Robert Garcia Tagorda, Christopher Genovese, and Alex Tabarrok today take note of this article in Science News, which indicates that 3 researchers have found that coins, when tossed, land the same way up they started about 51% of the time.

Why hasn’t this been discovered in practice before? Interestingly, the article discusses a previous experiment with coin tossing that didn’t discover any bias:

During World War II, South African mathematician John Kerrich carried out 10,000 coin tosses while interned in a German prison camp. However, he didn’t record which side the coin started on, so he couldn’t have discovered the kind of bias the new analysis brings out.

Kerrich most likely didn’t discover the bias because some other part of his coin-tossing procedure ensured randomness. And, indeed, in a large number of trials, if there’s no bias in the starting condition (approximately equal numbers of coins are “heads” or “tails” when tossed), there will be no bias in the aggregate result—even given this finding.*

More to the point, the practical value of this finding seems minimal. The most obvious application—wagering—is precluded because no casino game that I’m aware of uses coin flips, though it’s possible that the ball in roulette and dice in craps may be similarly biased—again, given a known starting position, something that is rare in roulette at least (as the ball is under the control of the casino staff rather than the wagerers).

James Joyner isn’t quite convinced of Jeff Jenkins’ argument that John Kerry is more conservative relative to Democratic presidents (historically) than George Bush is liberal, using Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s NOMINATE method. James writes:

The problem I have with Poole’s coding methodology is that it’s excessively time bound. To compare Bush 43 to Reagan or Kerry to Carter ignores massive shifts in public opinion during those time periods. The “center” is not a spot on a map; it’s a median of current attitudes.

There are actually two versions of Poole and Rosenthal’s methodology. The version Jenkins apparently used for his analysis (from the description in the article) is called W-NOMINATE, and only looks at a particular Congressional session (e.g. the 107th Congress, from 2001 to 2003). There’s a second version, called DW-NOMINATE, that allows comparisons over time between Congresses. In other words, using W-NOMINATE is inappropriate for comparisons over time.* James goes on to write:

I’d think the ACU/ADA ratings are much more useful than Poole’s, since the comparison is made against one’s contemporaries.

Actually, ACU and ADA ratings are essentially interchangeable with W-NOMINATE first dimension scores. But I think James is critiquing Jenkins for something that Jenkins actually didn’t do (even though the article might lead you to think he did).

It seems to me there are two related questions here: is Bush more extreme than Kerry? and, are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to their partisan predecessors? The first question was pretty clearly answered by Jenkins in the article. The second can’t be answered by the W-NOMINATE method that Jenkins used—which, given his indication that he deliberately simplified the analysis (by using W-NOMINATE instead of DW-NOMINATE), makes it seem odd that he tried to make comparisons over time. The question I think Jenkins answered is “are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to predecessor presidents vis à vis the Congresses they faced”—and, for that comparison, W-NOMINATE or ADA/ACU scores would work equally as well.

Update: Jeff Jenkins has a comment at Dan’s place that clarifies the situation; he did use DW-NOMINATE for the interyear comparisons, but that point was lost in the editing process. So ignore the above paragraph. ☺ He has some interesting points too in regard to Poole and Rosenthal’s book, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.

Also worth pointing out is the forthcoming APSR piece by Doug Rivers, Josh Clinton, and Simon Jackman, “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data”. There's also a recent issue of Political Analysis in which all of the articles were on ideal-point estimation (which is the technical term for NOMINATE and the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman approach). And, if you want to do it yourself, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn have included the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman procedure in their MCMCpack package for GNU R.

I previously discussed Kerry’s ideology here. Dan Drezner also discusses the article in question here.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger has an article on the continued difficulty some large-county legislators are having getting an exception to the statewide ban on county sheriffs using radar.

The status of all the various bills is here, while the current law is here.

As Steven Taylor notes in the latest Toast-O-Meter, there’s a primary to be held this Tuesday in Mississippi and three other Southern states. Democratic frontrunner and presumptive nominee John Kerry will be campaigning in Jackson tomorrow at a black church and Tougaloo College.

Steven Taylor, prompted by the Invisible Adjunct, observes that the appropriateness of lecturing versus using a seminar format is largely determined by three factors:

1) the level of the course (e.g., intro, advanced undergrad, grad), 2) the subject matter, and 3) the size of the class.

I’d broadly agree with Steven. All three of these factors are highly correlated; relatively straightforward subject matter is generally taught at an introductory level in large classes, while more complex subject matter usually involves small classes taught at an advanced level. The exceptions—notably the “honors seminar” version of intro—work because there’s an underlying assumption that the students in the course are already familiar with most of the material that they would have learned in the non-honors course, thus the course is no longer a true “intro” course.

Starting this summer, Mississippi’s getting a new area code—769—which will overlay the 601 area code in central Mississippi. Amazingly, Mississippi only had one area code until 1997. (Everything you’d ever want to know about area codes is here.)

The 2003 Chairman’s Letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway was released this morning, and Warren Buffett gets in a couple of subtle digs at the Bush administration. The best one was this one on page 19, regarding the opening of a new Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM) store in Kansas City:

“Victory,” President Kennedy told us after the Bay of Pigs disaster, “has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” At NFM, we knew we had a winner a month after the boffo opening in Kansas City, when our new store attracted an unexpected paternity claim. A speaker there, referring to the Blumkin family [the founders of NFM], asserted, “they had enough confidence and the policies of the Administration were working such that they were able to provide work for 1,000 of our fellow citizens.” The proud papa at the podium? President George W. Bush.

To borrow a phrase from another Sci-Fi series, wa-HOOO! But, yeah, I’d like the TV show back too…

A recent addition to SN‘s blogroll is the self-described Hot Abercrombie Chick!, Amanda. She seems to attract very weird commenters. She also received this email, which is just downright odd… but, since I’m bored, I’ll put my limited matchmaking skills to work to fulfill this gentleman’s request.

Here’s the punchline from Steve Verdon:

I used to have quite a bit of respect for Krugman. Now I see him as a despicable, low-life, partisan jackass.

Read the whole thing for the rest. It’s pretty sad.

My theory about the history of the South is that every Southerner doesn’t know anything that happened before 1980 (except Sherman’s march to the sea) and every Northerner doesn’t know anything that happened since 1954 (except a bunch of blacks getting blasted with fire hoses). For the former, I rely on interactions with Ole Miss students; for the latter, I rely on this Yale Daily News piece, which contains the following quote:

“Tennessee has southern hospitality and a southern feel without having the antagonism of the deep South,” Elizabeth Dohrmann ‘06 of Nashville said. “Everything is so alive and the culture is still intact, but it’s probably one of the easiest places to visit in the South.”

One suspects Ms. Dohrmann’s experience of the South—a region that Nashville is about as much a part of as Seattle is—is limited to a viewing of Sling Blade and vague familiarity with the plots of Deliverance and Mississippi Burning. One also suspects Ms. Dohrmann’s knowledge of Memphis—a city that combines the best and worst of the deep South in one not-so-tidy community—is limited to knowledge that her beloved Tennessee Titans played a season in a shitty stadium in said city.

As for the alleged “antagonism of the deep South,” I’d rise to the defense of the region except I’m running late for my Meetup with Acidman and a few pals from the CCC.*

Since I really don’t have much to add to any of the current political discussion (Stern versus the FCC, Bush’s campaign advertising—hey, it’s 1992 all over again!), and I’m running out of time to meet my “one post per GMT day quota,” I figured I’d talk a little about my new laptop—inspired in part by Michael Jennings’ blogging about his.

Tom Maguire suggests that the National Journal finding that John Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate isn’t supported by Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE scores, at least not over the last two Congresses. He also quibbles:

Any fool can ask a question that ten wise men cannot answer: Dr. Poole bases his rankings on all recorded roll call votes, including the straight party-line organizational votes – for example, all Republicans voted for Bill Frist as Leader, and for the various Republican committee chairpersons. My suspicion is that the results give a good ranking within parties (so Kerry is really a centrist Dem), but the border between Republican and Democrat on substantive votes is blurrier than these results suggest. Objectivity and simplicity might suffer, but has this been looked at?

My (admittedly fuzzy) recollection of NOMINATE is that the results are fairly robust when you exclude pure party-line votes from the input data. A second approach to this question is a recent paper (released Monday!) by Joshua Clinton, Simon Jackman, and Doug Rivers that uses a Bayesian item-response theory model to approach the question (the same method used in their forthcoming APSR piece, a variant of which I used to measure political knowledge in my dissertation); the abstract follows:

We reanalyze the 62 key Senate roll calls of 2003, as identified by National Journal, using a statistical procedure that (1) is sensitive to different rates of abstention across senators and roll calls; (2) allows us to compute margins of errors on voting scores and the ranks of the legislators, as well as compute the probability that a given senator occupies a particular rank (e.g., is the “most liberal” senator). The three Democratic senators running for president in 2003 have markedly higher rates of abstention than the rest of the Senate, leading to considerable uncertainty as to their voting score (particularly for Senator Kerry). In turn, we find that contrary to recent media reports, Senator Kerry (D-MA) is not the “most liberal” senator, or at least not unambiguously; as many as three Senators could plausibly be considered the “most liberal“, with Kerry third on this list behind Senators Reed (D-RI) and Sarbanes (D-MD).

The note lacks any high-powered math, and should be accessible to anyone with an interest in politics and a modicum of statistical knowledge. Incidentally, their method does show a closer overlap between Democrats and Republicans than NOMINATE does (in part because they restricted the analysis to 62 “key” votes rather than all of the roll calls). One other thing to note: the whopping error bar around Kerry’s position, a direct result of his absenteeism from the Senate over the past year.

Considering that I spent a good ten minutes of Black Hawk Down with my eyes closed and am still freaked out about the needle scene in Pulp Fiction almost a decade after it was released, I’ll probably take a pass on The Passion of the Christ. For those considering seeing it (including my mom’s Sunday School class, who are going this weekend), Robert Prather has a roundup of links, while Rev. Donald Sensing has a review.

Dumb question… does anyone know if the following XML construct is technically legal?

<a title="<![CDATA[lame <i>test</i>]]>" href="http://www.debian.org/">blah</a>

PyExpat barfs on it, as does Mozilla’s XML parser, and I suspect they’re right to do so, but I can’t find anything in the XML specification that says, definitively, whether or not CDATA declarations are allowed in attributes. (If this is incorrect XML, Movable Type 2.661 generates invalid RDF/XML and my trackback discovery code isn’t busted.)

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber demonstrates the well-known flaws in Borda vote counting quite vividly. The Borda count is probably best known as the counting mechanism used by the Associated Press and ESPN/USA Today college basketball and football polls in the United States—to my knowledge, it is not used in practice by any governmental body.

Dan Drezner’s latest TNR essay deals with Sam Huntington’s recent Foreign Policy essay on the “threat” of unassimilated Hispanics to the United States. Read the whole thing here and all the footnotes at Dan’s place.

Update: Two Matthews weigh in: Stinson and Yglesias. Neither is impressed by Huntington’s argument, while Matt Stinson helpfully points out that whatever Huntington is, he isn’t a neoconservative (whatever that is…).

Read the story at Slashdot, bearing in mind the FUD-to-truth ratio inherent in that forum. There’s more info on some of SCO’s claims from GOLUM’s own Jim Greer here.

Update: Joy Larkin is rather unimpressed by SCO’s latest antics as well.

Obligatory conflict-of-interest disclaimer: I interviewed with AutoZone for a job (in part) supporting the software at issue in the lawsuit last month, and Jim (who is no longer at AutoZone) is a pretty good friend of mine.

Tonight, I attended the 2004 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Public Lecture by Wisconsin political scientist Virginia Sapiro; her topic was, “What Does Civility Have To Do With Politics?” It was a rather wide-ranging talk that engendered a pretty good discussion from the audience, and not one that is easily summarized—particularly by someone who wasn’t taking notes. She came at the question from the perspective of the impact of politics on norms of civility rather than (as you might expect) the impact of the norms of civility on political discourse.

I did ask Dr. Sapiro her thoughts on reconciling our empirical knowledge that people learn more from negative campaigning with calls for civility, like the “I approve this message” requirement in McCain-Feingold, and she pointed out that it is possible to have a civil campaign that nonetheless compares candidates’ positions. I wonder about the relative effectiveness of that approach versus the more classic “incivil” negative campaign—do voters learn as effectively from “civil” ads—and whether civility is really more in the eyes of the beholder. Ads like the infamous mushroom cloud from 1964 or Willie Horton in 1988 probably weren’t considered uncivil by the campaigns (or, in the case of Horton, nominally unaffiliated groups) that produced them, but Barry Goldwater and Mike Dukakis probably didn’t agree with that assessment. Definitely plenty of food for thought.

Robert Garcia Tagorda is the latest to ponder whether or not Dick Cheney needs to be replaced:

Here’s my tentative observation: Cheney represents two related problems. First, he has a bad image. Second, he gives Democrats a good target for criticism. Rudy and Condi can help fix the first, but they wouldn’t necessarily solve the second. For instance, though they’re significant improvements from a public-relations standpoint, they wouldn’t really slow down the attacks on the jobless recovery.

On national security and foreign policy, they could do both: Rudy’s post-9/11 performance still resonates with the public, while Condi has the professional qualifications. But how much would they add overall to the campaign? Bush is already strong on these fronts, and unless he can gain notably more voters by subtracting Cheney’s Halliburton ties and WMD remarks (among others), I don’t see how Republicans truly benefit from the change.

In the end, it might still be best to dump Cheney, if only to energize the ticket. I just caution against high expectations.

I think dumping Cheney, however, removes the most obvious target for criticism—and the only one actually on the ticket. While some of the Cheney criticism would devolve onto Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Paul Wolfowitz, and a host of other figures, it’s hard to pin all of the myriad problems attributable in some tenuous way on Cheney to any single one of them. Removing a lightning rod for critics like Cheney, while not immunizing the administration from criticism, at least has the effect of diffusing that criticism, thus making it harder for Democrats to personalize their attacks.

Update: Kevin Drum doesn’t think it’s going to happen. He asserts that “Cheney is very popular with Bush's conservative base,” something I don’t buy at all, for reasons discussed here, although it’s a forgivable error on Kevin’s part.* For what it’s worth, though, fewer conservatives than moderates think Cheney should be ditched, according to the Annenberg poll numbers that Robert cites, but I can’t tell offhand if the finding is statistically significant.† (The finding may also simply reflect the fact that conservatives are more loyal to the administration in general.)

I’ve previously discussed Cheney’s status as a liability for the administation more than once in the past couple of months as these rumors have swirled around.

Apparently unsatisfied with wasting taxpayer dollars by insulting our intelligence with TV advertising, the Federal Drug Warriors are now planning to annoy the hell out of internet users in their quest for a drug-free America:

[ Drug Enforcement Administrator Karen]Tandy said the DEA plans online educational initiatives including Internet versions of Public Service Announcements and pop-up ads that will appear on the computer screens of individuals searching the Internet for drugs.

All the more reason to use Mozilla Firefox. You can block pop-ups and stick it to the Man!

Ryan Gabbard inquires:

Anyone else think Liv Tyler was much prettier presenting the music at the Academy Awards than she was playing the most beautiful Elf in Middle-Earth?

Well, it’s your big chance to judge for yourself. Personally, I could have done without the Lisa Loeb glasses, which look fine on Ms. Loeb, but seemed odd on Ms. Tyler.

Hei Lun takes apart a philosophical paper that argues that people should only listen to experts who share their ideological beliefs. (Let the grand de-linking begin!)

Steven Taylor links a Howard Kurtz WaPo piece that notes the media’s differential treatment of two political figures who defied the law, ex-Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore and very-much-not-ex-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome. What may be more interesting is that Kurtz finds a married (at least in the eyes of Ontario) lesbian reporter to quote on the topic (not to mention getting multiple Sully quotes), but can’t manage to dig up an evangelical Christian who has anything to say.

Plus ça change…

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, faced with an armed rebellion and pressure from the United States and France, left Haiti this morning, according to numerous reports.

For more, see James Joyner.