I found a good stats article on fitting data to a power law distribution, testing whether the fit is good, and testing whether a fit to an exponential or lognormal distribution would be better:
Power-law distributions in empirical data, SIAM (2009)
Aaron Clauset,1, 2 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi,3 and M. E. J. Newman
For anyone checking in here: I got out of the habit of posting on my blog around June 1 and haven’t managed to get back to it. I might resume, but I might not.
Robert L. Pollock: Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks – WSJ.com.
For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”
The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.
The Mosul and organ harvesting stories were soon brought together in a hit Turkish movie called “Valley of the Wolves,” which I saw in 2006 at a mall in Ankara. My poor Turkish was little barrier to understanding. The body parts of dead Iraqis could be clearly seen being placed into crates marked New York and Tel Aviv. It is no exaggeration to say that such anti-Semitic fare had not been played to mass audiences in Europe since the Third Reich.
When I interviewed Prime Minister Erdogan (one of several encounters) in 2006, he was unabashed about the narrative.
Erdogan: “I believe the people who made this movie took media reports as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these influences.”
Me: “But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of America, that we’re the kind of people who’d go to Iraq and kill people to take their organs?”
Erdogan: “These kind of things happen in the world. If it’s not happening in Iraq, then its happening in other countries.”
Me: “Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?”
Erdogan: “I’m not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in poverty who use this as a means to get money.”
I was somewhat taken aback that the prime minister could not bring himself to condemn a fictional blood libel.
I was just googling to try to find out how much the Gulf oil spill might cost in damage. I suspect it’s overblown. Apparently Exxon Valdex caused damage of less than 5 billion dollars according to the Courts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the true damge were much smaller, since the courts aren’t likely to be fair where oil companies are concerned. Think, too— if (a big assumption) all the wildlife in a stretch of 10 miles is destroyed, leaving virgin habitat (since the oil becomes harmless under sand), won’t wildlife move back in after just a few years? That might be a bad few years for fisheries–if there are any— but as far as Existence Value, it just means a few years of nonexistence during which nobody much woudl ahve visited it anyway.I value Alaskan wildlife in general quite highly, but I value Alaskan wildlife from 1995 to 2010 at almost zero. That fifteen years has no cosmic significance at all, and also no personal significance to me.
I wonder if the current BP spill is really causing any damage?
many seemed intent on skirting campaign finance laws: Obama’s foreign contributors were making multiple small donations, ostensibly in their own names, over a period of a few days, some under maximum donation allowances — but others were aggregating in excess of the maximums when their contributions were all added up. Other donations came in from donors with names such as “Hbkjb,” “jkbkj,” and “Doodad.” Also, thousands of Obama’s foreign donations ended in cents. This was evidence of foreign contributors sending in donations in foreign currencies that exchanged into odd amounts. Americans living overseas would almost uniformly be able to contribute dollars, in set amounts.
The Obama campaign received a substantial amount of money from countries that have an interest in seeing a weak American President: $366,708.22 from China; $25,259.00 from the United Arab Emirates; $7,062.60 from Russia; and $6,716.28 from Saudi Arabia. Obama also took in $6,350.00 from Indonesia; $5,000.00 from Kenya; and $1,750.00 from Egypt.
The FEC alleges that Obama also illegally took donations from Tamil Tiger leaders. The Tamil Tigers are, according to the FBI, the most successful terrorist group in the world. While the Hillary Clinton returned contributions from the Tamil Tigers, Obama kept them.
There are many other questions and mysteries regarding Obama’s campaign finances. The Puma P.A.C. blog notes: “Obama spent a record $744 million on his campaign but has disclosed donors for only $485 million of his windfall.”
In January 1944, the Office of Strategic Services created a secret document entitled “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” (available hereas a free audio book) to assist operatives in disrupting the Axis war effort. It contains the expected stuff about starting fires and shorting electrical systems. But the most enlightening stuff comes at pages 28–31, in a section entitled “General Interference with Organizations and Production.” There, we learn that our secret weapon against the Nazi war machine was . . . bureaucracy. Note these ingenious plots:
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
* * *
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible–never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision–raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
More nuggets after the jump.
The big problem with being poor in 21st Century America is not that you can’t afford to buy enough stuff, it’s that you can’t afford to move away from other poor people.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Shedding Light on the AZ Immigration Law.
ARIZONA SENATE BILL 1070 LEGAL ISSUES RAISED BY ARIZONA’S NEW STATUTE REGULATING IMMIGRATION Gabriel J. Chin,* Carissa Byrne Hessick,** Toni Massaro,*** and Marc L. Miller**** May 23, 2010
Eric Rasmusen comments, erasmuse@Indiana.edu
(1) Which web address is it? The second, I think. Clarify footnote 1:
“1 The documents at issue are SB 1070, 49th Leg., 2d Sess., Arizona Session Laws Ch. 113, http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/49leg/2R/laws/0113.htm as amended by HB 2162, 49th Leg., 2d Sess. http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2162c.pdf ”
(2) Since the statute is only 11 pages long, include it as an appendix to your paper.
(3) You write on page 3: “• When a person is stopped or detained, presentation of an Arizona driver’s license or another specified form of identification may be sufficient to show legal status or citizenship. Id.”
The statute establishes a presumption. I think “may be sufficient” is misleading in your statement.
It isn’t clear whether the presumption of legality is even rebuttable, even if the person stopped is obviously an illegal alien. It would be useful for you to discuss that— how is this kind of language interpreted in other contexts?
“A person 13 is presumed to not be an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States 14 if the person provides to the law enforcement officer or agency any of the 15 following: 16 1. A valid Arizona driver license….”
(4) You write:
“May Arizona police arrest or stop based on undocumented status alone?
Yes. Under existing precedent, state and local law enforcement can arrest for violation of federal offenses. Almost all people who came here without any documentation and do not have authorization to be here committed some criminal violation of federal immigration law, such as entry without inspection in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1325. Therefore, being undocumented will often constitute probable cause for this offense. In addition, SB 1070 makes clear that an officer can arrest for any deportable offense. A.R.S. § 13–3883(A)(5).”
That’s useful to point out. You might clarify further: even before the new law, Arizona police COULD stop people based on “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present”, and were free to use “racial profiling” as you define it. And as you say jn the passage below, even before the law, police could question someone even without reasonable suspicion or any suspicion at all:
“How can the police tell if someone is undocumented?
They can ask. The police need no reasonable suspicion or probable cause to ask any question of any person, so long as officers do not create the impression that answers are required. So a common way for the police to determine immigration status will be for them simply to ask an individual where they were born and how they got to the United States.”
You should emphasize that the new law says that now “a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person,” so the police MUST make a reasonable attempt if they are stopping somebody for something else. That part of the law is directed against police departments unwilling to use authority they had even under the old law.
You say on page 16 that:
” Section 11–1051 may be read to require police officers in Arizona to voluntarily inquire about immigration status when they have a reasonable suspicion that someone is not a legal resident, even if they do not have power to stop that person.”
How could anyone possibly read Section 11–1051 that way? Your next paragraph says that it’s because Section 11–1051 doesn’t mention what police must do if they haven’t stopped someone, but that would be an amazing interpretive stretch. The statute doesn’t say anything about whether police have to question citizens observed wearing white shirts either, but we don’t think that means maybe they have to question them all.
More reasonably, the law does not require the police to stop someone even if they are virtual certain that he is an illegal alien— perhaps because he even tells them he is. (And you might mention that that is true for violations of any law, if I’m right on that— if someone comes up to a policeman and confesses to murder, current law allows the policeman to say, “That’s nice” and ignore it, doesn’t it?)
(5) Put your email addresses on the paper, to increase the probability of comments. (I’ll just send this to the first author, Gabriel Chin.)
King Barack the Verbose – Mark Steyn – National Review Online
The European motive for doing this is to “save the euro” — a currency whose very existence is a monument to the unbounded narcissism of government. The euro notes are decorated by scenic views of handsome Renaissance, Gothic, and classical edifices — just like the White House on U.S. currency. The only difference is that the European buildings do not exist in what we used to call the real world. They’re entirely fictional. That’s Big Government: Even if you don’t build it, they’ll still come. If you invent a currency for a united Europe, a united Europe is sure to follow.
CHURCH FATHERS: Letter 5 (St. Basil)
Who could be so stony-hearted, so truly inhuman, as to be insensible to what has occurred, or be affected by merely moderate grief? He is gone; heir of a noble house, prop of a family, a father’s hope, offspring of pious parents, nursed with innumerable prayers, in the very bloom of manhood, torn from his father’s hands…. But yesterday it seemed that you had only little to trouble you, and that your life’s stream was flowing prosperously on. In a moment, by a demon’s malice, all the happiness of the house, all the brightness of life, is destroyed, and our lives are made a doleful story. …2. But we mean—do we not?— to bring out the gift which God has stored in our hearts; I mean that sober reason which in our happy days is wont to draw lines of limitation round our souls, and when troubles come about us to recall to our minds that we are but men, and to suggest to us, what indeed we have seen and heard, that life is full of similar misfortunes, and that the examples of human sufferings are not a few. Above all, this will tell us that it is God’s command that we who trust in Christ should not grieve over them who are fallen asleep, because we hope in the resurrection; and that in reward for great patience great crowns of glory are kept in store by the Master of life’s course. Only let us allow our wiser thoughts to speak to us in this strain of music, and we may perhaps discover some slight alleviation of our trouble. … We have not lost the lad; we have restored him to the Lender. His life is not destroyed; it is changed for the better. He whom we love is not hidden in the ground; he is received into heaven. Let us wait a little while, and we shall be once more with him. The time of our separation is not long, for in this life we are all like travellers on a journey, hastening on to the same shelter. While one has reached his rest another arrives, another hurries on, but one and the same end awaits them all. He has outstripped us on the way, but we shall all travel the same road, and the same hostelry awaits us all.
CHURCH FATHERS: Letter 6 (St. Basil)
When first you were made a mother, and saw your boy, and thanked God, you knew all the while that, a mortal yourself, you had given birth to a mortal. What is there astonishing in the death of a mortal? But we are grieved at his dying before his time. Are we sure that this was not his time? We do not know how to pick and choose what is good for our souls, or how to fix the limits of the life of man.
While I hesitate to ascribe motives, in the case of Brooks I shall make an exception. It really seems to me his ersatz Burkeianism is mostly about allowing him to pose as that irritating object, the liberals’ favorite conservative. And it conveniently allows him to do so without staking out any very specific territory. It’s just, oh, I don’t have any specific principles or ideas, you know; with me it’s about my dispositions, my habits, my gastro-intestinal predilections.
» Faber: Nations Will Print Money, Go Bust, Go to War…We Are Doomed – Big Government
If deficits didn’t matter as many like Economist James Galbraith argue today, why should citizens even pay taxes? It would make everyone happier if they didn’t
I could never figure out whether the Platonic philosopher was aiming at the ability to offer irrefutable argument – argument which rendered him able to convince anyone he encountered of what he believed (the sort of thing Ivan Karamazov was good at) – or instead was aiming [10] at a sort of incommunicable, private bliss (the sort of thing his brother Alyosha seemed to possess). The first goal is to achieve argumentative power over others – e.g., to become able to convince bullies that they should not beat one up, or to convince rich capitalists that they must cede their power to a cooperative, egalitarian commonwealth. The second goal is to enter a state in which all your own doubts are stilled, but in which you no longer wish to argue. Both goals seemed desirable, but I could not see how they could be fitted together.
and
Eventually I got over the worry about circular argumentation by deciding that the test of philosophical truth was overall coherence, rather than deducibility from unquestioned first principles. But this didn’t help much. For coherence is a matter of avoiding contradictions, and St Thomas’s advice, ‘When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction,’ makes that pretty easy. As far as I could see, philosophical talent was largely a matter of proliferating as many distinctions as were needed to wriggle out of a dialectical comer. More generally, it was a matter, when trapped in such a comer, of redescribing the nearby intellectual terrain in such a way that the terms used by one’s opponent would seem irrelevant, or question-begging, or jejune. I turned out to have a flair for such redescription. But I became less and less certain that developing this skill was going to make me either wise or virtuous.
Mail Online – Peter Hitchens blog
I say that Marie Stopes International (which receives about £25 million a year from the NHS, much of it for killing unborn babies under contract) should be allowed to advertise its repellent services on TV. But on one condition. That each advertisement is followed by both of these: film of an actual abortion of a 24-week-old baby, and a brief documentary reminding viewers that Marie Stopes sent love poems to Adolf Hitler in August 1939, advocated compulsory sterilisation for the ‘unfit’, and cut her own son out of her will because he married a girl who wore glasses.What sort of organisation would name itself after such a monstrous woman?
I’ve written about him once. That was in 2002. Washington University had decreed that reporters needed official permission to conduct an interview on campus. According to the new guidelines, a reporter who wanted to conduct an interview on campus was required to notify the Public Affairs office, and a person from that office would have the right to monitor the interview.So Katz called and asked if I wanted to break the rules. Of course, I said. I went to his office and interviewed him. He wanted to talk about his bosses.
“They’re control freaks,” he said. “This kind of policy is something you’d expect from a corporation. I have nothing against corporations, but a university is a fundamentally different thing.”
He dismissed the notion of a closed campus.
“A university is a small town with public spaces open to all. There is supposed to be a free flow of ideas and people. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a real university. I’ve done a fair amount of consulting for the defense industry, and I’ve seen more freedom of thought, freedom to disagree, in the defense establishment than I see here.”
By the way, the door to his office was decorated with an American flag. That’s unusual in the physics department.
Update, May 29: More info–still not on murder specifically, and just Phoenix.
Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said about 10% of his department’s arrests are illegal immigrants — a number close to the estimated percentage of undocumented migrants in the local population — but the Maricopa County sheriff’s office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities, said 20% of its inmates are illegal immigrants. Fifteen percent of state prisoners are illegal immigrants. (LA Times:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/03/nation/la-na-arizona-crime-20100503)
Also:
Crimes committed by illegal immigrants dropped by 18.5 percent from 2007 to 2008 thanks to law enforcement’s hardline against those in the country unlawfully, said Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas on Sunday.
A study by Thomas’ office shows the amount of illegal immigrants sentenced for felonies in Maricopa County Superior Court dropped from 4,731 in 2007 to 3,855 in 2008.
That’s an 18.5 percent drop, more than double the 8 percent reduction in overall crime, Thomas said.
Put another way, 18.7 percent of the people sentenced for felonies in Maricopa County Superior Court in 2007 were in the county illegally. In 2008, only 14 percent of that group were illegal immigrants. http://blogs.chron.com/immigration/archives/2009/10/post_317.html
Thomas’s office had a website with illegal aliens crime info called Illegalimmigrationjournal.com, but by now, May 2010, there is a new county attorney and he’s obliterated the site. You can still get scattered pages via Google’s cache, e.g. here.
Update: May 27. Here’s another way to look at it. 15% of inmates in Arizona prisons are “criminal aliens” (from http://www.azcorrections.gov/adc/reports/CAG/CAGApr10.pdf). If that’s the right percentage of murder that are illegals, the number of murders by illegals is 13, not 72. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between (because murders by illegals are caught at a lower rate than those by Americans, but more warrants are issued for them as a result of their not being caught right away), and the number of murders by illegals in Arizona is about equal to the 25 American deaths in Iraq.
Update, 1:12pm. Note that the weakest stat behind this calculation is the 83% estimate for murders by illegal aliens. I give a source, but it doesn’t explain where it got the info. It would be nice if someone would check by going through a month’s murders for Phoenix and seeing how many are suspected to be by illegals. Also, for a warrant to be issued, there has to be a suspect found, and,I suppose, not arrested on the spot by the police.
I estimate that January-April 2010, foreigners killed about 3 times as many people in Arizona as they killed US soldiers in Iraq during that same period. (72 murders as opposed to 25 combat deaths). Sources and calculations:
36 murders in Phoenix: Jan-April 2010.
Monthly Count of Offenses Known to Police Part I and Part II (pdf
http://phoenix.gov/police/carumonthly.pdf
83 percent of homicide warrants in Phoenix are issued for illegal aliens.
http://www.examiner.com/x-35821-Immigration-Reform-Examiner~y2010m2d21-Two-illegal-aliens-charged-with-murder-of-South-Carolina-man
Thus. an estimated 30 killings by illegal immigrants just in Phoenix so far in 2010. (Of course, some of the victmis are probably ilelgal aliens too.)
In 2008 Phoenix had 167 murders.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_08_az.html
In 2008 Arizona had 399 murders.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_05.html
Multipling 30 by 399/167 we get an estimated 72 murders in Arizona so far in 2010 by illegal aliens.
25 US casualities, Irqa jan-april 2010;
iCasualties – Iraq http://www.icasualties.org/iraq/index.aspx
Fergus Cullen: Richard Blumenthal’s Real Record – WSJ.com
The attorney general has also used the power of the state to bully small businesses. In 2003, he sued Computers Plus Center for $1.75 million in damages for allegedly selling state government machines without specified parts. Mr. Blumenthal issued a press release accusing the business owner, Gina Malapanis, of fraud: “No supplier should be permitted to shortchange or overcharge the State without severe consequences,” he said. “We will vigorously pursue this case to recover taxpayer money and send a strong message about zero tolerance for contractor misconduct.” Ms. Malapanis was even arrested in her home on seven first-degree larceny charges.In 2008 the charges against Ms. Malapanis were dismissed. As for the civil case, she refused to plead guilty and countersued the state for abusing its power and violating her constitutional rights. The jury, recoiling at the overly aggressive action that ruined her business, awarded her a whopping $18 million in January. In a handwritten note on court documents, the jury foreman said the state had engaged in a “pattern of conduct” that harmed Ms. Malapanis’s reputation, and cited the state’s press releases impugning her integrity, some of which came from Mr. Blumenthal. Mr. Blumenthal is appealing the decision.
Obama-Prop Calderon Rips USA, Gets Standing Ovation from Dems (But Off-Script He Admits the Truth)
Calderon was on with Wolf “Blitzed” last night on CNN Situation Room. Wolf Blitzer says, “What’s wrong with the folks in Arizona wanting to protect their border?”CALDERON: In Arizona, there is some racial profiling criteria in order to enforce the law that it’s against any sense of human rights; and, of course, is provoking very disappointing, uh, things — or very disappointing opinion — in Mexico and around the world, even here in America. So to introduce this kind of elements, especially racial profiling aspect that are attempting against what we consider human rights, it’s the principle of discrimination which is against the values of this great nation.
RUSH: Yeah. Who is he to preach to us? For crying out loud, they deport more illegal immigrants from Mexico than we do! How do they catch their illegal immigrants? Do they profile them? How the hell do they find out who’s in their country illegally? Here’s the next question from Blitzer: “So if people want to come from Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador or Nicaragua, they want to just come into Mexico, can they just walk in?”
CALDERON: No! They need to fulfill, uh, a form. They need to establish their right name. We analyze if they have not a criminal precedence.
BLITZER: Do Mexican police go around asking for papers of people they suspect are illegal immigrants?
CALDERON: Of course! Of course!
BLITZER: If somebody sneaks in from Nicaragua or some other country in Central America through the southern border of Mexico and they wind up in Mexico, they can going get a job?
CALDERON: No, no, no.
BLITZER: They can work?
CALDERON: If somebody do that without permissions, we send — we send back them.
RUSH: We didn’t record that ourselves. We didn’t make it up.
The American Spectator : Resenting African Christianity
Unlike the U.S. Episcopal Church, which is almost entirely U.S. members plus some small dioceses from Latin America and Taiwan, United Methodism is more fully international, with about one third of its members in Africa. Amid growing United Methodist churches in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, among others, and a U.S. church losing about a 1,000 members weekly, the 11.4 million denomination likely will soon be majority African. At the church’s next governing General Conference in 2012, probably 40 percent of the delegates will come from outside the U.S., even further diminishing liberal hopes.
Without the religious background, there wouldn’t be any science, because the fundamental notion that separated the West from everybody else was the notion that God is rational and created a rational universe, so there were rules out there to be discovered.Nobody else looked for the rules, because they didn’t believe they were there to be found. They didn’t believe that the world had been created in the same rational way. The marvelous thing is that these early Christian scientists, including Newton, believed God had created a rational world, went ahead and looked for the rules of that rational world — and darned if they didn’t find them. In an interesting sense, it was a scientific confirmation of the Christian religion.
