Monthly Archives July 2016

If you get this in email, you may prefer to read this on the Beyond Labels website.

The URL is: https://beyondlabels.ustiger.net/2016/07/notes-18-july-2016/

Pokemon GO is the biggest mobile game in history. Article from Forbes.

Health benefits of Pokemon GO

Pokemon in Blue Hill

Health benefits of Pokemon GO.

Political benefit: Edward Snowden captured.

http://kurdishdna.blogspot.com/2012/06/lactose-tolerance.html

https://xkcd.com/882/

The decline effect wikipidea and New Yorker Article. More thoughts by the original author in New Yorker.

A brief history of Opioids by Atlantic. This is an interactive graphic in the article:

Why did Turkish Coup fail

Analysis of Coup in FiveThirtyEight.com.

Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) talks about “The theater of terror” in the Guardian.

…terror is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties, who are unable to inflict much material damage on their enemies.

This article that Ronald Reagan (and the NRA) favored gun control in California because the Black Panthers armed themselves.

Great analysis of gun laws by state, and its follow-up. Also this post about  trusting studies.

Wikipedia, legal definition of intention.

Definition of negligence.

Comey on carelessness vs negligence.

Grand Juries in America

Scott Adams on Comey

That was the choice for FBI Director Comey. He could either do his job by the letter of the law – and personally determine who would be the next president – or he could take a bullet in the chest for the good of the American public.

He took the bullet.

Thanks to Comey, the American voting public will get to decide how much they care about Clinton’s e-mail situation. And that means whoever gets elected president will have enough credibility to govern effectively.

Extensive survey of research and surveys of research and so on.

Pull quote from the article, below:

I always assumed it obviously didn’t. Then a while ago I read this harshly polemical but research-filled article claiming to prove it did. Then I found a huge review paper on the subject, written by a Harvard professor of sociology, which concluded after analyzing sixty pages of exquisitely-researched studies that:

Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.

Clearly this was more complicated than I thought. I decided to waste my precious free time reading seven zillion contradictory studies to figure out what was going on. Some people on Tumblr have demanded I report back, so here goes: