Jack

There was a lot of discussion Monday about the rebuttal by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) to FiveThirtyEight’s latest Senate forecast. That forecast identified the Republicans as more likely than not to take over the Senate. But the GOP’s advantage is slim, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in both the individual races and the overall forecast.

The DSCC’s memo pointed to past forecasts by FiveThirtyEight that were off the mark. It’s a fun story for news outlets, but public statements by partisan groups won’t usually say anything that you didn’t already know.

Indeed, it’s not news that forecasts are sometimes wrong — as our Senate forecasts were in Montana and North Dakota in 2012. (Democrats won both races when Republicans were favored in our model.) Furthermore, the margin of error is larger at earlier stages of the campaign.

That’s why our forecasts are expressed in terms of probabilities. For example, our NCAA tournament model gave Mercer just a 7 percent chance of defeating Duke on Friday. Mercer won. Upsets are supposed to happen sometimes. Specifically, out of all forecasts in which we say the underdog has a 7 percent chance of prevailing, the underdog is supposed to win about seven times out of 100 over the long run — no more and no less. This property is called calibration, and it’s one of the best ways to assess probabilistic forecasts. (We’ll be conducting a test of the historical calibration of our NCAA forecasts this week.)

Nor is it news when party officials claim that the errors are all in their direction. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republicans were convinced that Mitt Romney would significantly outperform the polling averages. In fact, the polls weren’t all that great in 2012. But the polls were biased (I use the term “bias” strictly in a statistical sense) in favor of Romney, rather than against him. For instance, President Obama won Colorado by 5.4 percentage points as compared with a RealClearPolitics polling average that showed him ahead by 1.5 points; he won Virginia by 3.9 points as compared with a RealClearPolitics polling average of 0.3 points.

Sometimes, as in North Dakota in 2012, party officials are right and public polls are wrong. But more often, it’s the other way around, such as when the Romney campaign’s internal polls were badly biased toward its candidate, or when Democratic polls claimed the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall in June 2012 was a toss-up. (Instead, Scott Walker, the Republican governor, was retained by 7 percentage points — almost exactly what the public polls predicted.) On average, partisan polls released to the public express a 6-point bias in favor of their candidate.

Our forecasts could be wrong in November. In fact, they probably will be wrong — it’s unlikely that Republicans will win exactly six seats. But we think it’s equally likely that our forecast will be biased in either direction. If Democrats retain just one more seat, they’ll hold the Senate. Or Republican gains could grow to seven seats, or quite a bit more.

And here’s the least surprising news: Political campaigns are hypocritical. At the same time the DSCC is criticizing our forecasts publicly, it’s sending out email pitches that cite Nate Silver’s “shocking, scary” forecasts to compel Democrats into donating.

You’d do well to shut out the noise the next time the DSCC writes a polling memo.

Or so it seems from one study:

How do the corvids stack up against us? “Crows and ravens performed comparably to primates and children tested in [similar] tasks,” Hillemann said. But one difference between the avian brain and the primate brain may be the way that they consider quality versus quantity. Birds usually aren’t willing to wait in order to increase the amount of food, only to optimize the quality of their reward. “This may be unique to birds,” she adds, “because carrying a large amount of food can be disadvantageous in flight.” On the other hand, a human child can fit two marshmallows in his mouth just as easily as one. While more research is needed, this lends support to the notion that this sort of impulse control is a case of convergent evolution, having evolved independently in the avian lineage and in our primate lineage.

I found the entire post of interest.

Excellent piece in the Washington Post on the FDA and sunscreen:

…American beachgoers will have to make do with sunscreens that dermatologists and cancer-research groups say are less effective and have changed little over the past decade.

That’s because applications for the newer sunscreen ingredients have languished for years in the bureaucracy of the Food and Drug Administration, which must approve the products before they reach consumers.

…The agency has not expanded its list of approved sunscreen ingredients since 1999. Eight ingredient applications are pending, some dating to 2003. Many of the ingredients are designed to provide broader protection from certain types of UV rays and were approved years ago in Europe, Asia, South America and elsewhere.

If you want to understand how dysfunctional regulation has become ponder this sentence:

“This is a very intractable problem. I think, if possible, we are more frustrated than the manufacturers and you all are about this situation,”

Who said it? Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research! Or how about this:

Eleven months ago, in a hearing on Capitol Hill, FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities.”

If this is high priority what happens to all the “low priority” drugs and medical devices?

The whole piece in the Washington Post is very good, read it all. I first wrote about this issue last year.

Addendum: See FDAReview.org for more on the FDA regulatory process and its reform.

The bottom line seems to be this:

By using cutting-edge motion-capture technology, we have been able to precisely break down and analyse specific motion patterns in male dancing that seem to influence women’s perceptions of dance quality. We find that the variability and amplitude of movements in the central body regions (head, neck and trunk) and speed of the right knee movements are especially important in signalling dance quality. A ‘good’ dancer thus displays larger and more variable movements in relation to bending and twisting movements of their head/neck and torso, and faster bending and twisting movements of their right knee. As 80 per cent of individuals are right-footed, greater movements of the right knee in comparison with the left are perhaps to be expected. In comparative research, there is extensive literature on the signalling capacities of movement…Researchers have suggested that females prefer vigorous and skilled males; such cues are derived from male motor performance that provides a signal of his physical condition.

 Time Warner Cable customers looking to lower their bills would be able to hire “professional negotiators,” to squeeze discounts out of the cable provider under a trial service being offered by Yipit, a New York-based daily deals startup.

Yipit sent out an email on Thursday to a small group of people on its distribution list directing them to a link to submit their Time Warner Cable account information. Then Yipit said it would have employees who are “professional negotiators” try to haggle for better rates with the cable company.

The service is being tested as consumers are being hit with cable bills rising faster than the rate of inflation and as cable companies find it harder to hold onto customers who are defecting to newer entrants such as Verizon FiOS.

Yipit was founded in 2009 and offers an email newsletter roundup of top daily deals from websites such as Groupon and Gilt Groupe.

A representative from Yipit verified the authenticity of the offer but declined to comment further. A Time Warner Cable spokeswoman said “there’s no need for our customers to pay someone to call us on their behalf.”

The website cites potential savings of $564 per year. Yipit will not charge customers if it is unable to extract better rates but customers do have to pay a 20 percent cut of savings if it succeeds, according to the offer on its website.

There is more here, via the excellent Daniel Lippman.

Some people think of tobacco as a drug, whereas others think of it as a therapy — or both. But for the most part, it's hard to find people who think of the tobacco plant in terms of its medical applications. Qiang Chen, an infectious disease researcher at Arizona State University, is one such person. His team of scientists conducted an experiment, published today in PLOS ONE, that demonstrates how a drug produced in tobacco plants can be used to prevent death in mice infected with a lethal dose of West Nile virus. The study represents an important first step in the development of a treatment for the mosquito-borne disease that has killed 400 people in the US within the last two years.

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Slamming the snooze button over and over again is pretty much the crummiest, least restful way to kick off your morning, so consider this a public service announcement: A light-up alarm completely changed my life, and I think it can change yours, too.

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You probably don't realize it, but hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods pass through airports every day inside of passengers' baggage. Well, a ring of baggage handlers at LAX certainly realized it. Police say they've been stealing thousands of dollars worth of goods right out of people's suitcases for months.

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Even the best Eagle Scout prefers to navigate during the day. The Vikings, apparently, would have laughed at such a preference—according to new research, the North Atlantic seafarers' sun compass was so advanced it even worked after dark, thanks to clever engineering and mystical crystals.

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A thousand feet off the ground, the wind blows brisk and uninterrupted. But how do you build such a tall, thin beam to support a turbine's blades? You don't—you float the generator in a giant helium balloon. The world's first floating commercial wind turbine will soon be hovering over Fairbanks, Alaska.

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Oh look, a Skyrim-like dungeon in the wilderness and... I can't open it.

The Elder Scrolls games are lonely. That's their greatest strength. They're about wandering through huge worlds, picking flowers or hunting wolves or seeking out unexplored caves. They're games about freedom, which they grant to the player by pushing the biggest concerns into the background. When everything is relatively unimportant, anything can be important. So why not play Daggerfall as a local hero who picks a tiny village and does every quest there until all the cardboard cutout townspeople virtually sing your name every time you talk to them? Why not spend your time in Skyrim collecting every cheese wheel in the game, dumping them into your new house's living room? The moments of greatness in the series occur when that freedom meets the game systems in ridiculous or fantastic fashion, like cresting a hill and watching a giant kick a poacher a hundred yards or desperately fleeing from a lich king into the path of a rampaging dragon and then falling down the mountain as the two fight one another.

In contrast, massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) have, since the days of Everquest and especially World Of Warcraft, been about control. After Ultima Online's early attempts at granting freedom to players ran into both technical and sociological problems, the genre achieved success by controlling the player experience and granting potential rewards as authored by the game developers. This certainly beats the brutal nightmare that UO's ridiculous player-versus-player system quickly became, and it's not like the genre can't include moments of beauty and ridiculousness. They just happen to occur in spite of the game's controlling systems, not in harmony with them.

For this reason, The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO) always deserved skepticism. Was there any good reason to expect that the joys of the Elder Scrolls games would translate to a massively multiplayer format? I would love to be able to tell you that TESO manages to bridge those worlds of freedom and control, combining the best of both into a beautiful paradox. Unfortunately, after playing this past weekend's semi-open beta while TESO prepares for launch in just a couple of weeks, I found that the opposite was true: it was the worst of both worlds. TESO takes the most predictable path, putting a superficial coating of The Elder Scrolls over a fairly conventional MMORPG.

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Investigators think the missing Malaysia Airlines 777 was seized by someone who knew how to fly it and then flown toward (or to) an as-yet-unknown destination as much as 2,000 miles from its last known position.

This range that could have taken the plane into central Asia or, via a southern route, far out over the Indian Ocean. (See red arcs at right)

It's certainly possible — some people believe probable — that the jet crashed in deep water. US investigators currently seem to believe this.

But why would anyone want to meticulously plan and execute the theft of a plane and then fly it 7 hours only to crash it in the ocean?

Unless you wanted to try to make the plane or its passengers or its cargo disappear forever (possible, but why?), it seems unlikely that you would go to this trouble. If you just wanted to kill everyone, you could crash anywhere, anytime. And the sooner you crashed, the better, because the less likely that someone on board would discover you and foil your plot.

That the person or people who took control of the Malaysia jet flew the plane for at least 7 hours after they switched the transponder off, therefore, would seem to raise a very real possibility that they did not want to crash the plane, but, instead, wanted to fly it somewhere.

Where? 

Over the weekend, we published a map created by WNYC that shows all the runways within the plane's range that could handle a jet of this size. It's possible that the jet was headed for one of these or another makeshift runway created for the purpose of this one landing (and, possibly, another takeoff).

Some, including Jeff Wise of Slate, have speculated that the plane's destination was Central Asia — somewhere in China, perhaps, or Pakistan. Today, a theory was floated that the plane slipped through land-based radar by shadowing another jet. More likely, perhaps, the radar operators just ignored its blip, the same way the Malaysian radar operators did.

But why steal a plane a fly it somewhere? And what of the passengers and crew?

Some obvious reasons to steal a plane would be to:

1) Sell the plane or its parts

2) Transport someone or something somewhere (on this trip or another)

3) Procure a 777 to use later 

If the goal was to sell the plane or its parts, good luck. This plane and its parts will now be the hardest plane and parts to fence on the planet.

If the goal was to transport someone or something, stealing a full commercial airliner in mid-air seems a complicated way to do it. If mere transportation was the goal, moreover, the job would probably be complete by now, and we might have already gotten some indication of what happened to the plane and its crew.

If the goal was to use the passengers as hostages to demand something, it also seems likely that we would have heard news by now. More than week has gone by.

That leaves the third option — procuring a 777 to use later, with or without using the passengers as hostages (or shields). If this was the plan, the execution of the first part of the plan was truly brilliant: While investigators were scouring the ocean for wreckage, the perpetrators could have landed, refueled the plane, and flown it almost anywhere. And they could now be poised to carry out the second part of the plan.

Some have speculated that the next mission for the plane might be an attack of some sort. If the plane has indeed flown somewhere undetected, this speculation seems reasonable. And the questions that would follow, of course, would be 1) an attack on what? 2) when?, 3) how? (with a bomb on board – or just the plane?), and 4) with or without the passengers?

If you assume that this whole plan was drawn up and executed with extreme care, which it seems to have been, it is reasonable to assume that the second part of the plan would have been equally well thought out. So, unfortunately, it does not seem inconceivable that, at some point in the near future, the world might discover the missing Malaysian jet by spotting it on radar again, perhaps flying toward a major city. If that happens, the next question will be whether the passengers and crew are on board. If they are, the local government might face the choice of shooting down a 777 loaded with most of its passengers and crew... or allowing the plane to continue to fly on toward whatever destination it is headed for whatever purpose its pilots have in mind.

The motivations for such a plan seem hard to fathom, at least given what is so far known about the passengers and crew of Malaysia 340. So let's hope this possibility is as unlikely as it would have sounded a week ago.

One thing seems probable:

The more time that elapses, the more likely it would seem to be that the jet crashed in the ocean. If someone was brilliant enough to plan and execute the theft of a 777 in mid-air and land the jet on some remote runway with some future plot in mind, that someone is probably also brilliant enough to realize that the more time that goes by, the more likely it is that the plane will be discovered.

SEE ALSO: Pilots Say The Jet Theft Took Meticulous Planning

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U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate's second-ranking Democrat, sounds thrilled to reportedly be on a list of Americans targeted for sanctions by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Daily Beast's Josh Rogin reported Monday that Durbin would be on the list, which comes in response to U.S. President Barack Obama's announcement of sanctions on seven Russian officials and four Ukrainians with ties to the crisis.

Durbin recently co-authored a resolution condemning Russian military intervention in Ukraine. A spokesman for Durbin couldn't confirm if he was on the list, but he sent along this statement from the Senator reacting to his reported inclusion:

"My Lithuanian-born mother would be proud her son made Vladimir Putin’s American enemies list," Durbin said.

Putin is expected to unveil his sanction targets as early as Tuesday. 

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Women are more likely to die of heart attacks because their symptoms are often misdiagnosed as anxiety so they do not get vital swift treatment, said a study Monday.

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal set out to understand sex differences in mortality rates for men and women with acute coronary syndrome.

They asked 1,123 patients aged 18 to 55 to fill out a survey after being admitted to one of 24 hospitals in Canada, one in the United States and one in Switzerland.

The women in the study, the researchers found, generally came from lower income brackets, were more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease.

They also had substantially higher levels of anxiety and depression than the men.

The researchers noted that the men received faster access to electrocardiograms (ECGs) to check heart rhythms and fibrinolysis to prevent blood clots than the women.

Early treatment for a heart attack can prevent or limit damage to the heart muscle, while saving the person's life.

On average it took 15 minutes and 28 minutes, respectively, for men to be given ECGs or fibrinolysis from the time they arrived at an emergency room.

In contrast, it took 21 minutes and 36 minutes for women.

The researchers pointed to the women's higher levels of anxiety as the primary reason for the discrepancy.

"Patients with anxiety who present to the emergency department with non-cardiac chest pain tend to be women, and the prevalence of acute coronary syndrome is lower among young women than among young men," said lead researcher Louise Pilote.

"These findings suggest that triage personnel might initially dismiss a cardiac event among young women with anxiety, which would result in a longer door-to-ECG interval."

The findings were published in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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