can make paper out of it, if you don't mind it being fragile, and brown. It makes great rope and twine. That's why you can buy hemp rope and hemp twine almost anywhere, but only retarded hippy stores sell anything else made from hemp. No, hemp is not a replacement for any petroleum based products. Yes, I know that there is "research" that shows that we can use hemp to replace every aspect of modern life. While this may be "technically" true, it is far from actually being true.
Please don't call Missoula a small town, it is one of the largest cities in Montana. I've lived in small towns before, Missoula is not one.
I wish people would stop acting like Marijuana is so completely benign. Sure, it's not as toxic or addictive as cigarettes, but smoking anything is bad for your lungs. People with dependent personalities can become addicted to anything with a strong psychological effect. Don't get me wrong, it shouldn't be illegal. I'm just sick of people acting like it's some king of magic wonder drug that can solve all of our problems.
"The last eruption was 640,000 years ago... so the next is overdue."
That's kind of like saying "it hasn't rained in a couple weeks, so it'll probably rain today". There is a very small chance this thing will erupt in your lifetime. We should be prepared anyway, though.
"What's important is figuring out why this supposed culture of poverty continues, and what can be done to fix it."
A culture of poverty persists for the reasons you've already laid out: It is easy. People live life the way they were taught to by their parents and their piers. People are taught that victimhood is a way of life and embrace it. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about these reasons. You could forcibly sterilize the poor, but that wouldn't do anything to stop poor people who come from wealthy backgrounds from just building the whole culture all over again. You could take peoples children away at birth, but that would probably end up raising even more victims, because few people would be raised with care and compassion. You can't really make being poor any harder.
There are lesser reasons, which you haven't touched on, but about which something can be done. Higher education is a big problem. Many "skilled" jobs require college degrees. But, people from poor backgrounds have great difficulty obtaining degrees. This is because there is no "culture of poverty" to make them feel welcome in a university setting. Poor people can get there on scholarships and grants, but then become disillusioned and give up when they fail to fit in. Not to mention that poor people often try to start families and careers sooner than the college culture allows. You wouldn't believe how many of my friends have been told flat out that they can not work a job while they attend their professional program. That works fine for people whose parents pay for everything, but it doesn't work out so well for people from poor backgrounds. Curiously, the same college professors who complain about the plight of the poor do very little to fix this. Part of the problem is the lack of incentive for universities to increase admissions. These non-profit and public institutions maintain prestige by admitting few students, and have no mandate to meet the needs of the population at large. No standards exist to make coursework mobile, which commits students to relocated to another area of or school staying in that college community until their degree it completed, regardless of how a student's personal circumstances change. It it impossible to begin your four year degree in one state and finish it in another without repeating oftentimes, a great deal or previous coursework.
Another is common misconceptions in the media. If you tell people enough that they are helpless, they will eventually believe it. For example, minorities are repeatedly told that their minority status precludes them from success, even though there are minority groups that are very successful (such as asian americans) despite general prejudice which still exists against them. The message that minorities need special help to escape poverty is insulting and ignorant.
"Did you ever consider the fact that they're both major centers of poverty?"
Hummm. . . It sounds like banning poverty would be a better way of solving the problem then. Or maybe you should just try to do something more proactive than arbitrarily banning shit to piss people off. I mean, there was crime long before there were guns, why would you think banning them would reduce crime?
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different" That reminds me of my own education somehow. Lets see, of 128 required credits, less than half were engineering related. Somehow, I doubt my employer cares about all those humanities.
You can mod that funny, but eugenics was considered a scientific endeavor at during the '30s when the KKK was at it's peak. Many people simply took it as fact that white people were genetically superior to other races. It is an apt comparison, though most people wouldn't agree because global warming is "real" and eugenics is "fake".
You must be new here.
Do you have the 30GB iPod? It's advertised battery life is only 3.5hrs for video playback (the 80GB model has a larger battery).
Power and battery(6)
.43") and heavier(5.5oz vs 4.8oz), so it must have a larger battery along with it's (physically) larger hard drive.
Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery
Playback time (30GB model)
Music playback time: Up to 14 hours when fully charged
. . .
Playback time (80GB model)
Music playback time: Up to 20 hours when fully charged
So there you have it, 20 hrs for the 80GB and 14 for the 30GB. Just another reason to spend a little extra for the high end model. The 80GB ipod is thicker (.55" vs
The new iPod nanos are all made of anodized aluminum. They shouldn't scratch the way the old black ones did.
Technically speaking, you are correct. But, the main advantage of selling at a lower price than other resellers is increased sales. Of course, if you can't advertise a price that is lower than your competitors, it is very hard to gain any benefit from the reduced price (people wont buy something they don't know about). The effect is that you can't buy an Apple product priced significantly below the MSRP. Of course, there is a small range in sale prices. But it is not worth shopping around to find the best price.
"Last I looked - these things ran for $150 each at Costco for the 2GB model."
I'm not nitpicking your comment, but I would like to point out that it does not matter where you get your iPod. It will always be the same price. Apple does not allow resellers to sell at any price other than the MSRP. They enforce their policy be cutting off or fining resellers that fail to comply.
Speaking of Apple's sales policy, did anyone else notice that the 2GB model is only available in "plain" silver, and the only black iPod is the 8GB model. I don't think I've ever heard of a company charging people so much for specific colors! Their strategy is brilliant though, by bundling the more attractive colors with larger amounts of memory they make it easier for people paying extra to justify the purchase to themselves. It's easy to see how a technophile who was only looking to spend $150 could be persuaded to put out another $100 for the black iPod they really want because it has four times the memory! Hopefully they will revisit their MacBook pricing and make the "black fee" less obvious as well.
"Positive correlation between technological advancement and energy generation/consumption has been true throughout human history"
True, but that that doesn't mean a more advanced society will always use more power. For example, using polymers instead of glass and metal uses less energy, but polymers are generally considered more advanced. The same could be said about computers, modern desktops and servers consume less power; or cars which become more energy efficient as technology advances. I don't think there's any reason to believe that more energy must be consumed as technology improves. The only reason this correlation has existed in the past is the lack of scarcity of energy resources compared to labour. Or course, as energy resources become more scarce, this trend should reverse.
Why even have the planet earth if we either a) are all dead or b) don't live on it. If saving the planet means removing ourselves from it, then there's truly no point to saving it because we won't be able to use it! I think perhaps the Kardashev scale if fundamentally flawed.
"the reason why companies include that handy pre-paid envelope to "recycle" the ink carts is that they make a lot of money from it."
No they don't. Strictly speaking, recycling the cartridges costs them money. So why do they pay to take them back, and more importantly why are other people willing to give you money for the cartridges? Because HP (or whoever else) has patented the cartridge's print heads, or pin configuration's and they are the only ones legally allowed to manufacture them. But, other people can take the used cartridges and "re-manufacture" them. HP (and all other printer manufactures, for that matter) sell the cartridges at a huge profit as a way to make money on their zero-margin printers. Did you ever think it was strange that it costs almost as much to refill a printer as is does to buy it? That's no coincidence, they price the cartridges just enough lower than the printers that you will chose to refill it rather than buy a new one. The irony is that it is probably more harmful to the environment when a company remanufactures a cartridge, than it be would be if they just made a new one (it's also 3-4 times as expensive as making a new cartridge, and produces a vastly inferior product). Of course, remanufacturing cartridges is more profitable than manufacturing them because remanufactures don't have to develop, sell, and service printers.
Here's the best advice for the environmentally aware, don't buy remanufactured cartridges. They are bad for the environment (as stated above) and they are much lower quality (it's not worth the savings if you have to deal with bringing back defective cartridges, or live with streaking or other problems you will encounter). Don't send your cartridge back to them. Just throw it away and buy a new one, there's nothing in it bad for the environment, but giving it back to them hurts the environment. Definitely don't give it to a re-manufacturer, that is even worse for the environment.
When you're buying a printer, look at the cost per page and the print quality (and the print speed in laser printers). The ticket price, the cartridge price, and the print speed (for ink-jets) are made up numbers and shouldn't factor into your decision. When they realize that people are looking at cost per page, they will start selling low volume printers that are more expensive out the door, but have lower cost per page. Maybe then we can put this horrible cartridge recycling thing behind us.
So you have electronic ballots instead of paper ones, what's difference. On the surface, a large number of false electronic ballots may seem easier to produce than a large number of paper ones, but in reality, either method is only limited by how many fake ballots you can enter before you get noticed. There is simply no way to be completely sure any election was not stolen without compromising the anonymity of the voters.
"unlikely unless the "sample" tended to systematically lie to the pollsters"
No, it is not unlikely. As I said before, voter averages vary significantly from polling location to polling location. Say, for example, that exit polls were taken at only one or two of a dozen or so polling locations in a precinct. You would almost expect the exit poll from that precinct to be different from the actual election result. Especially if exit polls were only taken at urban or rural locations rather than a mixture of the two. This wold be like taking a few core samples from only one hemisphere of the moon, and then assuming that the entire composition of the moon is represented by the samples you took. Sure, there's millions of molecules of lunar material in the samples, but it doesn't mean that you took millions of random samples.
"My first answer to you was that yes, discrepancies in polling locations, random samplings, etc.--every significant thing that could skew the results--were all responsibly incorporated in the analysis"
No, saying that "common sense says we can discount this factor" is not the same is responsibly incorporating it into an analysis. That would be a proof by condescension (i.e. this factor is trivial and will be disregarded).
The point of my argument is that since not every polling place was sampled, and only a small number of polling places were sampled, the polling was not random. She says that this is a "small factor" but it isn't. Her paper lays out her assumptions in the equations she lists. She simply calculated the odds that the mean of a random sample of the size taken would differ from the actual mean. She then looked at three factors that could have caused a difference between the two results (listed above). The problem is that error resulting from differences in the mean from polling place to polling place was not considered.
If, for example, the general election results, or even the exit poll results indicated the number of polling places, how many people were polled at each place, and who the typical voter voted for at each location, it would be possible to calculate the odds that the observed difference would occur given a random sample of polling places (the odds of this would undoubtedly be much higher, because of the smaller number of polling places). But, as the author indicates, that data was not collected, so such an analysis is impossible.
And as a side note, it is puzzling to me that that people see the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual numbers and seem to question the actual election results because of the exit poll results. The actual data incorporates the entire population in its data, and was collected transparently, with a great deal of oversight to assure that it was collected properly. The exit polls, on the other hand, used a small, semi-random sampling of the population and was collected with no transparency and no oversight. Certainly the actual election data is more reliable than the exit poll data.
"P.S. I'm not a mathematician, either, just a lawyer, which is why I tend to adopt Kennedy's approach and appeal to more knowledgeable authorities in order to promote an argument."
I think that whenever someone is considering a report which is highly technical in nature, they should try to develop a basic understanding of the subject matter being dealt with. I'm not saying that this kind of understanding is good enough that you'd be able to spot false or unreasonable arguments that an intellectual authority might have made, but it will help you put their results in context and may help you better understand the claims they've made.
"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a
.). Of course, I could tell that she made this assumption without even reading the paper, because it is literally the only assumption you can make with the amount of data they have. She goes on to say:
5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selecting
voters as they leave the polling location."
No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. .
"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit poll
discrepancy are produced by
1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voter
response rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidential
discrepancies),
2. vote miscounts, and
3. random sampling error.
There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enough
data has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect an
analyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares.
Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we do
not know."
Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).
"According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)"
The problem with this claim is that the one in three billion number is calculated by assuming that the exit poll was taken by a completely random sampling of voters. Of course, exit polls are not collected at every polling station, and we expect to see different results at different stations. Even if they were taken at every polling station, certain voters might be more willing to take an exit poll than others. Random sampling is well understood, and it is possible to remove uncertainties about the "randomness" of a sample, but exit polls are not conducted this way because of the time and difficulty involved (it would not be possible to collect enough data in one day). To account for this, pollsters normalize their exit poll results to the real election results and use the data to say which groups of people voted for with candidates.
So no, that is nowhere near conclusive.
It's dishonest to charge the tax on the supply side, because voters will not be able to see how much the tax is costing them.
Almost all education spending is done on the state level, and therefore is not reflected in the federal numbers. Federal spending happens in the form of grants to schools and students, and is usually associated with specific, nation-wide initiatives.
There isn't an overriding definition of value. We each assign it in our own way. To a furniture manufacturer, a chair has very little value (since they have more chairs than they can use). So they exchange the chair for for something else (usually money) which they feel has more value than the chair. But the person who bought the chair didn't get ripped off. They felt that the chair had more value than whatever they exchanged for it (usually money). I the end, both parties gained form the exchange, and wealth was generated on both ends of the exchange.
So the claim that Vista will "Cost" the EU is a false one, since europeans purchasing it will do so because they feel it has more value than the money they pay for it. In the end both the EU and Microsoft will benefit from the exchange. Clearly, the author of the article has no understanding of free exchange, or how wealth is generated. And yes, looking at the price Europeans will pay for it is a good way to judge the benefit to the EU, because Vista has at least that much value to European citizens. Of course, you may think that their money would be better spent elsewhere, but in a free society(not that we actually live in one) people are allowed to make their own decisions.
This is not a scientific paper. I don't know what a "bioethologist" is, but it's not a biologist, and it's not a neurologist, and I don't think that jsut because someone was published in some scholary journal makes them an expert on everything.
The artical claims that dolphins have "very few" neurons. Well, how many do they have? How does that compare to the number in other, supposedly smarter animals? They claim that dolphins won't jump out of the water to escape from nets, but where's the proof? No research has been done. No science has been done. The artical is just a bunch on meaningless, unsubstantiated claims.