Let Math Save Our Democracy

Here’s where the average-median difference comes in. Across all 30 districts in Arizona State Senate races, the Democrats won an average of 46.1 percent of the vote. The median outcome was 42.8 percent. The median Democratic vote share was less than the average by 3.3 percentage points, a direction that slightly benefited Republicans — the opposite of the plaintiffs’ contention. By well-established statistical criteria, even this difference could have arisen by chance, rather than partisan intent. In State House races, the difference was an even smaller gap of 1.7 percentage points. Over all, Democrats won 39 percent of all state legislative seats. If the commission was trying to show special favor to Democrats, it did a poor job.

I have come up with additional tests to identify other consequences of gerrymandering. One is to ask whether one party’s winning margins are more lopsided than the other side’s. For example, in the Pennsylvania congressional election of 2012, Democrats won only 5 out of 18 congressional House seats, despite winning slightly more than half of the statewide vote. Democratic winners garnered an average of 76 percent of the vote, while Republican winners won 59 percent. Statistically speaking, this 17-point difference would arise by chance less than 1 percent of the time.

Simple criteria for identifying gerrymanders would be of great use. The Supreme Court has never rejected a voting district for giving a political party an advantage. Justice Antonin Scalia has previously attempted to shut the door on questions of partisan gerrymandering, pointing out that legal battles have “almost invariably produced the same result (except for the incurring of lawyers’ fees).”

A majority of the court, however, supports the idea of finding a test that measures partisan asymmetry. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who in the past has provided the deciding vote on this question, has stated his desire to find a workable means of identifying partisan gerrymanders. Either the average-median difference or the lopsided-margin test could serve such a function. Justice Kennedy can have them both.

Statistical tests can be used by courts to throw out meritless cases while freeing up time for investigation of true offenses. These tests can supplement other existing legal mandates, such as Ohio’s recently passed requirement for districts to be geographically compact. Conversely, the tests allow oddly shaped district boundaries, which are sometimes needed to comply with Voting Rights Act requirements. My tests can also be combined with sophisticated methods for examining single districts in detail. Finally, a statewide statistical approach might even be used to test proposed plans before they go into effect.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

- Abraham Lincoln

Wisdom Of The Week

Training for combat is about changing the brain. Decades of neuroscience research have firmly shown that the brain is highly adaptable and that repeated activities designed to create specific behaviors—like combat training—literally “change cellular structure and strength of connections between neurons.”At the rifleman level, training teaches soldiers to respond reflexively to situations that demand a spontaneous conditioned response, such as engaging an enemy fighter at close range. It is the same behavioral process that professional athletes apply to develop the fine-tuned motor skills needed in competition.

This learning process also applies to activities that demand higher cognitive ability, such as detailed planning for a combat operation or reacting to a complex attack. A way to train this capability would be to construct an exercise that requires leaders to undergo physical or fear-induced stress and then perform deliberate, time-constrained planning for an ambiguous situation. This could be a simple puzzle-solving activity or a complicated vignette-based planning exercise that incorporates combat systems. This “cognitive stress shoot” would allow leaders to discover their personal responses to stress and identify useful techniques to overcome the cognitive disabilities associated with it.

Units should also structure training to present multiple streams of information and detectable patterns of enemy activity that will teach leaders what to look for. Historical battle accounts reveal that small changes in the environment, like a lack of regular street activity, can sound subconscious alarms. Constructing patterns in training and then altering them can teach leaders to listen to their hunches and be extra vigilant when “something doesn’t feel right.” Incorporating collateral battlefield elements, like a civilian populace, challenges leaders to cognitively analyze the situation and think beyond the battle drill.

On the individual level, leaders should develop personal cognitive battle drills that better prepare them for the mental challenges of combat. They should rehearse exactly what words they will use to report an initial contact and what guidance they anticipate issuing in the opening moments of a battle. These drills create neural circuitry that is familiar to the brain when the actual event happens, thus making it easier to execute with calm and confidence.

These drills serve as a personal routine that primes the individual to control stress, sense subconscious patterns, engage cognitive problem solving, and lead with emotional control. Then, by adding the element of physical danger or stress to the scenario, leaders can adapt to perform the cognitive thinking despite emotional distraction. David Rock notes, “People who succeed under pressure have learned to be in a place of high arousal but maintain a quiet mind, so that they can still think clearly. Over time and with practice, this capacity can become an automatic resource. The brain can be wired to deal better with emotions.” This adaptation will develop mental fitness for leaders that may prove to be crucial in the unit’s future battles.

Leaders must learn where they should position themselves on the battlefield to facilitate their cognitive responsibilities. Despite mission, terrain, or movement technique, leaders must discern what position allows them to survey all aspects of the fight.[55] As much as possible, they should directly observe their soldiers and get information real time without compromising their ability to keep a macro view. Conversely, soldiers expect to see their leaders at the proverbial “front” and cannot respect leaders who are never among them. Finding this balance is part of what makes leadership an art.

- What Combat Leaders Need to Know About Neuroscience

Quote of the Day

 

Quote of the Day

I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.

- Eric Kandel

Robert Trivers Wild Life - A Documentary on His Life

Robert Trivers Wild Life from Susan Kucera's site on Vimeo.

Quote of the Day

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

- Matt Ridley, Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Wading Through the Hype about CRISPR

George Church, a CRISPR pioneer from Harvard University sees possible paths from these legitimate uses to more dubious ones. “I think enhancement will creep in the door in terms of treating serious diseases,” he says. Someone who is losing their faculties to Alzheimer’s disease might turn to gene-editing to stem their cognitive decline. “Then, someone younger with a super high risk of the disease. Then, a business executive who wants to get ahead of the game. Then that same executive who wants to fix his sperm cells.”

But gene-editing might be totally impractical for fixing common diseases, because they are typically influenced by legions of genes. If you took people with the highest risk of, say, schizophrenia, you’d probably need to CRISPR thousands of genes to bring their odds back down to average levels. That’s a terrible idea, for reasons we’ll get to.

The same is true for attributes like intelligence, height, sporting ability, or personality traits, which involve small contributions from thousands of genes, and a massive dollop of environmental influence on the side. “The dishes do not come à la carte,” writes Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “If you believe that made-to-order babies are possible, you oversimplify how genes work.”

So, no matter how precisely we can edit genes, there are some things we won’t be able to edit our way out of—and certainly not safely. Genes rarely do one thing. Those thousands of edits will ripple through the body in unexpected ways. For example, deleting the CCR5 gene would make people resistant to HIV, but also make them 13 times more likely to die of West Nile virus. Tweaking their FUT2 gene might make them less likely to develop Type 1 diabetes but also make them vulnerable to norovirus.

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Quote of the Day

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

- Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school . . . it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

- Hentry David Thoreau