Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2013

Canada’s Arctic patrol ship design program just a job creation scheme that doesn’t actually create jobs in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:58

The CBC’s Terry Milewski on the Harper government’s much-heralded shipbuilding program which is far more expensive than it needs to be — because of the demand that the work be done in Canada — and yet somehow doesn’t even manage to create Canadian jobs:

Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose and Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced March 7 in Halifax that Ottawa will pay Irving Shipbuilding $288 million just to design — not build — a fleet of new Arctic offshore patrol ships.

Irving will then build the ships under a separate contract.

However, a survey of similar patrol ships bought by other countries shows they paid a fraction of that $288 million to actually build the ships — and paid less than a tenth as much for the design.

In addition, the design of Canada’s new ships is based upon a Norwegian vessel whose design Ottawa has already bought for just $5 million.

The Norwegian ship, the Svalbard, was designed and built for less than $100 million in 2002.

Experts say the design price is normally 10-20 per cent of the total cost of the ships.

But don’t worry … jobs are being created or saved by this major Canadian government project … in Denmark and in the United States:

Another criticism of the project is that much of the design work — in a project meant to create Canadian jobs — is actually going overseas.

Although Irving will manage the design project in Nova Scotia, it has subcontracted the actual production of final blueprints to a Danish firm, OMT. Seventy Danish ship architects will work on those.

The job of designing the systems integration is going to Lockheed Martin and the propulsion system will be designed by General Electric, both U.S. companies.

This is only to be expected, say supporters of the project.

“We’ve been dormant here for better than two decades now. We don’t have the skill sets inside the industry,” said Ken Hansen, editor of the Canadian Naval Review in Dartmouth, N.S.

Warren Moon says Tim Tebow couldn’t hack it in the CFL

Filed under: Cancon, Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:50

And if there’s anyone in the NFL’s Hall of Fame who also knows what it takes to be a great quarterback in the CFL, it’s Warren Moon:

Hall of Famer Warren Moon said in a radio interview Wednesday that the Canadian Football League is not a viable option for Tim Tebow to prove he can play quarterback, as the former Heisman Trophy winner doesn’t throw the ball well enough to play in the league.

“You have to be able to throw the ball up there, if anything. They throw the ball a lot. It’s only three downs, so the passing game is much more important up there, and there’s a lot more field to cover,” Moon said in an interview with KILT-AM in Houston.

“If you can’t throw the football, it doesn’t matter where you play quarterback,” he said. “You have to be able to throw it. That’s his biggest problem, just being able to complete passes, be an accurate passer. I think he’s a really good athlete playing the position, but I don’t think that’s enough sometimes.”

Tebow cleared waivers on Tuesday after being released by the New York Jets. The Montreal Alouettes, who own his CFL rights, have said they would welcome Tebow to the league — provided he’s willing to compete for a job as a backup quarterback.

[. . .]

Moon played six seasons in the CFL after going undrafted out of Washington in 1978, leading his Edmonton Eskimos to five consecutive Grey Cup titles, throwing for 21,228 yards with 144 touchdowns and 77 interceptions. In 17 NFL seasons, he threw for 49,325 yards, 291 touchdowns and 233 interceptions. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006.

Moon said he thinks that if Tebow wants to continue playing in the NFL, he’ll have to switch to another position. Moon told ESPN Radio’s “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” on Monday, “I don’t think it’s going to happen at the quarterback position for him, at least not in the National Football League. You have to be able to throw the football before everything else happens.

Cherrypicking the result you prefer from a recent Medicaid study

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

Megan McArdle explains why a recent study’s results may be much more important than you might gather from the way it’s been reported so far:

Bombshell news out of Oregon today: a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of what happens to people when they gain Medicaid eligibility shows no impact on objective measures of health. Utilization went up, out-of-pocket expenditure went down, and the freqency of depression diagnoses was lower. But on the three important health measures they checked that we can measure objectively — glycated hemoglobin, a measure of blood sugar levels; blood pressure; and cholesterol levels — there was no significant improvement.

I know: sounds boring. Glycated hemoglobin! I might as well be one of the adults on Charlie Brown going wawawawawawa . . . and you fell asleep, didn’t you?

But this is huge news if you care about health care policy — and given the huge national experiment we’re about to embark on, you’d better. Bear with me.

Some of the news reports I’ve seen so far are somewhat underselling just how major these results are.

“Study: Medicaid reduces financial hardship, doesn’t quickly improve physical health” says the Washington Post.

The Associated Press headline reads “Study: Depression rates for uninsured dropped with Medicaid coverage”

At the New York Times, it’s “Study Finds Expanded Medicaid Increases Health Care Use”

I think Slate is closer to the mark, though a bit, well, Slate-ish: “Bad News for Obamacare: A new study suggests universal health care makes people happier but not healthier.”

This study is a big, big deal. Let me explain why.

A layman’s guide to evaluating statistical claims

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

We’re awash with statistics, 43.2% of which seem to be made up on the spot (did you see what I did there?). Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers offer some guidance on how non-statisticians should approach the numbers we’re presented with in the media:

So how can non-experts and policy makers separate the useful research from the dross? Allow us to offer six rules.

1. Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion. Do the same patterns repeat in many data sets, in different countries, industries or eras? Are the findings fragile, changing as one makes small changes in how phenomena are measured, and do the results depend on whether particularly influential observations are included? Thanks to Moore’s Law of increasing computing power, it has never been easier or cheaper to assess, test and retest an interesting finding. If the author hasn’t made a convincing case, then don’t be convinced.

2. Data mavens often make a big deal of their results being statistically significant, which is a statement that it’s unlikely their findings simply reflect chance. Don’t confuse this with something actually mattering. With huge data sets, almost everything is statistically significant. On the flip side, tests of statistical significance sometimes tell us that the evidence is weak, rather than that an effect is nonexistent. Remember, results can be useful even if they don’t meet significance tests. Sometimes questions are so important that we need to glean whatever meaning we can from available data. The best bad evidence is still more informative than no evidence.

3. Be wary of scholars using high-powered statistical techniques as a bludgeon to silence critics who are not specialists. If the author can’t explain what they’re doing in terms you can understand, then you shouldn’t be convinced. You wouldn’t be convinced by an analysis just because it was written in ancient Latin, so why be impressed by an abundance of Greek letters? Sophisticated statistical methods can be helpful, but they can also hide more than they reveal.

4. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking about an empirical finding as “right” or “wrong.” At best, data provide an imperfect guide. Evidence should always shift your thinking on an issue; the question is how far.

5. Don’t mistake correlation for causation. For instance, even after revisions and corrections, Reinhart and Rogoff have demonstrated that economic growth is typically slower when government debt is higher. But does high debt cause slow growth, or is slow growth in gross domestic product the cause of higher debt-to-GDP ratios? Or are there other important determinants, such as populist spending by a government looking to get re- elected, which is more likely when growth is slow and typically drives debt up?

6. Always ask “so what?” Are the factors that drove the observed negative correlation between debt and GDP likely to exist today, in the U.S.? Does it even make sense to speak of “the” relationship between debt and economic growth, when there are surely many such relationships: Governments borrowing simply to fund their re-election are likely harming growth, while those investing in much-needed public works can provide the foundation for growth. The “so what” question is about moving beyond the internal validity of a finding to asking about its external usefulness.

ESR on the true meaning of moral panics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Eric S. Raymond on the difference between the claimed meaning and the actual, underlying reason for various moral panic incidents:

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude — as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones — like, say, inner-city Detroit — might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

Fraudster who sold fake bomb detectors to Iraq jailed for ten years

Filed under: Britain, Law, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Under the circumstances, a ten year sentence is pretty lenient:

Fraudster James McCormick has been jailed for 10 years for selling fake bomb detectors.

McCormick, 57, of Langport, Somerset perpetrated a “callous confidence trick”, said the Old Bailey judge.

He is thought to have made £50m from sales of more than 7,000 of the fake devices to countries, including Iraq.

The fraud “promoted a false sense of security” and contributed to death and injury, the judge said. He also described the profit as “outrageous”.

Police earlier said the ADE-651 devices, modelled on a novelty golf ball finder, are still in use at some checkpoints.

Sentencing McCormick, Judge Richard Hone said: “You are the driving force and sole director behind [the fraud].”

He added: “The device was useless, the profit outrageous, and your culpability as a fraudster has to be considered to be of the highest order.”

One invoice showed sales of £38m over three years to Iraq, the judge said.

The bogus devices were also sold in other countries, including Georgia, Romania, Niger, Thailand and Saudi Arabia.

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