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cc andrealindenbergNigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn't happening or humans aren't responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question -- tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.
The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn't at liberty to divulge.
Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they're not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That's in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion - which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.
"If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there," says Leck. "There's the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be 'God created it that way' or something like that. I don't know how you answer that."
The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won't be swayed by any amount of argumentation.
Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive - for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form "It's 113 degrees outside - good thing global warming's a myth!"
Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn't actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.
In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics - allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves.
In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.
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Are 'Patent Trolls' the Secret Heroes of the Tech World?
eric25001
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 13 Comments
Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
Not much differance. Few on either side have an open mind or can discuss the issue. To use the phrase anti-science nonsense is ad hominem and shows that the reporter lacks an open mind or science background and cares little for the truth, accuracy, or the facts.
howiem
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 12 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
People like Mims are the pseudo scientists, because when they say something it cannot be wrong, even when it turns out to be wrong. I read his article that the Global Warming fruitcakes have no argument so they use a software puppet. One would expect no less.
Calling those who do not agree with you names like "crackpots" is not exactly the way to convince skeptics that the "Warmers" aren't just a bunch petty demagogues. If the "Warmers" have nothing to hide, then why are they hiding things?
flared0ne
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 328 Comments
And I read his article as a prime example of finding a resource allocation problem and fixing it. There is a REASON why "profiling" systems work so well -- because they DO detect characteristic patterns. And when a particular pattern says "here is someone who has a belief, an opinion, but no basis for that position", the solution to an ongoing disagreement is to automate the citation in response of pertinent facts. No "puppet" involved -- more like a teacher recording a lesson plan and automating the "here's what you don't know" lesson.
I CAN see how that might seem condescending -- to imply that someone's hard-fought pseudo-"rational" arguments are about as predictable as playing tic-tac-toe... But statistically speaking, there are VERY few original arguments still waiting to be made.
Do I pass my Turing test??
nigel.leck
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 3 Comments
If you were told "The Sun is causing GW as Neptune is also warming", you think well that's interesting and then go look it up and find "Neptune's orbit is 164 years so seasonal plus the sun is in a low activity phase" unless any more evidence is presented the answer this argument would remain and really shouldn't be a matter of opinion.
flared0ne
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 328 Comments
Re: "anti-science nonsense"...
It's fairly obvious that YOU have never been "pinned to a wall" by someone speaking nonsense, TRYING to discuss something waay outside of their grasp... Have to wonder what your cut-off threshold is, at what point YOU say "Sure. You're right. Excuse me, I have to go watch some paint dry."
If you have NOT ever experienced that dubious joy, I have an aether-wave-theory proponent you should meet. Or maybe you would prefer to debate Standard Relativity and the invalidity of physics with another individual I'd be happy to distract with YOUR availability. Who knows -- if you enjoy reading comic books and conspiracy theories, you might enjoy their conversation.
Personally, I vote for the increasingly common "Ignore" button as the best option for reducing background clutter and inane demands upon my time.
Here's to not seeing you later.
bilkie
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 1 Comment
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
How is Leck "pinned in a corner?" Seems to me he's just a spammer. The script would be just as effective if it took the other side of the debate and "wore down" "pro-science" commentators by flooding them with a set of canned responses. Maybe someone should do just that; but let Leck and Anti-Leck get a room where the scripts can duke it out without filling Twitter with useless drivel. (Oops too late.)
flared0ne
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 328 Comments
EXCELLENT point. Except proponents on the other side of the argument (specifically the "under-informed" category he is doing battle with) don't HAVE an equivalent set of supporting citations they CAN use in a counter-barrage. THAT is the whole POINT.
I hypothesize that his intentions are "for the public good" -- except studies have shown that to "encourage" behavior is much more effective than "educating" and then EXPECTING good behavior. And his approach IS definitely aligned toward provoking more of a scientific method, providing peer-reviewed citations to clarify misunderstandings... Which goes over big (not) with the most typical rednecks.
I can see it now: "The Match of the Century"
between SmartA-Leck and The Anti-Leck-tual...I don't insist he's found a viable solution to anything -- but I'll bet on two things: a) we WILL see more automata like this and b) we will never be able to fully trust twitter stats ever again.
StupidPeasant
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 82 Comments
The quantity of opposing data may be inversely related to the quantity of funding for researching supporting data. If you seek to test by disproving a theory that has a great deal of political, philosophical and monetary potential for the types that run universities or political parties, you might not get the money you want. Is that possible?
nigel.leck
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 3 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
I would suggest that http://www.heartland.org is already doing that.
jpontin
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 50 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
I take bilkie's point - but as flaredone notes, there is a subtle difference between Leck's bot and a hypoethetical climate-change denialist bot that would assert there is no athropogenic change. Leck's bot generates references and citations to published research that refute denialist claims.
See: "...Tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun."
zdzisiekm
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 3 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
Neither the reporter, nor the programmer in question are scientists for starters. To label scientists critical of AGW mantra "proponents of anti-science nonsense" shows ignorance. Prof. Lindzen of MIT has authored 235 refereed papers and is an outstanding scientist, yet he remains critical of AGW and for a good reason: the hypothesis is not confirmed by observation. In science, you see, this invalidates the hypothesis.
jpontin
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 50 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
Prof. Lindzen does not, in fact, doubt that greenhouse gasses contribute to global warming, nor that the earth has warmed. Rather, he says we do not know a variety of things: the possible contributions of other causes and possible alleviations from other factors, and therefore the range of possible temperature changes. Yet, he is always the example cited by skeptics of someone who doubts anthropogenic global warming. Do you have other citations, please, of climate scientists who have basic reservations about the fact of global warming, and the contribution of greenhouse gasses?
cripdyke
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 50 Comments
Re: Mindless chatbot; Mindless reporter
@ eric who said:
To use the phrase anti-science nonsense is ad hominem and shows that the reporter lacks an open mind or science background and cares little for the truth, accuracy, or the facts.
=============================================O, g37 r33lz!!!11!1
u r proving urself unAbl 2 p0st heerz
-as unable as someone who thinks l337sp33k is simply a lack of typing skill.
Don't use "ad hominem" if you don't know what it means. Here's a hint: it's not latin for failing to take someone's argument seriously.
Calling anti-science nonsense, like "as soon as you put this cracker in your mouth it will magically transform into muscle-y goodness with the DNA of some guy who died a bunch of centuries ago, but still somehow taste and feel like a cracker," anti-science nonsense is not ad hominem to all christians.
[One clue that is true? No christians were actually named in the quote]And, y'know, there's scientific proof that crackers don't transform into meat into people's mouths - human meat, delicious maguro, steak tartare or any other kind.
Now that quote is anti-religion, and specifically anti-Christian-theology. But it's not ad hominem.
Just because your argument is shredded at the end of a debate doesn't mean someone insulted you. Just because your hypothesis is proved right doesn't make you better than anyone else.
Information can be true or false, persuasive or nonsense without saying anything at all about the quality of any person who has allowed such information to pass through that person's mind.
Now I've made an argument that your statement that the phrase is "ad hominem" is anti-latin nonsense.
That doesn't mean I'm smarter than you or that I can get more dates for a Saturday night or that I can run the 110-meter hurdles 7 times faster than you (or, frankly, *at all*!!!).
It means somewhere along the way, either you got a very incorrect impression of the meaning of ad hominem or that, in a moment of commenting, you got careless or confused with which latin phrase you meant to say. That's it.
If we can't say that 2+2=896 is anti-math nonsense without someone whinging that we are being insulting, then we can't develop vaccines or build cell-phones or...y'know, *program computers to create networks that allow people to comment on articles*.
I prefer the world we've got, thank you very much.
Shine
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 22 Comments
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
Hah clever. I was wondering when something like this would show up. I am sure it'll get some people to question their sources. It would be cool if they made one to respond to creationism, homeopathy etc.
jturnbull
- 1 Day Ago
- 11/03/2010
- 1 Comment
Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
Is this clever or a form of high tech bulling? My army of Chatbots will beat you down for ever expressing an opinion different than mine.
cripdyke
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 50 Comments
Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
Bullying?
I think you truly misunderstand what bullying is.
The answer to bad speech is not censorship, it is good speech.
This is a way to respond to Twit's who put *erroneous information into the public sphere*.
Everytime misinformation is put out there, CORRECT information is immediately appended to the discussion.
The truth is that the original poster is unlikely to be convinced...but this makes it much less likely that corners of the twitterverse can be filled with bad information *only*... which means that readers of a thread will get exposure to good info when bad info might otherwise make an open-minded person lean in the direction of believing something truly false.
The side effect is that if the original poster keeps posting that the bot will also keep posting. But this is not bullying anymore than the law against false commercial speech "My toothpaste will cause teeth you lost in an accident to regrow! Magically! For Reelz!" is disallowed by law. If you say that you can be fined or arrested or go to jail.
Is that bullying? That's *way* worse than having someone say, "Actually, there's a journal article that disproves your line of argument."
What if someone has a religious belief that they can magically regrow teeth & that if the toothpaste doesn't regrow someone's teeth, it's because that idjit didn't "believe on the Lord ToofFairree" hard enuf?
Now you're arresting someone for expressing their religious beliefs. Isn't that bullying? - according to your definition, it would pretty much have to be, wouldn't it?
Why don't we concede that bullying involves actual harmful actions - and actual intent to harm - whether psychologically harmful "You are a bad dresser and have an atavistically dense eyelash-per-linear-inch count!" or physically harmful, like putting tacks on someone's chair.
Imagine a person is leaving flyers all over a neighborhood that say, "there is no so thing as red/green colorblindness because there's no difference between red & green! I've lived my whole life & never saw any evidence that red & green are actually different colors!"
...Would it be bullying to come along 5 minutes later - late enough that they never saw you actually following them - and left flyers that said, "actually, there's plenty of difference that there is a difference between red light & green light. Here are some scientific articles that demonstrate how light has different wavelengths, opsins in the eyes have several different chemical compositions, different opsins are sensitive to different wavelengths & finally that in experiments some people are able to distinguish numbers in a field of red & green & some aren't & it appears the difference is that some see it all as one color, but most see the green dots separately from the red, which allows them to see the green dots form a number"?
This is the behavior we're talking about.
he's even scrupulously honest in telling everyone that it's "AI" doing it.
Your definition would make it immoral to simply state that someone saying 2+2=78 is wrong.
Tomato Addict
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 1 Comment
Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
Cripdyke's comments should be added into the chatbot's program for the next time someone misuses "ad hominem".
There was a recent XKCD comic on a related topic: http://xkcd.com/810/
Essentially, if people are not capable of making comments that can't be addressed by an automated system, they might deserve to be filtered out as "not helpful". Even Answers In Genesis - the source of many really bad arguments about evolution - has a list of arguments that should never be used.
danlgarmstrong
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 21 Comments
Re: Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
Interesting concept. I wonder if it could be used politically.
One *good* use might be a supercomputer scanning websites for *standard* jihadist propaganda, and replying with a quote the koran to rebut the poster.
Probably more examples where this could be put to *bad* use.
dcpalmer
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 1 Comment
Proponent of Anti-Science Chatbot
Has the author's chatbot encountered an anti-science crackpot chat-box? Did they get into some kind of 24-7 infinite loop argument? It would serve them right.
Come to think of it, such a chat-bot could someday replace Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow. That would be progress.
nigel.leck
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 3 Comments
Re: Proponent of Anti-Science Chatbot
The answer would be no as it records what it has already said and will not repeat it.
omnologos
- Today
- 11/03/2010
- 1 Comment
Re: Proponent of Anti-Science Chatbot
All you'll need is another chatbot clever enough to disguise repetitions, and there you'll get the 24/7 infinite chatloop.
=========
My impression of this whole affair is that the joke will ultimately be on the bot's creator. If you can be replaced by a mindless machine, what does that tell people about your reasoning skills?
If a bot can sustain your argument despite being devoid of critical thinking, what should one conclude about your own critical thinking?
Yes, there is a vast literature in favor of AGW, and one can go around fishing for whatever pro-AGW statement one could ever wish for. There is even a website cataloging everything that is supposed to be linked to AGW, and that means literally everything, and its opposite. What has that _quantity_ got to do with proper science, I will never understand.
Remember Einstein..."wieso hundert Autoren?"...
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense - Technology Review
Amazon Web Services Blog: What Can I Say? Another Amazon S3 Price Reduction!
What Can I Say? Another Amazon S3 Price Reduction!
We've reduced the prices for Amazon S3 storage again. As is always the case, the cost to store your existing data will go down. This is markedly different than buying a hard drive at a fixed cost per byte and is just one of the many advantages of using cloud-based storage. You can also count on Amazon S3 to deliver essentially infinite scalability, eleven nines of durability (99.999999999%), and your choice of four distinct geographic locations for data storage.
So, starting November 1, 2010, you'll see a reduction of up to19% in your overall storage charges on a monthly basis. We've created a new pricing tier at the 1 TB level, and we have removed the current 50 - 100 TB tier, thereby extending our volume discounts to more Amazon S3 customers.
The new prices for standard storage in the US Standard, EU - Ireland, and APAC - Singapore regions are as follows:
Old New First 1 TB $0.150 $0.140 per GB Next 49 TB $0.150 $0.125 per GB Next 50 TB $0.140 $0.110 per GB Next 400 TB $0.130 $0.110 per GB Next 500 TB $0.105 $0.095 per GB Next 4000 TB $0.080 per GB $0.080 per GB (no change) Over 5000 TB $0.055 per GB $0.055 per GB (no change) Reduced Redundancy storage will continue to be priced 1/3 lower than standard storage in all regions.
The full price list can be found on the Amazon S3 page. We'll continue to work relentlessly to drive our costs down so that we can pass the savings along to you!
We've got several more announcements related to S3 coming up in the near future, so stay tuned.
The S3 team is hiring Software Development Engineers, a Technical Program Manager, System Engineers, Administrators, and Product Managers. More information and instructions for applying can be found on the Amazon S3 Jobs page.
-- Jeff;
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Comments
Thank you so much. Any plans to lift 5 GB upload limit for individual files?
Posted by: Pavel | November 01, 2010 at 12:38 PM
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Implanted chip allows blind people to 'see'
Published on Science 2.0 (http://www.science20.com)
Implanted chip allows blind people to 'see'
By HankCreated Nov 3 2010 - 6:25pm
A man with an inherited form of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa, has been able to identify a coffee mug and various shades of gray using a retina implant, according to work published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.The Retina Implant AG is a sub-retinal chip placed in the central macular area behind the retina. Their chip works by converting light that enters the eye into electrical impulses which get fed into the optic nerve behind the eye. It requires an external battery which was connected to a cable that protruded from the skin behind the ear.
It's not ready for prime-time just yet and they're not the only ones working on a solution. The BBC notes that a rival chip by US-based Second Sight sits on top of the retina and has already been implanted in patients, but the Second Sight version requires the patient to be fitted with a camera fixed to a pair of glasses.Citation: Eberhart Zrenner, Karl Ulrich Bartz-Schmidt, Heval Benav, Dorothea Besch, Anna Bruckmann, Veit-Peter Gabel, Florian Gekeler, Udo Greppmaier, Alex Harscher, Steffen Kibbel, Johannes Koch, Akos Kusnyerik, Tobias Peters, Katarina Stingl, Helmut Sachs, Alfred Stett, Peter Szurman, Barbara Wilhelm, and Robert Wilke, 'Subretinal electronic chips allow blind patients to read letters and combine them to words', Proc. R. Soc. B published online before print November 3, 2010, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.1747 (free to read)
NASA - Decade
Decade
From 220 miles above Earth, the Expedition 25 crew aboard the International Space Station shot this night time image of the northern Gulf coast. Mobile Bay and the city of Mobile (top left, beneath one of the solar panels of a docked Russian Soyuz spacecraft), New Orleans and Houston are visible as the view moves southeastward. The Interstate Highway 20 cities of Jackson, Shreveport, Dallas and Fort Worth are also visible further inland. The view extends northward (left) to Little Rock and Oklahoma City.
Since Nov. 2, 2000, humans have lived and worked in space continuously on board the station.
Image Credit: NASA
Toughest body armor developed by scientists
Click the image to view the article. Note that the armor may be "printed" using 3D printer tech for faster production.
Study: Rural Teens Are More Likely to Misuse Prescription Drugs | TIME Healthland
Contrary to what the pill-popping kids on Gossip Girl would have you believe, city-dwelling teenagers are actually significantly less likely than their rural counterparts to use prescription drugs such as painkillers and tranquilizers for non-medical reasons.
Researchers from the University of Kentucky surveyed 17,872 teens aged 12 to 17; about half of the kids lived in an urban setting and 17% lived in rural environs. The study found that 10% of city teens said they had experimented with prescription drugs they didn't need, and 13% of rural kids reported doing the same — overall, that amounts to a 26% increase in risk in rural areas. (More on Time.com: Addiction Files: Recovering From Drug Addiction, Without Abstinence)
When it came to illicit drugs like cocaine and marijuana, however, geography mattered less: all teens reported experimenting with these drugs at about the same rate. The researchers suggest that kids' drug-taking behavior may more to do with access than attitude. Urban adolescents are more likely to be able to acquire a wide variety of drugs, but rural teens are more often forced to source what's around them — typically that means leftovers in Mom and Dad's medicine cabinet.
Still, the study finds that several factors may reduce the risk of drug experimentation in rural teens: kids in two-parent households were 32% less likely to misuse prescription drugs than kids in homes with only one parent, and teens who stayed in school, had better physical and mental health and did not use other substances were also less likely to experiment with prescription drugs. (More on Time.com: What Is Causing that Musty Smell in Recalled Pills?)
"Much research has shown that young teens with health and mental health problems that are not being treated adequately are likelier to turn to addictive substances, that prescription drugs are there for the taking in medicine cabinets across the country, and that parents are the greatest influence — for better or worse — in whether a young person turns to these drugs," Susan Foster of Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse told CNN. "Early intervention is key though, since in most cases addiction has its origin in the teen years."
The new study was published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
More on Time.com:
Federal agency moves to close Kentucky mine
Federal agency moves to close Kentucky mine
By the CNN Wire StaffSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Mining agency seeks injunction over failure "to follow basic safety rules"
- It wants to close Kentucky mine until corrections are made
- Company says it does not believe the mine is unsafe
- Massey Energy owns mine where 29 miners died in April
(CNN) -- The federal government, in an action that it says is the first of its kind, filed a lawsuit Wednesday to close a Kentucky coal mine until its owner can make it safe for workers.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration, filing in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, seeks a preliminary injunction against the Freedom Energy Mining Co. mine No. 1 in Pike County. The mine is owned by Massey Energy Co.
"Freedom Energy has demonstrated time and again that is cannot be trusted to follow basic safety rules when an MSHA inspector is not at the mine," Joseph A. Main, assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, said in a statement. "If the court does not step in, somebody may be seriously injured or die."
Massey Energy also owns a coal mine in West Virginia where 29 miners died in an explosion April 5, the industry's worst disaster in 40 years. The mine had a spotty safety record before the explosion, with three deaths reported in the past 12 years.
Massey Energy has faced harsh criticism since the disaster.
The federal mine agency said Massey has failed to safeguard the Kentucky mine for proper coal dust levels, roof protection, ventilation and maintenance of electrical equipment.
Inspectors, during inspections from 2008 to 2010, issued 1,952 citations and 81 orders to Freedom Energy.
The company said Wednesday that it may idle the Kentucky operation until it meets current federal standards.
"Massey does not believe the mine is unsafe," it said in a statement. Freedom Mine No. 1 is an "older mine with extensive underground workings," the Richmond, Virginia-based company said.
"The operation has struggled to comply with newer MSHA standards," Massey said, adding that Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Don Blankenship recently visited the mine for a safety review. "During the safety stand-down, all underground Massey operations .... gave their miners additional safety training, and took steps to identify and correct mine hazards."
According to the MSHA, seven miners have been injured as a result of falling roofs in the past two years. Six major roof falls have occured there since August 11, the agency said.
The request for a preliminary injunction said the mine should stay closed until conditions are improved. Freedom must establish a health and safety management program, the agency said.
"Massey does not believe the mine is unsafe,..." Its just how we roll...
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Why conservatives should favor legalizing marijuana
Why conservatives should favor legalizing marijuana
By Evan Wood, Special to CNNSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Evan Wood: Conservatives concerned by spending ignore cost of failed war on drugs
- $2.5 trillion spent on war on drugs; crime, violence, drug use are the result, he says
- Taxation on marijuana could generate $1.4 billion a year in tax revenue, writes Wood
- Americans more likely to report marijuana use than people in Netherlands, he says, where it's legal
Editor's note: Evan Wood is the founder of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy; the director of the Urban Health Program at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS; and associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia.
(CNN) -- If there is one clear emotion emerging before November's U.S. congressional elections, it is that citizens across the political spectrum are worried about government spending and a perceived lack of government accountability regarding where tax dollars are spent.
Oddly, the government's approach to the illegal drug problem -- which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $2.5 trillion since former President Richard Nixon first declared America's "war on drugs" -- has been largely immune from this concern.
CNN iReport: You tell us whether it's time to legalize pot
One dramatic exception is California, where Proposition 19, which proposes to "regulate, control and tax cannabis," will be on the statewide ballot on November 2. In California alone, the illegal market for cannabis, or marijuana, has been estimated to be worth about $14 billion per year, and the legalization initiative aims to redirect the flow of these massive profits from violent drug cartels toward government coffers.
Although the full financial impact of legalization cannot be known, cannabis law enforcement in California is estimated to cost taxpayers anywhere between $200 million and $1.9 billion each year, whereas the State Board of Equalization has estimated that taxation could generate $1.4 billion a year in new tax revenue.
As the vote approaches, a clear division in political support for Proposition 19 has emerged, with a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll showing that 54 percent of Democrats support legalization as Republican support sits at 33 percent. This division is curious, given that cannabis prohibition takes its biggest toll on the traditional conservative wish list of fiscal discipline, low crime rates and strong families.
In fact, as detailed in a report published this month by my organization, the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, research funded by none other than the U.S. government clearly demonstrates the failure of marijuna prohibition. For instance, government reports demonstrate that even as federal funding for anti-drug efforts has increased from $1.5 billion in 1981 to more than $20 billion today, surveillance systems show that marijuana's estimated potency has increased by 145 percent and its price has declined by 58 percent since 1990.
At a 1991 lecture titled "The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise," conservative economist Milton Friedman noted: "There are some general features of a socialist enterprise, whether it's the post office, schools or the war on drugs. The enterprise is inefficient, expensive, very advantageous to a small group of people and harmful to a lot of people."
Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his achievements in the fields of "consumption analysis," had strong views about the certain failure of the war on drugs, which are shared by most economists who stress that costly efforts to remove the drug supply by building prisons and locking up drug dealers have the perverse effect of making it much more profitable for new drug dealers to get into the market.
This explains why surveillance systems funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health concluded that over the last 30 years, cannabis has remained "almost universally available to American 12th-graders," with between 80 percent and 90 percent saying the drug is "very easy" or "fairly easy" to obtain.
Friedman was also vocal about the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, including the enrichment of organized crime and drug market violence. As he wrote in The New York Times: "The young are not dissuaded by the bullets that fly so freely in disputes between competing drug dealers -- bullets that fly only because dealing drugs is illegal. Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one."
In this context, consider that about 28,000 people have died in drug market violence in Mexico since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared a war on drugs in that country, and that the U.S. government once estimated that Mexican drug trafficking organizations derive 60 percent of their revenue from cannabis exports to the United States.
The war on drugs has also had a devastating impact on families. Primarily as a result of drug law enforcement, one in nine African-American males in the 25-to-29 age group is incarcerated on any given day in the U.S., despite statistics that show ethnic minorities consume illicit drugs at rates comparable to those of other ethnic groups in the U.S.
In California, where the government spends more on prisons than post-secondary education, a recent report estimated that the cannabis possession arrest rate for African-Americans in Los Angeles County is more than 300 percent higher than that for whites. This disparity has emerged despite data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which has consistently shown that young African-Americans are less likely to use cannabis than whites.
In addition to both the racial and budgetary implications of this failed experiment, sociologists and criminologists are decrying the intergenerational effects of these policies on low-income families, as children left behind by incarcerated parents turn to gangs and the cycle continues.
One explanation for the persistently high support for cannabis prohibition is the concern that ending the war on cannabis will result in increased use. Interestingly, comparisons between the U.S. and the Netherlands, where cannabis is de facto legalized, indicate that despite the U.S.'s record rates of anti-drug enforcement expenditures, 42 percent of U.S. adults report that they have used cannabis, which is more than twice as high as that observed in the Netherlands, where only 20 percent report a history of cannabis use.
While some U.S. economists predict that rates of cannabis use could increase in California under legalization, they have generally ignored the potential benefits of the broad range of strict regulatory tools -- including licensing systems for vendors, purchasing controls and sales restrictions -- that have all proved effective at reducing rates of use and related harms of tobacco and alcohol.
As described earlier this month in an article published in the influential British Medical Journal, Robin Room stressed the need for an urgent consideration of the benefits of cannabis regulatory systems, especially given that successful government lobbying by the tobacco and alcohol industries have slowly eroded or eliminated many of these effective regulatory mechanisms in the U.S.
As Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel." Recent estimates suggest that national regulation of cannabis in the United States would result in savings of more than $44 billion a year on enforcement expenditures alone.
Conservatives should look at the ongoing legacy of the failed war on drugs, in light of their traditional commitment to stronger families, economies and societies, and reconsider supporting drug policies that only serve to weaken American society.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Evan Wood.
BBC News - Virus breakthrough raises hope over ending common cold
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Monday, November 01, 2010
5 Reasons Democrats Could Beat the Polls and Hold the House - NYTimes.com
— Updated: 8:20 pm -->5 Reasons Democrats Could Beat the Polls and Hold the House
By NATE SILVERIt was hard to pinpoint exactly when in the night things started to go wrong. But at some point, a trash can was knocked over in John Boehner’s office in the Rayburn House Office Building. A half-hour later on the other side of town, a hole was punched in the wall at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters.
Republicans didn’t really have much reason to be upset. They were going to pick up somewhere between 29 and 34 House seats from Democrats, pending the outcome of a recount or two and the receipt of mail ballots in some Western states. They gained five Senate seats from Democrats, and won the governorships in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, among many other states. It had been a wave election, indeed — but a wave about on the magnitude of 2006, rather than 1994.
For most of the evening, Republicans had still seemed quite likely to pick up the House, perhaps by some margin. Exit polls that (erroneously, it turned out) suggested a nine-point generic ballot win for the party colored the early coverage. So, when Baron Hill, the vulnerable Democrat in Indiana’s 9th district, held onto win his seat by a surprisingly robust 9-point margin, it was mostly ignored. Instead, coverage was focused on the dozen or so Democratic incumbents who lost their races early in the evening — some of them expectedly so (like Alan Grayson and John M. Spratt Jr.), but others of which (like Gerry Connolly of Virginia and Chellie Pingree of Maine) were more surprising.
In states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, however, Democrats held up surprisingly well. Mary Jo Kilroy, who had been all but written off, held her seat in Columbus, as did a trio of Democrats, Christopher Carney, Bryan Lentz and Patrick J. Murphy, in Pennsylvania. Ted Strickland won the gubernatorial race in Ohio, and Joe Manchin III was elected to the Senate in neighboring West Virginia (by double digits, in fact). Joe Sestak appeared to have upset Pat Toomey in the Senate race Pennsylvania, although the Associated Press had yet to call the race because of alleged irregularities in Philadelphia.
New York was another problematic state for Republicans: their gubernatorial nominee, Carl P. Paladino, was defeated by almost 40 points, and of the six or seven House seats they had hoped to win there, they had instead picked up just one, while another — the upstate 20th district — remained too close to call.
Still, the gains came steadily, if not quite steadily enough. Michael Bennet lost his Senate race in Colorado — taking Representatives John Salazar and Betsy Markey with him — even as more vulnerable-seeming Democrats, like Alexi Giannoulias of Illinois and Harry Reid of Nevada, held on. The Dakota Democrats, Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin of South Dakota, were both defeated, converting 148,000 square miles of territory from blue to red.
But Republican gains not only stalled out but reversed themselves by the time that the West Coast began to report its results. Not only had vulnerable Democrats like Jim Costa and Kurt Schrader held on, but Democrats had defeated two Republican incumbents — Dan Lungren of the California 3rd district and Dave Reichert of the Washington 8th — while also narrowly winning the Arizona 3rd district, where the G.O.P. nominee Ben Quayle had proven too difficult a sell. Overall on the night, Democrats won 8 seats formerly held by Republicans, about twice what most analysts had expected.
The Senate race in Alaska, meanwhile, as some had feared, appeared headed toward a prolonged legal battle concerning Lisa Murkowski’s write-in votes. But the plaintiff would Scott McAdams, a Democrat, and not Joe Miller, a Republican.
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A scenario like this one is possible tomorrow — not particularly likely, but possible, just as a 77-seat Republican gain is possible. It’s probably a somewhat greater possibility than people realize. Here are five reasons Democrats could outperform their polls and beat consensus expectations.
1. The cellphone effect. This one is pretty simple, really: a lot of American adults (now about one-quarter of them) have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don’t call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied.
There is also some indirect evidence for the cellphone effect. What follows is a list of each firm’s final generic ballot poll, arranged from the best result for Democrats to the worst. You can see that there is a rather strong relationship between whether a company included cellphones in its sample or not and the sort of result they showed. The polls that were conducted without cellphones showed Republicans ahead by an average of 9.3 points; those with them showed a smaller, 4.8-point advantage. That’s a difference of 4 or 5 points (and one which is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence threshold), which is about of the same magnitude that Pew identified.
Now, this probably does not mean that Democrats are bound to overperform their polls by four or five points. A fair number of polls do include cellphones, so at best it might be half that. And the effects probably aren’t so uniform from company to company. Still, this is a theory that has a fair amount of evidence behind it.
2. The ‘robopoll’ effect. Unlike in past years, there are significant differences between the results shown by automated surveys and those which use live human interviewers — the ‘robopolls’ being 3 or 4 points more favorable to Republicans over all, although the effects vary a lot from firm to firm.
Automated surveys, while they have performed fairly well in the past (although in the past, importantly, they did not show these systematic differences from regular surveys), have a number of potential problems that essentially boil down to extremely low response rates, which could potentially bias the samples. For instance, it may be that only adults who are extremely engaged by politics (who are more likely to be Republican, especially this year) bother to respond to them.
Most automated surveys also do not call cellphones — although that’s the bad news for Democrats in some sense: the ‘robopoll’ effect, if there is one, may have a lot of overlap with the cellphone effect, or they may even be one and the same thing.
3. Some likely voter models, particularly Gallup’s, may “crowd out” Democratic voters. Gallup’s traditional likely voter model has consistently shown terrible results for Democrats this year, having them down by around 15 points on the generic ballot, which could translate into a loss of 70 to 80 House seats, or maybe even more. The Gallup poll and the Gallup poll alone is probably responsible for much of the sense of impending doom that Democrats feel and the (premature for at least 24 more hours) sense of triumphalism that Republicans are experiencing.
There is quite a bit of room to critique the poll, however. The basic potential issue is that Gallup uses fixed turnout targets. For instance, they estimate that 40 percent of the electorate will vote, and then let their respondents fight it out to see who the 40 percent most likely to vote are.
So, for instance, if you have a lot of Democrats whose likelihood of voting is a 9 on a 10-point scale — people who might ordinarily be quite likely to vote — they’ll be excluded from Gallup’s likely voter sample if too many slots are occupied by perfect 10’s (who in this cycle, no doubt, tend to be Republicans). This is why, when Gallup digs just a little bit deeper into its voter universe — for instance, with its “higher turnout” model, which assumes that turnout is 50 percent rather than 40 percent — its results quickly shift from being something of an outlier to being fairly consistent with the other generic ballot polls. There are a lot of Democratic 9’s just beneath the surface of those Republican 10’s.
I don’t know that this is very realistic portrayal of how voting takes place in the real world. Except, I suppose, in the case of extremely long lines at the polling place, voters are not competing with one another to vote in any real way: the only-somewhat-enthusiastic Democrat is not denied her vote because the Republican in line ahead of her is even more psyched up.
And Gallup’s model can produce some strange effects. Robert Erikson of Columbia University has found, for instance, that the preferences of “unlikely voters” in their sample move in an opposite direction from those of its likely voters, which does not seem sound.
The counterargument would be that midterm election turnout has indeed been extremely stable at about 40 percent of the population, so Gallup is on solid footing in assuming that it will be somewhere in that range again.
But there is some evidence that turnout might be unusually high in this election: there is no doubt that Republican engagement is likely to be extraordinary, but Democratic involvement, also, in fact appears to be about average or slightly above.
Most polls will also have some bias in who they reach and who they don’t. Specifically, they’ll have trouble reaching people who are less likely to vote, who usually won’t have much interest in completing a political survey either. Perhaps it’s the case that 40 percent of the general American population will vote tomorrow — but, because of this response bias, perhaps the rate would instead be something like 60 percent of the adults that Gallup actually got on the phone.
Unless you have a really good idea of exactly what effect this response bias might have (and it would be hard to have a really good idea, because this type of bias is probably increasing as response rates to surveys decrease), using fixed as opposed to fluid turnout targets can be dangerous.
Gallup gets a lot of deference, because it is one of the best polling organizations in the world, and because its likely voter model has done very, very well in predicting the outcome of past midterm elections.
The fact is, though, if you took the various likely voter models, and put them in a lineup without their brand names attached, Gallup’s is probably not the one you’d pick out of that lineup as having the most robust design. And while Gallup’s likely voter model has done very, very well in Congressional elections in midterm years, it has been only about average in Congressional elections in Presidential years, and in other types of elections.
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So the rose-colored glasses scenario for Democrats looks something like this: throw out the generic ballot polls that don’t include cellphones. And then throw out Gallup, because there is something weird about the way its likely voter model is behaving this cycle.
The average of the nine remaining generic ballot polls in the table above is a Republican advantage of 3.9 points.
Democrats could possibly hold the House with a number like that one, although they’d be underdogs to do so. Most likely, they’d need another point or two. Where could they get it?
4. Democrats probably have better turnout operations. This is always what a party says when it’s about to lose an election: our amazing turnout operation will save us!
Still, Democrats probably do have an edge in this department with the voter lists and infrastructure they built up during Barack Obama’s campaign, and which have been perpetuated to some extent by Organizing For America. John McCain, by contrast, eschewed his ground game, devoting almost all of his money to advertising.
Now, Republicans may not need a terrific turnout operation — their voters are charged up enough, and probably don’t need a lot of glossy fliers and door-knocks.
Nevertheless, Democrats might be able to coax an extra percentage point or two of their vote to the polls, especially in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania where they’ve invested a ton of resources over the years. And in the event where Democratic turnout equaled that of Republicans (it won’t; the point is they might be able to get it a bit closer), they would probably hold the House, even with most independents breaking against them.
5. The consensus view of Democratic doom is not on such sound footing as it seems. When a party is likely to sustain fairly significant losses in a midterm election — and Democrats are going to sustain fairly significant losses tomorrow — there are a lot of things you might expect to see.
First, you would expect to see that the party’s generic ballot polls were bad. Some of them might be really bad. A handful of them might be not-quite-as-bad-as-the-others, and might provide some hope to the faithful. Most of them would be pretty bad, though.
Second, that party would get lots of bad results in polls of individual House districts.
Third, that party’s problems are going to manifest themselves among most, and possibly virtually all, demographic groups. So you can write a story about how the party is struggling among women. And among men. And young voters. And old voters. And rich voters. And working-class voters. And Hispanics. And whites.
Fourth, that party’s numbers are going to be especially poor among independent voters. Except in places where party identification is extremely lopsided, the party which is losing in an election — and Democrats are losing this election — will usually be losing by a larger lead among independents. That’s just the way the math works.
Okay, let’s stop there. So, what’s my point?
Each of the indicators that I mentioned above are direct manifestations of polling data. The message in the polls this year is unambiguous: bad things are going to happen to Democrats. The polls are probably going to be right.
It seems like the evidence that Republicans will win the House is very rich, redundant, robust. Look at this generic ballot poll. Look at this other generic ballot poll! Look at how badly Democrats are doing among whites. Look at how they’re doing among independents!
But all of these indicators are, in fact, highly correlated with one another. They’re all rooted in the polling, and they’re all dependent on the polling basically being accurate. There’s not much diversity at all: it’s just different manifestations of the same thing.
Our Congressional forecasting models are based on an intensive study of six political cycles: 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008. In five of those six years, the polls were quite good — they missed a few races, but were very strong overall.
In another year, however –1998 — they were quite poor. Democrats overperformed their polls by about four points in a great number of races around the country. What was supposed to be an echo to the Republican boom year of 1994 basically flopped, eventually costing Newt Gingirch his job as majority leader.
Consensus expectations also considerably underestimated the Republican wave year of 1994, although a few indicators (like Gallup’s generic ballot poll) got it about right.
If we wanted to be generous to Democrats (which is, of course, the purpose of this article), we could say that the consensus basically failed in two out of the last four midterm elections. Of course, that the consensus view could fail does not mean that it will fail in the Democrats’ direction: instead Republican gains could be much larger than expected.
But in my view, it doesn’t make sense to say, for instance — and a lot of people are saying things like this — that Republicans should gain between 50 and 60 seats, and the number could be higher, but it shouldn’t be lower. If that’s what you think, you should project their gains to between 60 and 70 seats (or whatever) instead.
The thing is, the upside case for Republicans is pretty easy to see. Most of the news in this election, after all, is favorable to them. You see the Gallup generic ballot number, you see incumbents like Raul M. Grijalva and Jim Obertstar in trouble, you see the president’s approval rating at 44 percent, you see the big crowds at Tea Party rallies, you see Scott Brown winning in Massachusetts, and it’s easy to connect the dots. It’s an easy case to make, and it’s a pretty good one.
The case that Democrats could do better than expected — not well, by any means, merely better than expected — rests a little more in the realm of what artists call negative space: not what there is, but in what there isn’t. There aren’t 50, or even more than about 25, districts in which Republican candidates are unambiguous favorites. There isn’t agreement among pollsters about how the enthusiasm gap is liable to manifest itself. There isn’t any one poll or one forecasting method that is clairvoyant, or which that hasn’t made some pretty significant errors in the past.
Instead, the case for Democrats is basically: yes, the news is bad, it just isn’t exactly as bad as you think, or at least we can’t be sure that it is. This isn’t a sexy argument to make.
Nor, probably, will it turn out to be the correct one; more likely than not, Republicans will indeed win the House, and will do so by a significant margin. But just as Republicans could beat the consensus, Democrats could too, and nobody should be particularly shocked if they do.
Open Society Foundations » The War on Voters
Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, and this year’s efforts to disfranchise voters have been unsettling in their coordination and innovation. Reports have surfaced across the nation of groups falsely alleging massive voter fraud. Some are even organizing surveillance teams to monitor polling places and even pursue buses of voters. The real reason for such shadowing is almost certainly to intimidate and deter voters.
Surveillance by Camera and Video
Organizers from the Tea Party and other groups in St. Paul, Minnesota, announced last week that they were offering a $500 reward to vigilantes for turning in people who are successfully prosecuted for voter fraud. The coalition is also organizing “surveillance squads” to photograph and videotape (read: intimidate) people trying to exercise their Constitutional right to vote. Tea Party organizers in Harris County, Texas, are using similar tactics even while conceding they violate local law. In Wake County, North Carolina, voters have complained [1] that observers are “[standing] behind the registration table (where they're not allowed) and tak[ing] pictures of the license plates of voters using curbside voting (also not allowed).” Tea Party [2] members have also begun challenging voter registration applications and announced plans to question individual voters at the polls whom they suspect of being ineligible.
Surveillance by Smartphone
An organization called the American Majority has developed a smartphone application for tracking incidents of so-called voter fraud. [3]When a user launches the application, the phone’s GPS sends a report to a tracking database. Users are encouraged to use the phone’s camera, which the app automatically opens, to collect photographic evidence of the “fraud,” which is clearly an intimidating act and a violation of voters’ privacy.
Trickery to Dilute the Black Vote
In Harris County, Texas, a flyer is being circulated in Black neighborhoods purporting to be from the black Democratic Trust of Texas. The flyer falsely claims that "when you vote straight ticket Democrat, it is actually voting for Republicans and your vote doesn't count" and that a vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White is a vote for the entire Democratic ticket. The flyer is clearly illegal and designed through trickery to deprive black voters of the right to vote.
Intimidation of Minority Voters
In Texas, a citizens group called the King Street Patriots has launched an initiative called True the Vote [4] that has already come under fire for intimidating poll watching practices at early voting sites in predominately black and Latino precincts. Poll watchers are alleged to have followed voters after they checked in, hovered over voters as they cast ballots, looked over voters’ shoulders to see who they voted for, and provided misinformation about voting procedures.
Harassing Latino Voters
A group affiliated with the American Majority, Minnesota Majority, sued Minnesota officials in federal court last week for not allowing Minnesota Majority members to wear "I.D. me" buttons at the polls. The group has made unfounded charges that non citizens have been voting. Minnesota does not require ID at the polls with a couple of exceptions. Not to be outdone by Minnesota actions, last week a mass email [5] sent in the name of Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio urged individuals to join an army of “VOTER FRAUD PREVENTION VOLUNTEERS to STOP ILLEGALS FROM STEALING THE ELECTION!” (capitalization theirs). Both tactics are clearly designed to motivate people to go out and harass minority voters.
Suspicious Fire
In late September, a suspicious fire destroyed nearly all of Harris County’s 10,000 electronic voting machines. [6] Harris County encompasses Houston, the third largest city in the nation. Open Society Foundations grantee Advancement Project [7] is working to mitigate the situation and protect minority voters.
Every American has the right to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Any form of discrimination, intimidation or challenge to voters without adequate basis is illegal and improper. There is just too much at stake for people to be denied their right to choose their leaders.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
It's morning in India
Mon, Nov 01, 2010 | Updated 12.45AM IST