My occupation is a statistician. I tell people it is like "CSI without dead bodies" because analyzing a set of data that has been collected is like doing an autopsy on a deceased person in the sense that I'm trying to learn what I can from what statistics and information are available. Except in this case the information does not involve gross things. For me the research process can be humorous, scary, but always captivating.
Iraq Body Count of Violent Civilian Deaths In Iraq Since 2003
I have been swamped with work and consulting and haven't been able to post here. I should have time in the next few weeks. There have been various online researchers who collect data from the public to describe a social phenomena. Iraq Body Count relied on crowd sourcing to track civilian deaths in Iraq since the US invaded in March 2003. Their current estimate ranges from 180,000 to 202,000 civilians for civilians and 268,000 death including combatants. The researchers for this site admit that this count is low but the trends in the graph above reflect the most violent periods in the war: The initial invasion, The height of the Sunni Insurgency in 2006 and 2007 and the invasion of ISIS in 2014-2017.
Nonviolent resistance movements chronicled.
There were lots of protests against the Iraq war world wide. The website Non Violent Resistance, created by George Lakey in 2011 at Swarthmore College, describes more than 1000 campaigns for social justice throughout history and the world. The oldest movement mentioned is in ancient Egypt in 1170 BC when laborers went on strike for pay. Looking at the above map it looks really crowded. There are four movements mentioned from antiquity.
Non Violent Movements in Pennsylvania
Looking at the map above it looks really crowded. However when one zooms into a local area (such as my home state of Pennsylvania, where Swarthmore is located, as seen above), it looks more sparse. If you are aware of movements for social change that are not included please let them know at https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/contact
Next I will write on the Southern Poverty Law Center's new hate group map.
My latest post on Data Driven Journalism is up an reprinted here. In my last post,
I reported that Washington, DC had an extremely high rate of 30.83 hate
groups per million residents in 2016 relative to the other 50 states
(the national rate was 2.84 groups per million). DC also had an
exceptionally low percent of the vote for Donald Trump in 2016, at just
4.1%. For these reasons, and other characteristics which make DC
fundamentally different from the other 50 states, I had to exclude it
from a correlational analysis between hate group concentration and
Trump’s percent of the vote. For this post, I will look at other ways
in which DC is an outlier.
According to the most recent Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) from 2015, DC
ranks third in median household income at $70,848 behind Maryland and
Alaska. Yet, the same SAIPE estimate also ranks DC eighth for the
percent of the population in poverty, at 17.4%. This indicates a large
gap between the rich and poor. The high rate of poverty is reflected in
DC’s low life expectancy at 76.53 years, ranking 43rd compared with the
overall US average of 78.86 years. Similarly, DC’s infant mortality ranked eleventh in the country,
at 7 deaths per 1,000 live births compared to the US rate of 5.9 deaths
per live births. Newly released estimates from the Census Bureau for
2015 show DC has the second lowest rate of those without health
insurance at 4.3% behind Massachusetts. These income and health
statistics suggest that DC deviates from the national rates, but not
that it is an extreme outlier – with one exception.
The statistics on crime suggest that DC is an extreme outlier. DC had a violent crime rate of 1,244.4 offenses per 100,000 residents in 2014.
This is almost twice as large as the next highest state, being Alaska
with a rate of 635.8 offenses per 100,000 residents, and more than three
times as large as the US rate of 365.5 offenses per 100,000 residents.
In 2014, it had the highest murder rate of any other state at 15.9
offenses per 100,000 residents.
Image: Paul Ricci.
Last fall, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released the number of hate crime incidents in 2015 for each state.
Adjusting their numbers for population, DC had a higher rate than any
other state, at 96.69 offenses per million residents. Using the FBI rate
method, this rate would be 9.67 reported offenses per 100,000
residents. As the above graph shows, this hate crime rate corresponds
with DC’s high rate of hate groups. However, this relationship does not
hold up when DC is excluded from the analysis, as can be seen in the
graph below. If DC is excluded, there is no statistically significant
relationship between the concentration of hate groups and hate crimes in
any of the other states, with only 2% of the variability accounted for.
Image: Paul Ricci.
Comparison of DC with New York City
So what factors besides poverty could be driving this relationship?
Compared to the other states DC has the highest population density by
far at 11,157.58 persons per square mile. Because Washington, DC is a quasi-city state, it may be appropriate to compare it to the US’s largest city, New York City (NYC).
In 2015, NYC had 8,550,405 inhabitants over a total of 302.64 square
miles (approximately 488.13 km2) giving the city a population density of
28,252.72 persons per square mile. I don’t have hate crime data for
NYC but I can estimate the hate group rate from the hate group map of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I counted 36 hate groups in the area, which would give NYC a rate of
4.21 groups per million – a number which is considerably below DC’s rate
of 30.83 groups per million. In 2010, 25.5% of NYCs population
identified as African-American whereas 50.7% of DCs population did. Of
the 21 total hate groups in DC, six of them are black separatist groups
such as the Nation of Islam (28.6%). Of the 36 hate groups in NYC,
eight are black separatist (22.2%). You can scan the other hate groups
in each city here.
Conclusion One must be careful to draw grand conclusions from statistics that
compare DC to the rest of the US and DC to NYC. One can look at the
obvious differences DC has with the other states. While it has three
votes in the Electoral College for President, it has no members in
Congress with full voting privileges on laws which may affect them.
Further, as John Oliver explains, they have to pay full federal taxes:
We see Washington, DC portrayed in the media all the time but do we
really notice what goes on there outside of the White House, the Capitol
Building, and the various other federal buildings? DC residents have
been campaigning for full statehood for years but it has been stalled in
Congress. This second class citizenship may or may not explain all of
the statistical discrepancies for DC. The issue definitely merits
further study. There could be many other anomalies regarding DC of
which I am not aware.
I was going to blog about the most recent Census Bureau county and state level estimates for PA but they haven't been released yet for 2014. I did look at some of my posts from the 2012 election titled 2012: A 1912 Rerun? (Only if you make it). The post included video/audio clips of the three main contenders for the presidency in 1912: Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Teddy Roosevelt. One contender I did not include in that Post was Eugene V. Debs, He finished fourth in the vote that year with 6% of the vote. He ran for President four other times on the Socialist party platform with 1912 being the high water mark for the number of votes. The 5th time he ran in 1920 he was imprisoned by the Wilson administration for opposing the US participation in WWI. He still received 1 million votes that year while in prison (the first year women could vote).
Bernie Sanders created the above documentary on Debs life with Sanders providing the voice of Debs. Looking at the current crop of three presidential candidates it's tempting to say that there has never been anything like this year. Looking back it can be seen that outsider campaigns were the norm rather than the exception. The current group of candidates was whittled down to three after the Indiana primary. Indiana just happens to be the home state of Eugene Debs. He was followed in this tradition by Robert LaFolette, Henry Wallace, Ralph Nader, and many other lesser known candidates in running outside the two party system to promote new progressive ideas that the two major parties were not discussing. Anti immigrant/labor candidates like Trump are also not new. The Know Nothing party of the 1850's is a good example. They had nominated former President Millard Fillmore as for President in 1856. I have written about other contemporary politicians like Rick Santorum, Tom Tancredo, and Joe Arpaio.
Where will the current group of candidates end up? That is up to all of us or at least the ones who participate. Many were predicting that Trump and Sanders would both fizzle out in the primaries even as both were . Neither has so far though the Democrats have been somewhat more adept at denying Sanders the nomination. **Related Posts**
The fifth anniversary of this blog coincides with the end of the series that inspired it's name. Because of this momentous event, instead of a top 10 all time post list I thought I would do a top 25 list out of 250 posts so lets get started. This should give a good sampling of the posts on the blog.
Pennsylvania's last Governor dragged his feet on expanding medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The new governor has reversed himself but a lot of other governors haven't.
Last year my friend from Hartford died from brain cancer. A site was set up for his family to cover medical expenses. I talked about how they shouldn't have to be begging for money for this purpose. You can still donate to their paypal account here.
In a follow up to the post on the concentration of hate groups (seen further down on this list), I looked at the correlation between the concentration of hate groups in each state and their health outcomes.
When Lance Armstrong was still claiming innocence of blood doping I thought I would apply probability theory to his claim. This is the post with the longest average time per view.
With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War these past 4 years I thought it would be helpful looking at in with similar conflicts in Italy, Germany and Japan which would have repercussions for later conflicts..
The second most popular post provides a sports metaphor (Barry Sanders' running statistics) for explaining global warming/climate change to denier of this science who also is a sports junkie (ie. Rush Limbaugh, James Inhofe, etc).
Thanks to this post being linked to on the BBC programme (British Spelling) web page for The Joy of Stats, this page has received over 3,000 hits (7% of total traffic). It covers the correlation between life expectancy and income.
Just one week after posting on the trial of Bradley Manning, the big news is Edward Snowden's leaking of a domestic surveillance program to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian Newspaper. Naturally jaws are dropped in Congress and in the public. Personally I am not surprised that we are tracked in this modern world where almost all of us are electronically connected. I have written many posts on how web statistics are compiled on us by sites like Google and Facebook and used for marketing purposes (see related posts below). I've also done PodCamp presentations on it as can be seen in the reproduced Google Analytics output at the bottom for May 12-Jun 12 2013.
Susan Landau in the clip above explains how metadata from domestic surveillance can reveal real patterns about ones life. Looking at friends Facebook pages is similar to collecting metadata. One can learn a lot by simply observing. Whenever the old Soviet Union had parades with large missiles, the US military brass and intelligence would be there to learn what they could about their military hardware. The technology has changed since then.
Is there potential for abuse just as there was in the old Soviet Union? You bet. We are all observing each other to learn info. The government says it's doing it to stop terrorist attacks but it did not stop the Boston Marathon bombings or other mass shootings in the US with higher death tolls. The Christmas underwear and Times Square bombers were thwarted by perceptive onlookers. Some surveillance is needed. What Snowden, Manning, and Assange are doing is giving those who are doing is giving the surveillance class at the NSA a taste of their own medicine. The need for privacy is understandable. The unchecked need for data and metadata on those around us is what is dangerous. As a researcher I abide by limits all the time on privacy and I must be on guard against invasions into mine as by blog is trolled from all over the world. My advice to those who are concerned about privacy on Facebook and other social media is if you don't want the public to see it don't post it.
There are ways to investigate social issues including terroism without invading privacy. The founding fathers created the constitution to protect our rights and also mandated the US Census taken every 10 years since 1790. It is now a valuable source of information about the US population.
This is the phrase that Charlie Sheen popularized when he was fired from his sitcom Two and a Half Men. We all want to back a winner but we never ask what the price of winning is.Today Barack Obama has been inaugurated for a second term after garnering 51% of the vote over Mitt Romney last fall. He has many challenges coming up on gun control, the economy, Afghanistan, and who knows what else. He had to raise billions of dollars for his campaign and millions more to pay for the ceremony today. How many favors will be expected in return?
In April, the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh will be honoring Sheen's father Martin for his peace activism. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve the recognition but please don't ask him about Charlie. His activism has not come without a price just like it has for the rest of us.
Lance Armstrong has finally come clean to Oprah Winfrey (but not yet under oath) on using performance enhancing drugs. I have written before about how abuse of these drugs goes far beyond Armstrong. He is an extreme case of gaming the system. If he had raced clean and finished in the top 20 seven years in a row in the Tour de France would that have been any less heroic? Sure he wouldn't have had all the money or fame which he so desired but we all wanted a hero for cancer survivors everywhere who suffer with the disease and get no recognition. I still wear the Livestrong rubber bracelet which he first popularized in 2005 and people ask me why. Yes Lance is flawed and who isn't. He can still become a hero even without winning bike races or heads a foundation. Is the Livestrong Foundation bad because of his extreme bullying to preserve his titles? Life is full of contradictions that we must negotiate.
So much energy, legal and illegal, is invested in winning. We need to ask ourselves when is the price worth it?
This weekend there were copy cat shootings to the Newtown shootings in Hollidaysburg, PA and Rochester, NY. I know I said I wasn't going to blog about the shootings but the extra incidents before the holiday prompted me. They may or may not be connected. I feel that this satire by Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo on Saturday Night Live in 1983 is just as relevant today as it was then. It fits in this blog because it is a simulated shooting, not real. (Hulu has removed this video. You can see another version of it here)
MotherJones magazine has a piece showing that there were 151 deaths from ten mass shootings in the US this year. That does not include the incidents this weekend which would bring this years total to 157 from 12 incidents (a mean or average of 13.1 deaths per incident). Yes the availability of guns is a factor and people are right to criticize the NRA for a denial of reality but there are many other factors at work in these types of incidents such as mental health and the influence of the media. Dave Cullen has written a book on the Columbine killings and gave an interview on C-SPAN's Washington Journal about these incidents. He correctly points out that there was an armed guard at Columbine who was out gunned. The presence of guns (especially arming the teachers as the state legislature in Missouri is trying to do but are wisely blocked by the governor) increases the risk of accidental shootings even if it were to slightly decrease the risk of deliberate ones. A famous case would be then New York Giants star Plaxico Burress accidentally shooting himself in the thigh in a night club when carrying a concealed weapon.
NRA members may point to a mass shooting in Norway where a far right wing fanatic killed (he won't be named here to quench his lust for fame) 69 people in 2011 (44% of the US 2012 total for one incident). They have better gun control laws and mental health services than the US. The killer was given Norway's harshest sentence, 21 years. How many of these shootings has Norway had since then? The police in Poland and the Czech Republic stopped other potential copycats. There were a, as I said in my post on the The Secret, there are definitely ways to minimize the risk of terrible events like these but it can never be eliminated. Controlling guns is a much better way to minimize the risk than making them more available but other factors need to be considered.
Another potential influence is the media. We need to ask ourselves, are we that different from those who went to gladiatorial games in the Roman Colosseum thousands of years ago to watch slaughter for entertainment? I know this is a strange topic to blog about on Christmas Day but the holiday season clearly did not deter the perpetrators in Newtown, Hollidaysburg, and Rochester. Yesterday was the appropriate time to talk about this topic. Buon Natale a Tutti. Merry Christmas to all in Italian.
It's a few weeks late but I had to update this post with Jon Stewart's skewering of the gun control debate in two parts below. The recent shooting in California also prompted me to update.
I've seen this video clip from the Ellen show make the rounds of Facebook and the web in the last few weeks. It is sad that it takes events like these or of Columbine for people to recognize the harmful effects of bullying.In school I was often called a faggot (I'm not) and worse and was bullied in other ways. The advice I got from adults was "ignore it, it will go away, it's just part of growing up" while it may be true for those who have a good face for playing poker but it never did for me. Of course being gay is not the only reason to be bullied. At least some parts of society are starting to recognize this age old problem, but are they ready to ask the deeper questions?
Much of what goes on in our schools is merely a reflection of the society as a whole. In schools it all occurs in a closed space. In our society you have the jocks like LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Ben Roethlisberger, the brains (nerds is my N word) like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, burnouts like Lindsey Lohan, beautiful people (you can think of examples), and everyone else just like in every school. There is often jockeying for position in society and schools which sometimes leads to conflict.
Bullying is about establishing a social hierarchy. It can be subtle by as cold stare or not. I am not a total saint in this myself. Sometimes to take the pressure off of me, I would pick on other kids.
Those in authority can set the tone for how those under them behave. For example, when our leaders engage in gay bashing, such as Sen. Jim DeMint R-SC saying that gays & lesbians should not be allowed to teach school, those who follow them will imitate and sometimes escalate. In another more telling example NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino has said inflammatory things about gays right after eight men were arraigned for torturing three gay men.
Another example of indirect incitement of bullying is Byron Williams who tried to kill people at the progressive Tides foundation but was stopped by the police. He confessed to being inspired by Glenn Beck, calling him a "school teacher." Richard Poplawski, who killed three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pa (less than a mile from my home), was also a follower of Beck's who was paranoid about Obama and guns. The journalist from Media Matters who interviewed Williams and has been following Beck's verbal bullying for years discusses it on Democracy Now!
Bullying is a symptom of larger forces in society. Kids are often better than adults at sensing which individuals do not fit the mold that society defines as "normal". It is the leaders who define who is and is not normal. Just blaming bullying on a few messed up kids with low self esteem (a myth that helps keep the problem going) or on violent video games (it does make the problem worse) with self esteem problems will not solve it entirely. It is necessary to recognize everyone's role in the problem.
The National Center for Bullying Prevention has resources for dealing with bullying at least on the school level. Research will have to be done to see how effective it is.
Final commentary which I cannot disagree with more. John Fugelsang says calling it bullying trivializes what it puts kids through. I argue that the International Monetary Fund saddling poor countries with debt is the same as bullies stealing unpopular kids lunch money. In the end, the name you give it matters less than correctly recognizing it when you see it.
Joel Burns' story telling teens that "it gets better" (echoed by President Obama) is moving but judging by his reaction the scars from his own bullying are still there and always will be. In some ways it does get better just as it has for African Americans in some ways since slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching ended, but is it as good as it would have been for them if those terrible things had never happened in the first place?
It "got better" for me when I was a freshman in college. Some guys in the dormitory were harassing me by jamming my door shut with pennies because I wouldn't be their patsy. The resident assistants were in their back pockets so I called the police on them. I have no regrets about it. The struggle for me was how does one handle not being bullied?
Dan Savage has picked up on the it gets better theme but only for LGBT's and has created an organization for victims of that type of bullying called the It Gets Better Project. He discussed the it on the Colbert Report. I still feel it doesn't address the core of the problem.
.jpg)
