Tag Archives: process

Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: "What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense"

by EmiliaSchwindt Posted on January 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let me start by saying, I don’t know anything about football. I’m from Los Angeles. We don’t have a football team. I went to NYU where the most popular sporting event is the Spring production of Damn Yankees. Up until very recently I thought football was soccer but with players who didn’t have feet, instead their legs ended with sort of rounded nubs—”balls,” if you will—and I thought it was so awful that millions of Americans get together every Sunday—which is the Lord’s day, by the way—to force disabled folk to compete in some sort of blood sport. It’s not that though. It turns out it’s the real life version of NFL Blitz, which it turns out isn’t just a video game. It’s based on a real thing. Anyway, what am I talking about?

Oh yeah! #Deflategate! The Patriots! (Why are they called “the Patriots”? I get that it’s about the American Revolution and Massachusetts played a key role in that but come on, we’re all patriots here, FOX News. Even the Bengals fans.) I don’t like the Patriots because they’re from Boston and Boston is the home of the worst NBA team in the whole wide world, the Celtics, who had the audacity to beat my Los Angeles Lakers a couple of times in the 1980s. Also, the Red Sox! They’re pretty awful! And Boston is a very cold city, at least in the winter. A not-so-long ago history of racism, Boston also has, let’s not forget. And New England clam chowder is garbage compared to Manhattan clam chowder. So, I say this just to be transparent. I don’t think I personally want the Patriots to win the Super Bowl. Maybe I do. The Seahawks don’t sound great. Pate Carroll is apparently a 9/11 truther, which is a turnoff.

Let’s veer this ramble towards the news: #Deflategate! Bill Belichick says he didn’t do it. It wasn’t him. It was Mr Blue in the Library with the piano wire. Or, something. He has a scientific explanation for why the balls were tested to be under-inflated.

“We simulated a game-day situation, in terms of the preparation of the footballs, and where the footballs were at various points in time during the day or night. … I would say that our preparation process for the footballs is what we do —I can’t speak for anybody else — and that process raises the PSI approximately one pound,” Belichick said. “That process of creating a tackiness, a texture — a right feel, whatever that feel is, whatever that feel is. It’s a sensation for the quarterback. What’s the right feel — that process elevates the PSI one pound, based on what our study showed. Which was multiple balls, multiple examples in the process, as we would do for a game.”

I don’t know what any of that really means. It reads like gibberish to me. I, like so many Republican politicians, am not a scientist. Bill Nye is though and he says it’s gibberish too:

“What he said didn’t make any sense…Rubbing the football, I don’t think, can change the pressure.”

And that’s the news. Goodnight and good luck.

P.S. One of the things I was confused about was how deflated balls would give an advantage to a football team, because presumably it would make them less aerodynamic, but as my colleague Tim McDonnell notes, it’s about “grippiness.”

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Bill Nye Slams Bill Belichick: "What He Said Didn’t Make Any Sense"

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The House Just Voted to Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline

by Oliver9602 Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The House of Representative voted overwhelmingly Friday to approve construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. But even with 28 Democrats joining nearly all Republicans in voting “yea,” supporters of the project still fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to override President Barack Obama’s promised veto.

The State Department, which has jurisdiction over the proposed pipeline because it would cross an international boundary, is currently in the process of determining whether the project is in the national interest. The House bill would circumvent that process and force approval of the pipeline. In a statement today reiterating its veto threat, the White House said Obama opposes the bill because it “conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures…and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests.”

The debate will now shift to the US Senate, which is planning to vote on the pipeline next week. Late last year, Senate Republicans came within one vote of the 60 needed to pass a bill to approve the project. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, the Keystone bill will likely pass next week. But as in the House, pipeline supporters will struggle to attract sufficient Democratic votes to override a presidential veto.

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The House Just Voted to Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline

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In Police-Civilian Encounters, Your Eyes May Be Your Worst Enemy

by KristenWhatley Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dan Kahan flags a recent bit of research about cognitive biases as a “run-away winner” in the contest for coolest study of the year. That might be a stretch, but it is pretty interesting.

Basically, it’s about whether police bodycams will help resolve disputes about what really happened in encounters between cops and civilians. There are reasons to think their effectiveness will be limited because even with video evidence, we tend to interpret ambiguous events to fit our preconceived biases. This is similar to the way sports fans interpret instant replays of penalties in ways that favor their home team, and it goes under the generic name of “motivated reasoning.”

So far, so boring. But conventional wisdom and common sense tells us that the way motivated reasoning works is simple: we view the events, and then we interpret them in light of our biases. That turns out not to be the case. The researchers performed a couple of studies based on video clips, one a citizen-police encounter and the other a brawl between two private citizens who wore different colored-shirts. In each case, the test subjects sympathized with one actor vs the other (police officer or suspect in study 1, green-shirt or blue-shirt in study 2). And it turns that motivated reasoning happens way earlier and is even more unconscious than we thought:

The super cool part of the study was that the researchers used an eye-tracking instrument to assess the predicted influence of motivated reasoning on the perceptions of the subjects. Collected without the subjects’ awareness, the eye-tracking data showed that subjects fixed their attention disproportionately on the actor they were motivated to see as the wrongdoer—e.g., the police officer in the case of subjects predisposed to distrust the police in study 1, or the citizen identified as an “out-group” member in study 2.

Wow!

Before reading this study, I would have assumed the effect of cultural cognition was generated in the process of recollection….But GBST’s findings suggest the dynamic that generates opposing perceptions in these cases commences much earlier, before the subjects even take in the visual images.

The identity-protective impressions people form originate in a kind of biased sampling: by training their attention on the actor who they have the greatest stake in identifying as the wrongdoer, people are—without giving it a conscious thought, of course—prospecting in that portion of the visual landscape most likely to contain veins of data that fit their preconceptions.

Kahan suggests that this study “comes at the cost of intensified despair over the prospects for resolving societal conflicts over the appropriateness of the use of violent force by the police.” Perhaps so. Certainly facts and evidence have a poor track record of changing minds, especially when it comes to emotionally charged events that affect our essential worldview. Still, I suspect that if bodycams become widespread, they’ll change minds slowly but steadily. In the same way that years of exposure to TV and movies have turned us into more sophisticated consumers of narrative video, years of regular exposure to bodycam footage may turn us into more sophisticated viewers of police-civilian encounters. We’ll probably know sometime around 2030 or so.

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In Police-Civilian Encounters, Your Eyes May Be Your Worst Enemy

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Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

by IrvingHerndon Posted on July 14, 2014

Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

By

Nicholas A. Tonelli

Blowing up mountains so that their coal-filled bellies can be stripped of their climate-changing innards doesn’t just ruin Southern Appalachian forests. It also poisons the region’s streams, as fragments of rock and soil previously known as mountaintops get dumped into valleys. A government-led study published two weeks ago concluded that this pollution is poisoning waterways, leading to “fewer species, lower abundances, and less biomass.”

Concern about just this kind of water pollution is why the EPA stepped in five years ago using its Clean Water Act mandate to boost environmental oversight of mountaintop-removal mining, creating a joint review process with the Army Corps of Engineers to help that agency assess mining proposals under the Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

The EPA can’t really do anything these days without the attorneys of polluters and the states that they pollute crying foul in court about “agency overreach.” So it was with the EPA’s 2009 “Enhanced Coordination Process.” The National Mining Association, West Virginia, and Kentucky filed suit, and a federal court sided with them. But on Friday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed that decision, issuing a 3-0 ruling in favor of the EPA. The Charleston Gazette reports:

In a significant victory for the Obama administration’s coal policies, a federal appeals court on Friday upheld U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiatives aimed at reducing water pollution from mountaintop removal mining operations. …

“The EPA did its job when it directed its staff to finally follow the law and science, and start protecting Appalachian waters and communities from mountaintop removal mining, which is associated with higher cancer, birth defects and early death for people living nearby,” said Emma Cheuse, an attorney with Earthjustice, which represented citizen groups who sided with the EPA in the case. “The coal industry continually fights for free rein to blow up mountains and dump waste all over Appalachia, and we’re glad to see clean water and healthy communities triumph today.” …

Coalfield elected officials responded with statements harshly criticizing the EPA and the court ruling, and promising legislation that would try to block the EPA from more closely scrutinizing mining operations.

The trade association and states also claimed in their lawsuit that the EPA erred in 2011 when it issued recommendations regarding the need for greater oversight by state and federal staff of mining permits that could affect salinity levels in rivers. The appeals court slapped them down on this point as well.


Source
Temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of fish assemblages downstream from mountaintop mining, Freshwater Science
Appeals court upholds EPA’s mountaintop removal crackdown, The Charleston Gazette

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

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Luis Suárez’s World Cup Bite Was Really Dangerous. Here’s Why.

by John Graham Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, has officially banned Uruguay striker Luis Suárez from the remainder of the World Cup for his alleged bite of Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini this week. And for good reason: Not only is biting another player incredibly unsportsmanlike and just plain dirty; it’s also extremely dangerous.

Of all the bites you can get—nearly 1 percent of emergency room visits are due to mammalian bites of various kinds—the human one is “particularly notorious,” as one study puts it, due to the risk of subsequent infection. Ten percent of human bites that break the skin become infected, quite a high number in comparison with infection rates generally. For example, in a recent study of 297 emergency room patients with lacerations, the infection rate was only 3.4%.

That’s because, to put it bluntly, we have pretty dirty mouths. Human saliva contains some 50 species of bacteria—and 100 million microbes of them per milliliter. There are even reports in the scientific literature of serious diseases resulting from human bites and their subsequent infections, including hepatitis, herpes, and tetanus. (There is even one report of a patient contracting HIV from a bite to the lip.)

The placement of Luis Suárez’s bite was relatively rare: the shoulder. More than half of human bites are on the hands and fingers; only about 18 percent are to the head and neck. One of the most common bite scenarios: One person punches another in the mouth, connects with his teeth, and ends up with a hand wound. One 2003 study found that of emergency room patients arriving with infected human bites, 70 percent were young men, and fifty-six percent of the bites were “clenched fist injuries.”

These so-called “fight bites,” says another 2002 study, are “notorious for being the worst of human bites.” That’s because they can infect certain hand tendons and joints that have “a very limited ability to fight infection.” The authors warn that “significant morbidity can result from late presentation or inadequate initial management” and that “the emergency physician needs to remain vigilant for complications associated with the closed fist injury.”

The research literature also notes that “patients with bite injuries are often intoxicated, making the process of obtaining a reliable history and conducting a thorough examination difficult.” Luis Suárez does not appear to have been drunk, though; and FIFA has a lot of videotape. It does not look like his bite broke Chiellini’s skin, but if it did, let’s hope he gets some very careful medical care.

We discussed the science of the human bite in more detail on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast:

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Luis Suárez’s World Cup Bite Was Really Dangerous. Here’s Why.

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How Much Cleaner Will Obama’s Climate Rules Make Your State?

by OMNSherita Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate strategy—a plan to limit carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s power plants. The main takeaway was that by 2030 the regulations will cut these emissions, the biggest single driver of global warming, by 30 percent compared to 2005 levels. But under the hood, things get a little more complex.

Rather than a consistent national standard, the proposed rule sets a different standard for every state, based on the EPA’s assessment of what each state can realistically achieve using existing technology at a reasonable cost. The goal applies to a state’s carbon intensity, the measure of how much carbon pollution comes from each unit of electricity produced in that state, rather than total carbon emissions. States like Kentucky and West Virginia, for example, rely heavily on coal power and have a higher carbon intensity than states like California that are more energy-efficient and have more renewable energy. By 2030, each state will be required to meet a carbon intensity target lower than where it is today; how much lower, exactly, depends on what the EPA thinks the state can pull off.

States will have broad leeway to devise individual plans to meet their targets, which could include installing air-scrubbing technology on plants themselves, adopting more robust energy efficiency standards, or switching from coal to cleaner sources like natural gas or renewables.

Here’s a ranking of which states will have to shrink their carbon footprint the most:

Tim McDonnell

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How Much Cleaner Will Obama’s Climate Rules Make Your State?

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Here’s Mindy Kaling’s Hilarious Speech to Harvard Law: "You Will Defend BP From Birds."

by TysonGoldfarb Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s actress/comedian Mindy Kaling speaking at this year’s Harvard Law School Class Day on Wednesday:

With this diploma in hand, most of you will go on to the noblest of pursuits, like helping a cable company acquire a telecom company. You will defend BP from birds. You will spend hours arguing that the well water was contaminated well before the fracking occurred. One of you will sort out the details of my prenup. A dozen of you will help me with my acrimonious divorce. And one of you will fall in love in the process.

Later, on a more serious note, Kaling urged graduates to “please just try to be the kind of people who give advice to celebrities, not the other way around.” She continued: “You are entering a profession where no matter how bad the crime, or the criminal, you have to defend the alleged perpetrator. That’s incredible to me.”

You can check out other highlights from her speech here, and you should watch the whole thing above.

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Here’s Mindy Kaling’s Hilarious Speech to Harvard Law: "You Will Defend BP From Birds."

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John Oliver Explains Why He Attacked Mitch McConnell With an Old, Wrinkly Penis

by ConnieMobley Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

On Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver and his crew got… graphic.

During one of the segments, Oliver discussed the state of the American political attack ad, and argued that as more money floods into the system, the quality of the ads declines. He said that the only way attack ads could get any worse would be if they were shown on cable TV, which doesn’t have to abide by network content standards. To demonstrate the point, the LWT crew made a pair of fake attack ads for the Kentucky Senate race between Alison Lundergan Grimes and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“For too long, politics in Washington have been dominated by old, white, wrinkled dicks,” the narrator says in the fake anti-McConnell ad. “And no dick is older, whiter, or wrinklier than Mitch McConnell’s.”

And then viewers are treated to a shot of an old, wrinkled penis that is supposed to represent Mitch McConnell.

Watch:

Try unseeing that. You can’t.

Anyway, I talked to Oliver on Tuesday to get the inside scoop on the humor and the horror that is his show’s old, wrinkly attack ad. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

MJ: Whose idea was it, if you recall, and whose penis did you use?

JO: Okay, those are two excellent questions. The first one, I’m not sure, and it might help to just go with collective responsibility. I don’t want to go with a sort of “I am Spartacus” moment but I think plausible deniability might be useful at that point. The second is the much more interesting question. And that is that, of course, you do need to cast a penis. And to do that you have to be presented with a selection of penii—I don’t know if that’s the collective term. And so then what you’re looking for—it’s amazing—when you look at then you start judging them for the purpose, because you want something that is funny but not sad. Because, you know, a sad penis does not help the comedy. No, it makes you think about the person the penis is attached to. So really, you just want a representative old man penis. And I’m not sure that sentence…has ever been said out loud before…We got to one that we liked, and the owner of that penis was generous enough to model it for us.

MJ: How did you get to one you liked? Like, what is the process of “getting” penii?

JO: We went through photos. It was basically the penis version of a headshot.

MJ: So this was like models?

JO: Models, basically. And you go through and say, “This one’s good, this one’s good, let’s get down to a short-list. Okay, it’s between these three. Um. I like this one.” And then what you do is you make a decision, you walk out of a room, and you stare out a window and question what the fuck you’re doing with your life…That’s basically how it goes.

MJ: I’m assuming you weren’t in the room when they shot it?

JO: I actually wasn’t because we were having to write…But apparently the man was very happy…I just came back and our editor, she had to live with that footage for a few days, but she did a fantastic job.

MJ: Has she recovered, psychologically?

JO: Yeah, she was very good. She’s called Cori McKenna, and she actually edited both the commercials…The other commercial was basically a chainsaw massacre in a mine involving a kitten, and I think she found that slightly less alarming to cut together than a sequence of beautiful tracking shots of an old man’s junk.

So there you have it.

My full interview with Oliver with be featured on Friday’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, so stay tuned.

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John Oliver Explains Why He Attacked Mitch McConnell With an Old, Wrinkly Penis

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Northwestern’s Football Team Just Voted on Unionization. Here’s What Happens Next.

by SusannahGiles Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Northwestern University football players voted on unionization today following a push from current and former athletes, a regional labor board hearing in their favor, and a concerted effort by university officials to convince players to vote no. Now that ballots have been cast, the landscape of college sports has been…well, it’s pretty much the same. For now, at least.

While the votes have been cast, they will not be counted until the National Labor Relations Board headquarters in Washington, DC, rules on whether the athletes are employees, which could take months. The board’s Chicago region found that they were, but Northwestern appealed that decision. The university has been active in pushing players not to unionize: Football players received iPads and were thrown a party at a bowling alley the first day of practice, though Northwestern officials said it was unrelated to the upcoming union vote. Head coach Pat Fitzgerald emailed the team that they might not be able to trust a union, and that the downside of organizing is much bigger than the upside. “You have nothing to gain by forming a union,” he wrote, keeping with the school’s theme that players have plenty to lose but their chains.

Just by securing the right for players to vote on representation, though, union advocates say they’ve already won. “Today is special because college athletes exercised their rights under labor laws, rights the NCAA has fought hard to deny them,” said Ramogi Huma, president of the College Athletes Players Association, which will represent the players if they vote to unionize. “Today’s vote clearly demonstrates that amateurism is a myth and that college athletes are employees.”

The results of the vote will only matter if the NLRB upholds the decision that the football players are Northwestern employees. If players voted no, the status quo will remain and players will be free to vote again next year (and every year after that). If they voted yes, Northwestern will likely refuse to bargain, which would take the case to federal court, dragging the process out even longer.

It may be a slow march, but the fight for unionization—led by Huma and former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter—is already paying dividends. Last week the NCAA removed restrictions on food for athletes, and president Mark Emmert told ESPN that the NCAA will likely vote on covering the difference between a scholarship and a full cost of college attendance, as well as adding an extra year of eligibility for players who are forced to sit out a year after transferring to another school. While those solutions aren’t exactly what the union has called for, they are the first of what will likely be many compromises as players and advocates keep the pressure on.

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Northwestern’s Football Team Just Voted on Unionization. Here’s What Happens Next.

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Here’s What Fracking Can Do to Your Health

by LakeshaBabin Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you know one thing about fracking, it might be that the wells have been linked to explosive tap water. Of course, a tendency toward combustion isn’t the biggest problem with gas-infused water; it’s what could happen to you when you drink it.

Although the natural gas industry is notoriously tight-lipped about the ingredients of the chemical cocktails that get pumped down into wells, by now it’s widely known that the list often includes some pretty scary, dangerous stuff, including hydrochloric acid and ethylene glycol (a.k.a. antifreeze). It’s also no secret that well sites release hazardous gases like methane and benzene (a carcinogen) into the atmosphere.

So just how dangerous are fracking and other natural gas extraction processes for your health (not counting, for the sake of argument, explosions and earthquakes)? Is it true, as an activist-art campaign by Yoko Ono recently posited, that “fracking kills”?

The answer to that second question is probably not, especially in the short term and if you don’t work on or live across the street from a frack site (which, of course, some people in fact do). But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to start fracking away next to kindergartens and nursing homes: Gas extraction produces a range of potentially health-endangering pollutants at nearly every stage of the process, according to a new paper by the California nonprofit Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy Energy, released today in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Institutes of Health.

The study compiled existing, peer-reviewed literature on the health risks of shale gas drilling and found that leaks, poor wastewater management, and air emissions have released harmful chemicals into the air and water around fracking sites nationwide.

“It’s clear that the closer you are, the more elevated your risk,” said lead author Seth Shonkoff, a visiting public health scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. “We can conclude that this process has not been shown to be safe.”

Shonkoff cautioned that existing research has focused on cataloging risks, rather than linking specific instances of disease to particular drilling operations—primarily because the fracking boom is so new that long-term studies of, say, cancer rates, simply haven’t been done. But as the United States and the world double down on natural gas as a cleaner alternative to coal (as this week’s UN climate change solutions report suggests), Shonkoff argues policymakers need to be aware of what a slew of fracked wells could mean for the health of those who live near them.

Even given the risks involved in producing natural gas, it’s still a much healthier fuel source than coal; particulate pollution from coal plants killed an estimated 13,000 Americans in 2010, while a recent World Health Organization study named air pollution (to which coal burning is a chief contributor) the single deadliest environmental hazard on earth.

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Here’s What Fracking Can Do to Your Health

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