We are well and truly in the very best of hands.

In late February, a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that obesity rates among children aged 2 to 5 had declined by 40 to 43 percent in the past eight years, a dramatic and encouraging finding. But researchers are now saying that the good news may have been a statistical mistake.

...

The CDCÂ’s study relied on a set of government-collected data thatÂ’s considered highly reliable, but wasnÂ’t ideal for this comparison: The study looked at over 9,000 Americans, but just 871 were between 2 and 5, and just a small proportion of them are obese. The margin of error, in fact, was wide enough that itÂ’s statistically possible there was no decrease at all.

This Reuters article explains why there's doubt:

If the news last month that the prevalence of obesity among American preschoolers had plunged 43 percent in a decade sounded too good to be true, that's because it probably was, researchers say.

...

In fact, based on the researchers' own data, the obesity rate may have even risen rather than declined.

"You need to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the validity of this finding," said Dr. Lee Kaplan, director of the weight center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

...

In some research 871 would be considered a large number. But when the obesity rate is fairly low, having a sample of a few hundred makes it easier for errors to creep in through random chance.

"In small samples like this, you are going to have chance fluctuations," said epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

...

The 13.9 percent obesity rate among preschoolers reported for 2003-2004 had a large enough margin of error that the actual rate could range between 10.8 percent and 17.6 percent, the CDC authors acknowledged. The 8.4 percent rate in 2011-2012 reported could range from 5.9 percent and 11.6 percent.

There are no other studies suggesting what this study claims. A WIC study (with 200,000 kids in it) found a small downward decrease in obesity rates, but nothing like 43%.

As I mentioned yesterday, the scientists involved in finding gravitational waves actually discovered, they thought, evidence of the waves three years ago. They spent the last three years amassing more evidence, and checking their math.

The video here shows one of the researchers coming to a scientist's house to inform him they'd determined the evidence had been proven to be very statistically sound. "5-sigma, 0.2 r," the researcher tells the scientist, which means nothing to me, but it means a lot to the scientist.

We have nowhere near this kind of rigor in the so-called "soft sciences," obviously. People just crank out study after study. Tiny, shaky findings of correlation are trumpeted as being very meaningful.

It's really pretty embarrassing.

A 43% drop in preschool obesity, with no other data supporting such a thing, and no plausible mechanism explaining such a sharp drop, shouldn't really have been reported.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (284)
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I guess.

"I think we’re in for a tsunami-type election in 2014,” Priebus said.”My belief is, it’s going to be a very big win, especially at the U.S. Senate level, and we may add some seats in congressional races. But I need to and we need to at the RNC make sure that we can capture the positives and the benefits we’ve been able to provide in 2014 and build on that to have success in 2016, which is a very different type of election.”

He was bullish on the Senate...

“I’m just guessing here, but I think among youth and women, we’re gonna see the greatest increase in 2014 because of, No. 1, Obamacare,” Priebus said. “It’s very, very, very personal among women losing your doctor, getting your insurance canceled.”

As he has argued before, he continued: “Then young people, Obamacare is intentionally designed to screw young people over. Actuaries sat down, decided, let’s just screw over everyone 35 and younger. That’s what they did.”

This is interesting: The Democrats' only strong candidate for Pennsylvania 6 has just abruptly bailed out of the race.

It really does seem like yesterday that the DCCC was blasting out memos touting Parrish as such a strong candidate and telling the media that he was the “only one the DCCC is talking to.”

The DCCC even sent Nancy Pelosi up to Philadelphia to fundraise for Parrish.

Now it looks like the Florida-13 fallout has left Pelosi and the DCCC with a two-time double digit loser to challenge strong Republican candidate Ryan Costello in the PA-06 open seat.

The NRCC speculates that this is because of the FL-13 loss.

Incredible: Scott Walker just announced a billion dollar surplus and $500 million plus in tax relief.

So what's his Democratic opponent, Mary Burke, do?

Well, she wants you to know she's tough on government spending too, and is really interested in keeping the books balanced.

So she's got some cuts in mind: She wants to eliminate the income tax deduction for paying for private school for your kids.

See, that's just money flowing out of the government doors. Time to get tough on spending, unlike that Scott Walker.

"I think that these were new entitlement programs basically and we have to make tough budget decisions," Burke told reporters after an hourlong appearance at a luncheon sponsored by WisPolitics.

Burke, a member of the Madison School Board, added, "We have to do budget decisions that are going to grow the economy, that are going to impact us positively, and I think those were two new expenditures, frankly, that did neither."

During the luncheon, Burke mentioned the two programs when asked to identify savings that could be made in the overall state budget.

See, she wants to make some "tough" decisions on the budget.

It's just that they happen to involve taking money from taxpayers in order to deliver it to government employees.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (437)
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Great.

Oh, by the way:

Sometimes I'm an idiot. You knew that. But lately I've been seeing "Simferopol" in the news and I've been assuming it's one of those "let's change a city's name to reflect actual pronunciation" things, like Peking becoming Beijing, or Bombay becoming Mumbai.

So I thought Simferopol was just Sevastapol.

It's not. They're near each other, but Simferopol is a different city, more inland than Sevastapol, and is the capital of the Crimean region.

Lately I might have written "Sevastapol" when news reports said "Simferopol."

Romney... has written an op-ed on all of this called "The Price of Failed Leadership."

Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?

A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

...

Able leaders anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them. My career in business and politics has exposed me to scores of people in leadership positions, only a few of whom actually have these qualities. Some simply cannot envision the future and are thus unpleasantly surprised when it arrives. Some simply hope for the best. Others succumb to analysis paralysis, weighing trends and forecasts and choices beyond the time of opportunity.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton traveled the world in pursuit of their promise to reset relations and to build friendships across the globe. Their failure has been painfully evident: It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office, and now Russia is in Ukraine. Part of their failure, I submit, is due to their failure to act when action was possible, and needed.

Eh. This is an easy analysis to make for anyone criticizing any president: You allege, vaguely, that things might have gone better had you been in charge. You're proclaiming your relative competency versus your opponent's relative incompetency, and as this is all counter-factual, it's impossible to disprove.

Obama, by the way, constantly did this to Bush (well, he did it to McCain, pretending that McCain was in fact George W. Bush), just saying "Hey, we're smarter, if we were in charge you wouldn't even have had to confront these difficult choices."

The argument is easy and a bit vague, so I don't put a lot of stock into it.

But given that Obama did the same thing, I do enjoy that the same tactic is being used against him.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (551)
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This is a terribly damaging disclosure, and it will only get worse, once Snowden reveals which country was bugged, or that country figures it out for itself.

Certainly this would be considered a crown jewel of intelligence work; it's now entirely undone. The targets know about it, and we're on the edge of a diplomatic shitstorm of end-times proportions.

Snowden seems to believe that the United States is simply not permitted an intelligence service at all. Any intelligence service would, of course, ferret out a target nation's secrets; that's the whole point of it. But Snowden seems to believe that foreign nationals and foreign governments have a right to privacy that we are not permitted to breach.

America once shuttered its codebreaking offices, back in 1929. Explaining the decision, former Secretary of State Henry Stimson would later write in his memoirs the notoriously naïve principle: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

And here we go again.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

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The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

The Washington Post is withholding details that could give away which country was targeted, but 1) apparently Snowden is revealing it anyway, and 2) come on, we're talking about ten possible target countries. They can guess that they were omnibugged, or that they might be the next one to be omnibugged.

I've mentioned this before, but the intelligence agencies often pay corporations to develop spy tech for them. Much of the cutting edge stuff cannot be made in government labs; you need someone like Kodak to make a truly micro-camera or micro-battery for you.

At some point, the fruits of this government-funded engineering show up on the private market. Kodak may sit on a breakthrough tiny battery for six or eight years, to give the government spies the benefit of their coup, but at some point, they're going to want to put that on the market.

My point is that whatever was done here seems to involve data compression. The notion of capturing and storing so much data would have been pure science-fiction just ten years ago.

But we've gotten used to some of these science-fiction conveniences. Ten years ago, it was impossible to pipe high-definition movies to people on demand. Now it's not only commonplace, but it's entirely unremarkable. No one really pauses to consider how incredible it is that they can tell their phone to download the entire film Gravity in hi-def and not only can they do so, but they can actually watch the movie within seconds of pushing the button.

Anyway, point is, I'm thinking that some of these incredible strides in data compression might just have been partly funded by the NSA.

More: My guess for the targeted country is North Korea. It's a basket case that needs watching, and it's small and impoverished -- I imagine that phone traffic is pretty small, and what traffic it has will be disproportionately made up of military and civilian elites. People worth listening to.

Also: Person of Interest. One of the creators, Jonathan Nolan I think, observed that when they started the show, they assumed the premise was sci-fi and fantasy, mostly. But as the years have gone by, they've realized more and more that it's not sci-fi, not even near-term sci-fi. It's going on right now.

The remaining sci-fi premise (as opposed to a premise that is actually real) of Person of Interest is artificial intelligence.

I'm beginning to wonder about that. I'm starting to wonder if in ten years we're going to find out, "Oh yeah, we had the first AI in 2012."

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (523)
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From VA Viper, who has more, including a gallery of some of the Museum's best (worst) pieces, and the backstory on the first piece the Museum collected.

It's pretty funny, and the curator of Bad Art has a good sense of humor. (When asked if the first piece collected by the museum is "priceless," she agrees it is, but then quickly adds that if anyone offers her a million dollars for it, she's selling it.)

Of course, it's going to occur to most people: How is this crap any worse than half of the crap hanging in art galleries?

Via The Corner, which is actually heavy on strange art collections today.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (199)
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The Flight Management Computer sits on a pedestal between the captain and copilot, so it could be accessed by either. Or by someone with pre-flight access to the computer.

The change may have been made with as little as seven or eight keystrokes of typing into the Flight Management Computer, simply substituting a new, more westerly waypoint for the original, scheduled one. Waypoints have a five character code; I guess the additional characters would be to indicate a new waypoint, and to hit enter.

The fact that the turn away from Beijing was programmed into the computer has reinforced the belief of investigators — first voiced by Malaysian officials — that the plane was deliberately diverted and that foul play was involved. It has also increased their focus on the plane’s captain and first officer.

The Malaysians, by the way, have officially retracted that previous report (already largely debunked) that the ACARS system was turned off before the copilot's last words over the radio.

The new timeline seems to be this:

1:07 am: Last ACARS ping

1:19 am: "All right, good night" communication from cockpit

1:37 am: Scheduled ACARS ping which never happened, because the system had been shut off. ACARS then was shut off sometime between 1:07 am and 1:37 am, and investigators can't pin it down any more than that (for now).

Flight 370Â’s Flight Management System reported its status to the Acars, which in turn transmitted information back to a maintenance base, according to an American official. This shows that the reprogramming happened before the Acars stopped working. The Acars ceased to function about the same time that oral radio contact was lost and the airplaneÂ’s transponder also stopped, fueling suspicions that foul play was involved in the planeÂ’s disappearance.

I sort of understand that but note that previously, evidence that these systems had been turned off at different times fueled suspicion that the plane's flightpath was deliberately altered; the new theory is that the fact that all these systems went out at the same time is evidence of deliberate action.

It seems whether they were turned off at the same time or different times, we're taking that as evidence of foul play. I suspect foul play myself, but it's a bit illogical to take exactly-opposite evidence as proving the same thing.

In an effort to determine whether the pilot had practiced taking down the plane, the authorities have reassembled the simulator for experts to examine.

Have I missed something? Was there a previous report the flight simulator had been disassembled? If not, what's that "reassembled" doing in there? Or do they just mean investigators disassembled it to remove it from the pilot's house? (It was a sizable thing, with three computer screens to simulate the view from the cockpit.)

As far as Thailand's spotting of a UFO: If that was flight 370, that would indicate a northwest trajectory for the plane, toward (Ed Morrissey says) India and the Central Asian Republics.

I suppose it would also indicate Pakistan as possible endpoint.

Given that Thailand detected this UFO on the night the plane went missing, there are questions why it took them 10 days to say something. It seems no one wants to admit the capabilities of their radars. Understandable, I guess, but what's the point of military radar if you can't use it to track down a plane possibly hijacked by terrorists?

What the Hell Did I Just Watch? Yesterday Ronan Farrow had on Lester Holt to play show and tell with a flight simulator. Holt owns one, and calls himself a "frustrated pilot" (I think he means wannabe pilot), and Farrow had him on to show the audience just what a flight simulator is.

I suppose the basics of this are useful enough-- there may be some small number of people who don't know what a flight simulator is, or may imagine that the only flight simulators are those huge, acceleration-simulating multimillion dollar things that pros use to train.

But it's very awkward and strange to watch Farrow ask some dumb questions about what is, basically, an elaborate and difficult videogame available for virtually any computer.

Oh: Farrow keeps asking Holt if it's "suspicious" that a pilot should own a flight simulator.

This is not a dumb question, but it is a stupid question to ask Holt. Holt is not an expert or a pilot capable of offering an opinion on this question. He's just a reporter who owns a flight simulator, period.

Farrow is asking a guy with no good way to know the answer the same question, multiple times.

Whether or not it's unusual for a pilot to own a flight simulator, or to be an enthusiast for flight simulators, is a good question, if you ask an actual commercial pilot.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 AM | Comments (354)
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Happy Tuesday.

NYTimes' latest piece on the Malaysian plane is that (at least) the first change in course was the result of computer input, not manual control. So all those folks who suggested that the drastic course change was the result of a struggle in the cockpit really didn't know enough to say.

The city council of Seattle has decided to kill upstart ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft to protect the taxi industry at the expense of riders.

"Nanobionic" plants. I love this sci-fi-turned-reality stuff.

Charles C.W. Cook wrote on "Handing Over the Keys to the Internet."

This, about how the presidents makes phone calls to other world leaders, was interesting.

[RSS]

[On iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:48 AM | Comments (223)
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The 727 That Vanished

It's rare that a large commercial jet goes completely missing but it has happened. Just over ten years ago a 727 took off from Angola and has never been seen since.

On May 25, 2003, shortly before sunset, Padilla boarded the company's Boeing 727-223, tail number N844AA. With him was a helper he had recently hired, John Mikel Mutantu, from the Republic of the Congo. The two had been working with Angolan mechanics to return the 727 to flight-ready status so they could reclaim it from a business deal gone bad, but neither could fly it. Mutantu was not a pilot, and Padilla had only a private pilot's license. A 727 ordinarily requires three trained aircrew.

According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since.

Most likely the men ended up crashing it but no wreckage was ever found. And in the years since then neither the plane nor its parts have ever appeared on the aviation market.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:32 PM | Comments (656)
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• Putin Reconizes Crimean Independence And The Ancschluss
  
• Handing Over The Keys To The Internet
  
• Ukraine Preparing For Russian Invasion
  
• Lawsuit Challenges Use Of Endangered Species To Stop Energy Boom
  
• Astronomers Discover Echo Of The Big Bang
  
• Feds Work Around Restraining Order To Execute Search Warrant On Gun Parts Store
  
• Aristotle On Crimea
  
• Elections Have Been Lost Over Less Serious Gaffes Than This One
  
• Duh: Health Insurance Premiums Up Under Obamacare
  
• America Needs A Healthy Does Of Elitism
  
• Not Ready For Hillary
  
• Romney Shreds Obama's Failed Leadership
  
• Evil Koch Brothers Employ An Out Of State Actor In Colorado Ad!
  
• Wes Anderson Centered
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:05 AM | Comments (619)
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Former Obama zealot denounces Obama for leftwing reasons.

I don't know if it's something. I suppose it's good that she's learned that all Personality Cults are lies.

And, Open Thread. more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:57 PM | Comments (388)
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