Month: November 2014

A Win-Win Game Plan

Christian Jarrett highlights a study suggesting that in “countries with greater gender equality … both women and men tend to perform better at the Olympics.” What researchers found when they compared Sochi medal results with World Bank data for 121 countries:

The key finding is that countries with more gender equality, especially in terms of educational equality, tended to achieve more Olympic medals among their female and male athletes. This association held true even after controlling for wealth and population size and income inequality. Income inequality was also associated with medal success (greater income inequality correlated with fewer medals), but income inequality and gender inequality were not correlated with each other, and each had an independent association with medals gained.

[Researcher Jennifer] Berdahl and her colleagues said that their results contradict the argument that striving for equality for women means inevitably that men will lose out. “Rather, gender inequality is likely to hurt both women and men by encouraging stereotypes that limit their ability to reach their full potential as individuals,” they concluded. “Eroding false and antiquated norms regarding what men and women can and cannot do is a ‘win-win’ that allows members of both genders to realize their true potential.”

When Eddie Discovered Freddie

Leann Davis Alspaugh considers Edvard Munch’s affinity for Friedrich Nietzsche:

In Nietzsche, Munch discovered a shared spiritual kinship – both suffered from loneliness, a lack of recognition, and a fear of madness. Nietzsche’s own work on art 1350956933_18abf3ca38_oand physiology coincided perfectly with Munch’s temperament and artistic interests; both regarded patho-physiology as a revelatory state, one to be feared as much as sought after. Art and physiology was much on the minds of nineteenth-century French and German thinkers, who often looked to rationalize man’s place in the world through the burgeoning field of what we today would call “metrics.” In 1847, Carl Ludwig introduced the kymograph, or “wave writer,” to track spatial position over time. Nietzsche himself personally owned a dynamometer, an instrument that purported to measure beauty and ugliness. In addition, developing photographic technology was used document the internal organs as well as facial expressions and the movement of the lips during phonation. With these graphical representations of bodily circumstances, thinkers like Nietzsche and Munch believed that elusive concepts like being, beauty, and aesthetics could be captured and made manifest, a sort of grand interdisciplinary ontological experiment.

(Image: Munch’s Friedrich Nietzsche, 1906, via Wikipedia)

Where It’s Deadly For Local Reporters

Juan David Romero passes along a “new report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reveals that only 6 percent of the 593 reporters killed from 2006 to 2013 were foreign correspondents”:

The most dangerous nations for journalists reporting at home from 2006-2013 were Iraq with 107 deaths; the Philippines, 63; Syria, 49; Somalia, 45; Pakistan, 43; Mexico, 43; Honduras, 23; Brazil, 19; the Russian Federation, 18; India, 17; Afghanistan, 16; and Colombia, 12. In this time period, the number of journalists killed in their home countries increased in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Arab states; in Africa the total remained stagnant, and in the U.S. and Europe the numbers declined.

The Ghosts Of Tourists Past

Jillian Steinhauer spotlights the surprisingly spooky work of German design student Philipp Schmitt, who captured images of flashing cameras at frequently photographed sites:

He began by simply placing geotagged photos in online maps as markers, little mustard-yellow drops littering New York City. Next, he created a web app “to retrieve my current geo location and to query the web for pictures taken at that position,” he writes on his website. He also rigged a camera flash to go off whenever pictures are found, allowing him to walk around an area while the flash is triggered. He recorded those results in long-exposure photographs of his own that are dotted with spots of light. In the final step, Schmitt added a person to the scenes, focusing his camera and flash on a stand-in tourist who appears and reappears brandishing a camera of his own.

She adds:

In a curious way, [the images] hark back to the first photograph ever taken of a person, a street scene shot by Daguerre with a 10-minute exposure – only two men stayed still long enough to appear. Then, in 1838, people went about their lives with no inkling of the technology that was set to revolutionize the world; now we carry it in our pockets, snap without thinking, and barely notice it at all.

Rodent Residents

A new analysis has found one rat for every four people in the Big Apple. Only one in four? Compared with the bed bugs …  I was going to jump on this for another unpopular rant about NYC. But DC’s at least as bad, if not a little worse:

The District was the nation’s third rattiest city in 2013, faring better than just Chicago and Los Angeles, according to pest control company Orkin. Orkin compiled these ranking based on how many rat treatments it performed in 2013, so take this ranking with a large cluster of rat dropping–sized skepticism … In Orkin’s ratings, New York City ranked as the fourth rattiest city, coming in behind D.C. But, it should be noted, City Desk spoke to D.C.’s very own rat consultant, Robert Corrigan, back in November, who declared New York City as “probably the No. 1 ratropolis in the United States.”

It’s still pretty bad – but way better than I remember. My habitual bike ride down the alley-way behind my apartment would routinely enter an Indiana Jones environment. There were so many rats it was close to impossible to avoid them. And the feel of a writhing, scurrying rat beneath your bike wheels is a particular form of eww. Meanwhile, Ben Richmond offers a brief history of the creature:

[W]hile we all agree that there are too many rats, no one has been sure of just how many we’re up against here. Jonathan Auerbach, author of the rat population study, traced the one-to-one ratio to a 1909 book by W. R. Boelter called The Rat Problem, “which assumed that there lived one rat per acre of land in England.” Since the country had, at the time, both 40 million residents and 40 million acres, Boelter concluded that England had a rat for each person. “The hypothesis was erroneously applied to New York City and is widely quoted to this day,” Auerbach’s paper states. Boelter probably wasn’t right about England, and there’s no reason to think what he found applies to New York.

The estimated number of rats has varied widely over the years: from 250,000 estimated in 1948 – a ratio of 36 people for every rat– to twice as many rats as people, according to unnamed experts cited by the New York Post. The city government isn’t into putting a number on its rat residents, but it does track the number of properties that could be housing them. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Pest Control Services reported that, in 2013, 10,800 property inspections had conditions able to harbor rats and 11,128 had active signs of rats.

What Parts Of Obamacare Will Republicans Repeal?

Medical Device Tax

Jason Millman explains why the medical device tax is at the top of the list:

With more than 7,000 device companies spread across the country, the industry has large concentrations of employers in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New York. The map [above], which shows the location of companies and employees who have signed onto a letter opposing the tax, helps explain why the issue keeps resurfacing.

How much would repealing it cost?

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax, which was added to the law to help pay for expanding coverage to an estimated 25 million people, will bring in $29 billion over a decade. That’s much less than other the funding sources in the law, like the tax on health insurers ($101.7 billion) or the requirement on medium-sized and large employers to offer coverage ($130 billion).

Sarah Kliff notes that opposition to the tax is bipartisan:

Nearly every industry has lobbied against its own assessment since Obamacare passed; insurers, for example, have run an extensive campaign against the health plan tax. But what might have given medical device makers an extra boost is that a decent number of Democratic senators want to see that fee gone, too. Both Minneapolis and Boston are hubs for medical device making. So it’s not especially surprising that Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Al Franken (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) all support medical device tax repeal.

Suderman agrees the “most likely item on the list is a repeal of the law’s medical device tax.” Other brewing fights:

Republicans will try to make an issue out of the individual mandate which is widely disliked, but Obama won’t let that one get through. The employer mandate, however, might be a successful target: The administration has delayed and undercut the provision on multiple occasions, and liberal policy shops have argued that it’s not necessary.

Paul N. Van de Water criticizes another item on the Republican wish list:

House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell called this week for a major change in health reform’s requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to employees who work 30 or more hours a week or face a penalty.  Claiming that the 30-hour threshold is “an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours,” they propose raising it to 40 hours.  In reality, however, that step would lead to fewer hours and more part-time work — the exact opposite of what their rhetoric about “restoring” the 40-hour work week implies. …

Only about 7 percent of employees work 30 to 34 hours (that is, at or modestly above health reform’s 30-hour threshold), but 44 percent of employees work 40 hours a week and thus would be vulnerable to cuts in their hours if the threshold rose to 40 hours.  (See figure.)  Under the Boehner-McConnell proposal, employers could easily cut back large numbers of employees from 40 to 39 hours so they wouldn’t have to offer them health coverage.

Chait points out that all of tweaks Republicans are advocating for would increase the deficit:

The GOP’s Obamacare conundrum in a nutshell is that they have condemned the law for its fiscal irresponsibility, but its political weakness stems precisely from its fiscal responsibility. The law made a lot of enemies because it had to make the numbers add up. Republicans have spent five years promising to get around to proposing their own plan, but they haven’t done it because if you want to make the numbers add up, you have to take things away from people.

The Wrong Way To Win In Texas

Douthat ponders the failed Wendy Davis campaign:

Yes, the social conservatism of Hispanics, while real enough, is sometimes overstated; yes, polling on abortion is always fluid and complicated, in red states as well as blue. But it still should be obvious that if your long-term political vision requires consolidating and mobilizing a growing Hispanic bloc in a state that’s much more religious and conservative than average, nominating a culture-war lightning rod is just about the strangest possible way to go about realizing that goal, no matter what kind of brilliant get out the vote strategy you think you’ve conjured up or how much national money you think she’ll raise.

It would be a little bit like, I don’t know, nominating a political-novice Tea Partier who owed her prior fame to a pro-abstinence campaign to contest a winnable race in a deep-blue, more-secular-than-average northeastern state. Not that the Republican Party would ever accidentally do anything like that, of course. But even that joke is part of the point: The Christine O’Donnell thing really did happen more or less by accident, because she happened to be in the right place at the right time to catch an anti-establishment wave and win a primary in which she was supposed to be a protest candidate. Whereas the Davis experiment was intentionally designed: She was treated to fawning press coverage, lavished with funding, had the primary field mostly cleared for her, and was touted repeatedly as part of an actual party strategy for competing in a conservative-leaning state.

Earlier Dish on the Davis campaign here.

The 2016 Tea Leaves

Nate Cohn reads them:

Last week’s results suggest that Republicans would be taking a big risk if they count on nonwhite turnout falling so low again. The vaunted Democratic mobilization effort did not replicate the 2012 electorate — something it could never do given the tendency for nonwhite and young voters to stay home — but it did produce a notably more Democratic electorate in states like North Carolina and Colorado than in 2010. … There is no way to be sure that the Democrats will remobilize young and nonwhite voters in 2016, even if it is the outcome most consistent with the available data on turnout and demographics. But if they do, the Republicans may need to perform still better in 2016 than they did last week.

But Larison warns that “most voters may have grown fatigued of having the Democrats in control of the White House by the time it comes to vote in 2016”:

In order to make the prospect of at least another four years of a Democratic president interesting, the party would probably need to put forward a fresh candidate with new ideas, but that is the opposite of what Clinton’s candidacy will be.

The very inevitability of Clinton’s nomination reeks of stagnation and intellectual exhaustion. So it’s possible that some other Democratic candidate might have been able to translate recent Republican success into a clear political advantage for the next election, but Clinton appears to be uniquely ill-suited to do that. That doesn’t mean that she won’t win in 2016, but it does mean that she is in a considerably worse position now than she was six months or a year ago.

Bernstein sees an improving economy as the Democrats’ best hope:

[C]umulatively, the odds are increasing that voters are finally going to believe the economy is growing. The economic picture is hardly perfect, but it’s also not unusual for perceptions to lag any improvement. For example, 20 years ago, Republicans would tell you that the recession that began in 1990 had ended well before voters went to the polls in 1992 and kicked President George H.W. Bush out of office because of the economy’s performance. But that electorate turned around and punished the Democrats in 1994 for that same long-ended recession. It took about three or four years for voters to acknowledge good times.

But what if the good times remain worse than in recent memory? Will the voters be taking it out on every president for the foreseeable future? I remain of the view that the key to winning elections is to present solid and fresh ideas for resolving clear and emergent national problems, and to find a candidate able to do that and to govern if she wins. Which means to say that Hillary Clinton needs a radical makeover in persona and policies if she is truly going to occupy the Oval Office.

Quote For The Day

“Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections. Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs, the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%, U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs, gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.

America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.

So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason. When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?” – a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press from a baffled Canadian.

(Hat tip: Addicting Info)