Quotulatiousness

June 5, 2012

That problematic statistic: the gender wage gap

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

The Washington Post on President Obama’s claim that women only earn 70 cents to each dollar earned by men (later “corrected” to 77 cents):

We were struck by the disparities in the data when we noticed that a news release by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) trumpeted the 77 cent figure, but it included a link to a state-by-state breakdown that gave a different overall figure: 81 cents.

What’s the difference? The 77 cent figure comes from a Census Bureau report, which is based on annual wages. The BLS numbers draw on data that are based on weekly wages. Annual wages is a broader measure — it can include bonuses, retirement pensions, investment income and the like — but it also means that school teachers, who may not work over the summer, would end up with a lower annual wage.

In other words, since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics may be less reliable for examining the key focus of the legislation — wage discrimination. Weekly wages is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but as mentioned, it does not include as many income categories,

The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — it is 86 cents vs. 100 (see Table 9) — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers. But, under this metric for people with a college degree, there is virtually no pay gap at all.

There are so many different ways of slicing the data that you can “prove” almost any proposition. President Obama also claimed that African American women and Hispanic women’s wages are even worse: “64 cents on the dollar for African American women and 56 cents for Hispanic women.”

Not only did the White House pick the statistic that makes the wage gap look the worst, but then officials further tweaked the numbers to make the situation for African Americans and Hispanics look even more dire.

The BLS, for instance, says the pay gap is relatively small for black and Hispanic women (94 cents and 91 cents, respectively) but the numbers used by the White House compare their wages against the wages of white men. Black and Hispanic men generally earn less than white men, so the White House comparison makes the pay gap even larger, even though the factors for that gap between minority women and white men may have little to do with gender.

Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame: joint US-Israeli projects

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The US and Israeli governments have admitted that the Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame malware infections were joint efforts:

American and Israeli officials have finally confirmed that the industrial grade Cyber War weapons (Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame) used against Iran in the last few years were indeed joint U.S.-Israel operations. No other details were released, although many more rumors are now circulating. The U.S. and Israel were long suspected of being responsible for these “weapons grade” computer worms. Both nations had the motive to use, means to build and opportunity to unleash these powerful Cyber War weapons against Iran and other that support terrorism.

The U.S. Department of Defense had long asked for permission to go on the offensive using Cyber War weapons. But the U.S. government regularly and publicly declined to retaliate against constant attack from China, mainly because there were fears that there could be legal repercussions and that weapons used might get out of control and cause lots of damage to innocent parties.

Iran turned out to be another matter. Although not a serious Cyber War threat to the United States, Iran was trying to build nuclear weapons and apparently Israel had already been looking into using a Cyber War weapon to interfere with that. Given the nature of these weapons, which work best if the enemy doesn’t even know they exist, don’t expect many details to be released about this Cyber War program. What is known is that the Cyber War weapons unleashed on Iran were designed to concentrate only on very specific targets. So far, only three weapons that we know of have been used. One (Stuxnet) was designed to do damage to one specific facility, the plant where Iran produced nuclear fuel for power plants, and atomic weapons. That one worked. The other two (Duqu and Flame) were intelligence collection programs. They also apparently succeeded, remaining hidden for years and having lots of opportunity to collect enormous quantities of valuable data.

Signs of hope in Mozambique

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Food, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

An article in the Guardian has some good news about the struggle against malnutrition, but it’s wrapped in misleading language:

All the women belong to the Wapsala Association, a 33-strong agricultural collective created to boost local smallholders, ensure a steady, year-round, supply of high-nutrition foodstuffs in an area prone to chronic shortages, and help end the curse of malnutrition that affects about 44% of all Mozambican children under five.

The Wapsala project is seen by some Mozambican nutrition experts as a paradigm to be emulated in similarly disadvantaged areas of the country and other parts of southern Africa.

The collective’s approach, rooted in public and international funding, contrasts sharply with the prioritisation of private-sector investment, as proposed at the recent G8 summit.

Instead of perpetuating the western focus on food security, the farmers of Wapsala provide a working alternative — what Graciela Romero, the international programmes director of War on Want, calls food sovereignty: a move to promote agrarian reform that favours small producers and the landless, and emphasises local markets and self-sufficiency.

As Tim Worstall points out, the way this initiative is being described is rather at odds with its actual goals:

OK, so we’ve got all the buzz words. Cooperatives, self sufficiency, food sovereignty, local markets and it’s very much anti private-sector investment.

And what is it that they actually want to do?

    “We would like to process other people’s cassava but we have no capacity,” he said. “The South Africans want dried cassava and cassava leaves. Market demand is high but we cannot supply it. We are also expanding our nursery business with trees and other plants — they expand our fruit production. But we are limited due to lack of water. It costs a lot to dig a borehole. The nearest is two kilometres away.”

They, err, want investment so they can export. You know, undermine someone else’s food sovereignty?

So, leaving aside the cant what they’re actually doing it trying to create a community of yeomen farmers who trade in local and regional markets. Not a bad idea at all but entirely different from that cant being spouted.

The US military’s SF research emporium

Filed under: Media, Military, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

John Turner sent me a link to this amusing little survey of what the US military’s R&D organization is willing to admit they’re working on and how it might be helpful in case of an alien invasion:

As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there’s one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our … well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?

Luckily, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as well as some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, are dreaming up the weapons of the future today. With the help of everything from lasers on jets to hypersonic planes to invisibility cloaks, we just might be able to make the battle for Earth a fair fight. You may think we’re joking, but why else would NASA be uploading The Avengers to the International Space Station if not as a training manual? Here’s a look at some of the most space-worthy inventions being cooked up now.

An issue for any unmanned, armed vehicle (whether land, sea or air) is the security of communications from the controller to the vehicle. Recent use of such devices has almost always been in combat against relatively low-tech opponents who did not have jamming or hacking capabilities (although the UAV forced down in Iran may signal the end of the easy period for combat UAVs). Earlier discussions of benefits and drawbacks to unmanned fighters are here, here, and here.

“We do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

You’ve undoubtedly heard lots of recommendations to reduce the salt in your diet, right? The western diet — especially the North American variant — has “too much salt”, and it’s killing us. At least, that’s what has been drummed into our heads for the last twenty years or more. The problem is that is may not actually be true, and in fact may create other health issues:

Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

[. . .]

When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

QotD: The settling of the west (revised edition)

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:03

America was built on the principle that a man could make choices about his own life. This has been a complete failure. You remember when pioneers set out by themselves into the untamed frontier? And you remember what happened to them? That’s right: They all died. Lacking a government to tell them how much soda to drink or salt to eat, they became too obese to run away from bears and mountain lions. It’s a sad chapter in our history, but luckily when people headed out west the next time, they brought lots and lots of government with them and founded California. And thanks to its huge amount of laws telling people what to do, that area has flourished (well, I haven’t read any news about California in a decade or so, but I assume it’s still doing pretty well).

Frank J. Fleming, “The Tyranny of Having Too Many Choices”, PJ Media, 2012-06-04

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