Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Your Domestic Terror Update

In case you were wondering, yes, all of the suspects on the FBI's Domestic Terrorism list are still of the ideological left.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Saturday, June 07, 2014

Federal Judge Declares Voting "Unconstitutional"

"In any voting situation," stated the judge Ty Rant, "there is inherently the chance voters might vote for something our elites do not favor. As our elites must be catered to in every particular, being that they are better than the hoi polloi, voting must be considered outmoded and something we have progressed beyond."

Judge Sonia Sotomayor immediately signaled her acceptance of judge Rant's opinion.

Monday, June 02, 2014

It's Garbage Like This That Gives Social Science A Bad Name

From the WaPo: Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds

People don’t take hurricanes as seriously if they have a feminine name and the consequences are deadly, finds a new groundbreaking study.
Female-named storms have historically killed more because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes.
Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning  1950 and 2012.  Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities.
The lack of even rudimentary scientific methodology is staggering. For starters, comparing the effects of pre-1970 storms with post-1970 storms is difficult because of an important historical change, namely the introduction of satellites to accurately track hurricanes. This "study" blindly treats these two era the same. Well, they are not the same. Pre-1970 storms (oh, and all of this data was collected from their supporting data) averaged 35.4 deaths per storm. Post-1970 storms averaged 16.8 deaths per storm.

They cannot even make the Prima Facia case for their paper. Male names have only been in use since 1979. Since 1979 male named storms have produced an average of 17.9 deaths. Females storms have produced on average 15.8 deaths per storm.

Honestly, this paper took 15 minutes to completely destroy. How it could be published by the National Academy of Science is beyond me.