William M. Briggs, Statistician

Part II of the leadership comparison of McCain and Obama

How much of the President of the United States’ job has been in the capacity of Commander in Chief?

To start—but in no way to finish—answering this question, consider this (difficult) picture:

This charts all major military activity of the USA since its birth in 1776. Only wars and conflicts of importance are included; that is, not every use of military force if plotted. For example, Commodore Perry’s mission to Japan, while vastly influential, is not included. The Boxer Rebellion, because it directly used a minimal number of troops, was of tremendous consequence, and so is presented.

The political parties in power at the times of the conflicts are shaded (red for Republican; blue for Democrat; green for Whig; purple for Democrat-Republican; and yellow for Federalist or none). For example, Democrat presidents presided over the beginning of the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, Korean War, and Vietnam War. Republican presidents were there for the start of the Civil War, Grenada Invasion and both Gulf Wars.

Different wars and conflicts are colored variously, and the lengths of the activities are shown. There has only been one period in American history without major conflict: from roughly 1819 to 1831. Two men were President during this time: James Monroe (1817-1825) and John Qunicy Adams (1825-1829; both were Democratic-Republicans). Of these two men, only Adams did not govern the White House during a time of major military conflict (Monroe managed wars earlier in his administration).

Thus, of the 43 presidents so far, 42 of them had direct command over significant military events. Obviously, the military is in use even when not engaged with the enemy. Presidents regulate the military strategically and tactically, for example as a deterrent. A current instance is the placement of missile-defense batteries in Poland to annoy Russia. And the military cannot spring into action suddenly without adequate training and support in times of peace, tasks which require significant interaction.

Whether or not any conflict on this list was preventable or abhorrent or necessary or just, all of human history suggests it is rational to believe conflict and wars will happen in the future. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. All this implies the obvious: the president must have adequate capabilities as Commander in Chief as it is very likely he will have to exercise these duties. The stated desires of the occupant of the White House also do not correlate with the occurrence of conflict.

It is true that only Congress has the power to declare outright war. Therefore, you might argue, the President’s role in warmaking is limited. But it is also only Congress who has the power to pass the budget: they control the purse strings. to be consistent you would also have the say the President’s domestic role is similarly limited.

To say that these powers belong to Congress obviously does not, and has not as history has shown, lessened the powers the President has and will have in guiding policy, both foreign and domestic.

Lastly, Obama’s own view on the subject are seen at the end of this video:

Don’t forget to see today’s post, which continues this one

Barack Obama served 143 days in the senate and no days in the military before he began his run for president. John McCain served 26 years in the senate and 22 years in the military before he began his campaign. (These numbers are from Roger Kimball’s blog.)

There are some immediate problems with these numbers. The “143 days” came about this way

From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United States Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory Committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate.

That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.

The one single Senate committee that he headed never even met — once.

After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan.

But during the 26 years McCain was a senator, the upper house was not in session continually, so to be fair we would have to only count the number of days the senate was actually in session over those years. This is unnecessary, because we all know that government and political business does not stop just because the gavel sounds. Therefore, we should give Obama, just as we are giving McCain, full credit for his time in service, which is to say 3.5 years since his swearing in as a senator in January of 2005. He still gets 0 years (or days) for military service. We also have to, since we gave it to Obama, award McCain his extra half year for the first part of 2008.

Let’s put that in table form for easier comparison:

Which is to say, McCain has about 14 times as much experience as Obama. However, this still isn’t an entirely fair comparison because McCain, who is 26 years older than Obama, has had a greater chance of gaining time on the job. To make the match up commensurable, we have to adjust for age.

Obama has had about 26 years opportunity to gain career knowledge (we don’t count the first 20 years of life for either man). McCain has had 50, or about twice as much time. So let’s redo the table dividing by the total amount of time available, which gives us the fraction of experience to available time. I’ll then multiply by 100 to turn the number into a percentage. We also have to be careful to note that when McCain was serving as a senator, he obviously could not serve in the military, and vice versa. For example, the amount of time McCain could have served in the senate was 50-22=28 years, of which he spent 26.

The conclusion is that McCain spent nearly all his time in direct training for the position of Commander in Chief, and Obama has spent about a little less than one-seventh of his.

You could argue for the inclusion of Obama’s time spent in other activities, such as the 3.5 years when he served on the eight-person Chicago-based Woods Fund “Poverty” Board with terrorist bomber William Ayers (whose reward for calling for the killing of his fellow Americans was to be made distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago). But most people aren’t anxious to bring attention to this service. However, in the spirit of generosity, let’s award him the full time. That ups Obama’s experience percentage to 27%.

Also, Obama served on the Illinois state legislature, which affirmatively counts as government experience. He served 7 years there, but that time overlapped entirely the time he spent sitting next to, but certainly never approving of or chatting with, radical leftist Ayers. The final table is (remembering again, that when Obama was in the State house, he could not be in the senate, etc.):

Thus, even in a generous counting, McCain still has more than twice as much experience as Obama.

This analysis assumes that any government service counts for gaining experience to the position of Commander in Chief, but surely direct military experience should be weighted at least slightly higher. I do not attempt such calculations.

Update. Thanks to LarryA who notes “Senator McCain was sworn into the Senate for the first time on Jan 6, 1987, 21.6 years ago, not 26.5 years ago as stated in the article. He was elected to the House four years before that, but the article is comparing Senate experience.” So the tables above should be changed from “Senate” to “Congress”.

“Zombie attacks to increase due to global warming” rang the headline on this blog seven moons ago. So said eminent zombiologist and scientist Dr Harrister, BS, MS, PhD, OMGWAG.

Who would have guessed that Bob Hope was ahead of us all?

I’ll tell you who! Pepsodent! With irium!

Thanks to Rob Avrech for reminding us of Hope’s wisdom.

Quick Quiz: what do you call an exceptionally nervous busybody who perpetually overestimates risk and on whose lips are forever the phrase, “Something must be done!”

Answer: That person is an activist—activism is a manner of life which nowadays can even be proclaimed a profession.

What, then, do we call somebody who rationally attempts to quantify risk and who soberly (on most days of the week) weighs his options and sometimes proposes that the best course of action is no action at all?

That person is an inactivist.

Isn’t that a great name? I love it! But I didn’t think of it. Frank Bi, who runs a site called The Journal of Inactivism, did.

Old Frank’s intent is that the label be taken ironically. To him, an inactivist is to be despised. Let me tell you something about irony, Frank. There’s an art to it that few possess; its use requires a rare talent. I sometimes flatter myself that I can successfully wield this heavy sword, but I fail nearly every time, as regular readers of this blog can attest.

And so have you failed, Frank, but do not despair. We can rescue your neologism and put it to good use. It can lead a second life of good service.

Thus, I counsel that we adopt the moniker “climate inactivist” at once. Just look what it has going for it.

“Climate skeptic”, a term many favor, is apt to be misleading. I, for example, am not skeptical that there is a climate. Inactivist, however, neatly captures and succinctly describes the attitude of many of us.

We, who do not deny that mankind influences climate, even sometimes harmfully, but who reckon that our uncertainty in the mechanisms of the hideously complex global climate system and the imprecision its forecasts, coupled with the glut of extravagant and ridiculous claims of evils that await us, are not strong enough evidence to yet warrant government-imposed mandatory taxes and regulation. We, who do not deny that that day might come, and who do not discourage voluntary and personal actions. We propose to take no action until our certainty is much stronger.

We propose to be inactive—we are inactivists.

This proposal will be voted upon at the next secret meeting.

Incidentally, to take us on a tangent to an unexpected dimension, Scott Kurtz presents the evil Statistician Magician! (I don’t have a cape.)

(This analysis was suggested by reader Joy C., who provided a link to the medal tables.)

China, even disregarding its cheating, grabbed the most gold medals (51 to the USA’s next best 36), but the USA took the most overall (110 to China’s next best 100). Either country, then, could be argued the better one depending on whether you value just gold or all medals.

But are there better ways to compare success than raw totals? For example, tiny Jamaica won 11 total medals, while Poland which is over 10 times as populated took only 10. Obviously, countries with enormous populations have a better chance at taking more medals because they have a larger pool of athletes to draw from. China, for example, has over 1.32 billion souls, with the USA has less than their decimal point, with only 305 million. (Population data gathered from Wikipedia.)

Let’s control for a country’s population and re-rank. Here is a table of some of the top countries with the medal totals normalized by population—total medals divided by population in millions. The number “Medals per million” is the number of medals won per million people.

The Bahamas tops the list: they won 2 medals with a population of only 330 thousand, an amazing feat, or perhaps I should say with amazing feet since their medals were in running events. Jamaica has 2.7 million people and won 11 medals. Ranking countries this way puts the USA down at number 44, with China not coming in until 68, with Taiwan ahead of it! Incidentally, the BBC site, one of the many hosting medal count tables, fearfully lists Taiwan as “Chinese Taipei”, which is meaningless because Taipei is only one city in Taiwan. China, with the world’s biggest population, can lower their denominator and do better next time if they institute a new Cultural Revolution. Georgia can also take some comfort for coming in well ahead of Russia (15th to 37th place).

Smaller countries also, as a matter of necessity, have to be more focused. Cuba, for example, won the majority of their medals in various martial arts (boxing, judo, and so on; perhaps they’re expecting something after Castro kicks over). The larger countries have entrants in most sports: both Communist China and the USA won their medals in dozens of events.

Here’s another way to look at the same data. This is a plot of the population (note the logarithmic scale) by the total number of medals won.

Many of the names are tiny and unreadable, but the general drift can be seen: greater populations help win more medals, just as expected. But not always. India ranks in with over a billion residents, but only garnered a couple of medals. Indonesia and Russia are also hugely populated but have few medals to take home.

As always, money helps. Here is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a rough measure of economic output, by total medal count: (GDP estimated from Wikipedia.)

China looks like its GDP is just behind the USA, but it isn’t. For example, Japan is second, Germany third then China. Clearly, though, the more bucks the more bang. But as with population, not always. India’s GDP outstrips South Korea’s and Australia’s but it’s medal total is lower. One of the more interesting things about this graph is the wide range of GDPs: over 6 orders of magnitude!

The next step is to see the joint effect of increasing population and GDP. That’s what this next, more difficult, picture shows:

Each dot is a country’s Population and GDP; the number beside it is the number of medals won. Darker circles help guide the eye to higher counts. The highest dozen Populations and the lowest GDPs are highlighted for easier recognition. The double bang received from having lots of people making lots of money is easily seen, but the relationship is not perfect.

I am not trying to predict the medal counts for the next Olympics, hence this is no real statistical model. To build one would require the data from previous Olympics, summer and winter, tracking the number of events, the changes in politics and inflation and on and on. Too much work and in the end there would be too much uncertainty that the model proposed is valid. Showing the data plainly is the fairest procedure.

Just for fun, and having nothing to do with the Olympics, here are the top and bottom 10 countries of dollars made per person (GDP divided by population). You can think of this as a sort of measure of citizen efficiency.

The USA makes the list at number 12 with about 45-thousand per person. England at number 11 is just about the same, mere dollars ahead. Non-Arabic Africa is at the bottom of all of these lists.

Of course, Luxemborg and Norway, at the top of this list, have less people that live in my neighborhood, so it isn’t entirely interesting. The largest population of the top 10 goes to Netherlands, which is equal to the population of Manhattan. Oh, the well run European countries! we often hear. But they are so tiny! Zimbabwe, the very bottom of the list, has about 13 million people with a paltry 48 bucks per head. North Korea’s population is estimated at about 24 million, but that was before last year’s winter, so their total dollars per capita could increase next year in that communist paradise.

Komodo dragons have been eating a lot of people in Indonesia lately and the locals blame environmentalists, as reported by Yaroslav Trofimov at the Wall Street Journal (a subscription is required; or borrow or buy today’s paper).

Apparently, in Indonesia, people used to hunt deer and leave portions of successful hunts to the komodo dragons. They also used to tie up goats as sacrifices. All of this pleased the dragons, which left the humans alone.

Then entered the Environmentalists from the Nature Conservancy, who sought and were awarded a ban on deer hunting. They also had dogs declared an “alien species”, thus outlawing them. Naturally, being sympathetic souls, they also got a ban on goat offerings. The reason they did all this, according to Widodo Ramono, the policy director of the environmentalist organization, was because he feared the komodo was becoming “domesticated.”

But, even though all the people in this group were no doubt armed with many letters after their names, each with multiple “studies” in hand, they forgot that the dragons had to eat.

So the dragons started wandering down to the villages and learned how tasty villagers and the villagers’ livestock were. “[T]oday the dragons are angry with us,” says villager Hajji Faisal, “and see us an enemies.” A man named Jamain, whose son was eaten, said “I don’t blame the dragons for my boy’s death. I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them. If it weren’t for them, my boy would still be alive.”

Nature Conservancy officials think Jamain’s and other villagers’ arguments that the environmentalist policies are to blame are based on “superstition.” They instead accuse Jamain’s son for looking too delicious (no, my dear readers, I am not kidding). In words I believe he has never himself heeded, environmentalist Putri Naga Komodo said of the connection, “You’ve got to be very careful about extrapolating and drawing any conclusions.”

In banning age old practices, I can only ask, wither multiculturalism?

Be sure and read Trofimov’s full story, from which all the quotes were taken.

The insane level of self-regard and idiotic self-indulgent behavior we accept from our celebrities should embarrass us.

There will always be utterly spoiled brats, but that these blots on humanity should be elevated to glorified status such that they are never held accountable for their tantrums is mind boggling.

The disrespectfully-self-named teen-music singer ‘Madonna’ is the latest in an unfortunately long and growing line of such luminaries. At a concert away from her home country yesterday, she played a song, apparently autobiographical, entitled “Get Stupid”, during which John McCain’s “image was flashed up alongside images of destruction and global warming and of Hitler and Mugabe” (from MSN news.)

This is no different than a rotten child going into the home of another and disparaging and disowning her family because she was denied a treat. It is pathetic, cowardly and ordinarily induces disgust on those who witness the spectacle.

But not if that person is a celebrity. Then, even though fans know better, they reach with all their might to seek justification and a reasonable explanation of their idol’s outburst. They should shun the woman, but they don’t want to deny themselves the small entertainment they receive from the simplistic music, so they relax their own morals. In short, the fans only think of their own pleasures, thus effectively mimicking what they have seen.

Well, all that is not new or even unexpected nowadays. This sort of thing is so common that my indignation probably seems out of place and reactionary.

What makes it worse is the reporting. Try Googling “Madonna Hitler” and you will see numerous headlines like this: “McCain camp blasts Madonna’s Hitler dig,” and “McCain staff slams ‘outrageous’ comparison with Hitler by Madonna.” Note the scare quotes around outrageous which, as the philosopher David Stove has taught us, means “not really outrageous but thought by so-and-so to be outrageous.”

The reporters, people who we are repeatedly told are well educated and discerning, cannot bring themselves to say what is obvious. They instead blame the “controversy”, using their best questions-were-raised style of empty prose, and say it is McCain’s staff that is having the problem.

I stole that title from WNBC’s web site, where they have a similarly titled story. The only reason I bring this to your attention—the story itself is ludicrous on its face—is that it is another piece of evidence that either (A) reporters care more about their hair than the organ under it, or (B) reporters are willing to say anything to gain viewers.

Of course, both (A) and (B) might be true.

It’s Friday afternoon; we might as well have a laugh. Here’s the story

Verlyn and Judith Adamson of Mount Horeb each claimed a $350,000 jackpot this week for having the winning numbers in the state SuperCash drawing last Saturday.

But they didn’t mention at the time that they also held two more of the winning tickets.

They claimed two more $350,000 jackpots Thursday. All four were purchased at different locations, but with the same numbers and for the same drawing…Verlyn Adamson, an accountant, said earlier in the week that he’s a big fan of math puzzles. He claims he developed a formula for lottery picks, but his winnings have been small until now.

[Their lawyer] said the Adamsons are “exploring patent protection” for the equation.

OK, I’ll bite. Why mention that they bought the tickers at different locations? It’s the same set of numbers on each ticket for the same drawing! It makes no difference where you bought them. The “reporter” obviously didn’t bother to look up the fact that the SuperCash drawing is a standard ball draw: “Choose 6 different numbers from 1 through 39″ (it took me nearly 30 seconds to find this; time I could have spent combing my hair).

You can, in this lottery, increase your winnings by buying multiple tickets, a practice which must be exceedingly common. But note that the Adamson’s didn’t win four different draws, just the same draw with four tickets with the same numbers. I feel stupid for harping on that observation, but apparently it wasn’t obvious to the “reporter.” It’s also not clear how many winning tickets they had: according to the SuperCash rules, you get two plays per ticket, so if they had four tickets they would have won eight jackpots, not four. Well, who cares about details?

Poor Adamson is now going to dump a substantial portion of his winnings (those not confiscated by the government) on a patent application for a formula for winning the lottery. I doubt his lawyer, who will of course be paid a fee, will discourage them. But I fear (and hope) the Patent Office won’t oblige them in the end.

If I were a cynic, I’d guess Adamson and his lawyer don’t care about the patent. It’s likely that they will be willingly persuaded to part with the formula for a fee, perhaps several times. How else did the “reporter” get the story in the first place?

I wonder how many people who pay for access to his formula will wonder why he’s selling it, because Adamson could make a boatload more by just using it himself.

Oh, yes. The reporter, as he must have learned in J School, provided balance by quoting a mathematician saying (in politer language than this) that Adamson was crazy.

If, and I know the odds of this are vanishingly small, any reader wants to know why such a formula is impossible, just ask and I’ll create a post explaining it.

“The VP speculation continues” is the headline of the day.

Some reporters camped out at Senator Joe Biden’s house and discovered he had visited a bank and a clothing store. This caused trembling and angst. What do these signs mean? Could Biden be withdrawing cash just in case he’ll soon be far from home? And maybe he bought a new tie at that clothing store! And where do you wear ties? At press conferences, such as those announcing VP picks.

Meanwhile, other pundits wonder if the Great Leg Tingler hasn’t really chosen his VP after all, and that he only said so to stall for time.

Are reporters as thick headed as they appear?

Not one of these bright journalism-school graduates hit upon the most likely reason for the delayed announcement: The longer the deferral the more free air time the Leg Tingler gets. They are being led by the nose and not one of them has the guts to say so.

Note carefully that I am not faulting the Democrat nominee: he is doing just as he should, and nothing less than his opponent will soon do. I am instead dismayed at the simple mindedness of the media—yes, even despite all evidence that I should have expected no less.

I had the knife at my throat after reading a paper by Preti, Lentini, and Maugeri in the Journal of Affective Disorders (2007 (102), pp 19-25; thanks to Marc Morano for the link to World Climate Report where this work was originally reported). The study had me so depressed that I seriously thought of ending it all.

Before I tell you what the title of their paper is, take a look at these two pictures:

The first is the yearly mean temperature from 1974 to 2003 in Italy: perhaps a slight decrease to 1980-ish, increasing after that. The second pictures are the suicide rates for men (top) and women (bottom) over the same time period. Ignore the solid line on the suicide plots for a moment and answer this question: what do these two sets of numbers, temperature and suicide, have to do with one another?

If you answered “nothing,” then you are not qualified to be a peer-reviewed researcher in the all-important field of global warming risk research. By failing to see any correlation, you have proven yourself unimaginative and politically naive.

Crack researchers Preti and his pals, on the other hand, were able to look at this same data and proclaim nothing less than “Global warming possibly liked to an enhanced risk of suicide.” (Thanks to BufordP at FreeRepublic for the link to the on-line version of the paper.)

How did they do it, you ask? How, when the data look absolutely unrelated, were they able to show a concatenation? Simple: by cheating. I’m going to tell you how they did it later, but how—and why—they got away with it is another matter. It is the fact that they didn’t get caught which fills me with despair and gives rise to my suicidal thoughts.

Why were they allowed to publish? People—and journal editors are in that class—are evidently so hungry for a fright, so eager to learn that their worst fears of global warming are being realized, that they will accept nearly any evidence which corroborates this desire, even if this evidence is transparently ridiculous, as it is here. Every generation has its fads and fallacies, and the evil supposed to be caused by global warming is our fixation.

Below, is how they cheated. The subject is somewhat technical, so don’t bother unless you want particulars. I will go into some detail because it is important to understand just how bad something can be but still pass for “peer-reviewed scientific research.” Let me say first that if one of my students tried handing in a paper like Preti et alia’s, I’d gently ask, “Weren’t you listening to anything I said the entire semester!”

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