Quotulatiousness

October 13, 2013

Schools with anti-bullying programs more likely to produce bullies

Filed under: Education, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

A counter-intuitive study result from the University of Texas – Arlington:

Anti-bullying initiatives have become standard at schools across the country, but a new UT Arlington study finds that students attending those schools may be more likely to be a victim of bullying than children at schools without such programs.

The findings run counter to the common perception that bullying prevention programs can help protect kids from repeated harassment or physical and emotional attacks.

“One possible reason for this is that the students who are victimizing their peers have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs,” said Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at UT Arlington and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Criminology.

“The schools with interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that.’ But through the programs, the students become highly exposed to what a bully is and they know what to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers,” Jeong said.

The study suggested that future direction should focus on more sophisticated strategies rather than just implementation of bullying prevention programs along with school security measures such as guards, bag and locker searches or metal detectors. Furthermore, given that bullying is a relationship problem, researchers need to better identify the bully-victim dynamics in order to develop prevention policies accordingly, Jeong said.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

Adrian Peterson’s personal tragedy

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I didn’t post about this yesterday, first because the news was still rather confused (some sites claiming other sites had fallen for a cruel hoax) and second because the story was still unfolding. Vikings running back Adrian Peterson’s son died after what appears to have been a beating from his mother’s boyfriend. This isn’t Adrian Peterson Jr., but another child the media didn’t know about until Friday.

In spite of the tragic news about his son, Adrian Peterson said he intended to play in today’s game against the Carolina Panthers, which has surprised some of the fanbase. The Star Tribune‘s Jim Souhan explains:

Of all the fiery rings of imaginable hell, none could possibly sear the soul like the loss of a child.

Adrian Peterson’s son died this week. This is the worst loss a human can suffer, and it happened in the worst possible way. A man allegedly beat his 2-year-old son to death.

When he was 7, Peterson watched his older brother get hit by a drunken driver and die.

While he attended the NFL combine, he learned of a half-brother being shot and killed.

Now, he has lost a son. He will grieve, and it appears he will play football while grieving.

How do athletes do this? How do they summon the competitiveness to play a game while bearing a heavy heart and a cluttered mind?

How will Adrian Peterson?

To the layman, the concept of playing a game while grieving makes little sense. No one would want to go to the office on the day their son died.

Great athletes are different from us in many ways, and this is one of those ways.

Games are their milieu. As hoary as the cliché has become, teams are their temporary families. The playing field is where they pour out their emotions, where they honor those they love.

If Peterson decides to play on Sunday, he will not be demonstrating insensitivity to his personal tragedy. He will not be displaying misguided priorities, or placing football above real life. There is no correct choice for Peterson to make, only the choice that allows him to grieve as he sees fit.

If he decides to play, he will be honoring his son the best way he knows how.

QotD: Luck of the draw

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

When the time came for us to leave Persia and make the long trek back to Iraq, we stopped again for a few days with Robertson in Kermanshah. Then I said good-bye to my host, my Persian friends, and to his house with keen regret — with, as a matter of fact, a secret personal regret.

As a junior officer in the first World War, I had been presumptuous enough sometimes to hope that if I survived and were not found out, I might with tremendous luck, by the time the next great war arrived, be a general. Then, I fondly imagined my headquarters would move from château to château, from which I would occasionally emerge, fortified by good wine and French cooking, to wish the troops the best of luck in their next attack. Alas, when the time did come and, by good fortune in the game of military snakes and ladders, I found myself a general, I was so inept in my choice of theatres that no châteaux were available. More often than not, I had to make do with a plot of desert sand, a tree in the African bush, or a patch of jungle, while my cuisine was based on bully beef and the vintages of my imagination were replaced by over-chlorinated water. Once or twice, however, I did get, if not my château with its chef and its cellar, at least an excellent substitute — an oil company bungalow. Once having sampled its comfort I would not have swapped Robertson’s house for all the châteaux of the Loire. Dug in there, a delectable future had spread before me in which I achieved my youthful ambition and conducted the war from linen-sheeted bed and luxurious long bath. But, like other youthful hopes, the vision faded. I was once more, had I known it, destined to châteaux-less wilderness.

Field Marshal William Slim, “Persian Pattern”, Unofficial History, 1959.

October 12, 2013

Not news: people under-report calorie intake, invalidating 40 years of federal research

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

Any study that depends on self-reporting, especially self-reporting on things like how much food they eat, can’t be assumed to be accurate:

Four decades of nutrition research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be invalid because the method used to collect the data was seriously flawed, according to a new study by the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina.

The study, led by Arnold School exercise scientist and epidemiologist Edward Archer, has demonstrated significant limitations in the measurement protocols used in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The findings, published in PLOS ONE (The Public Library of Science), reveal that a majority of the nutrition data collected by the NHANES are not “physiologically credible,” Archer said.

[…]

The study examined data from 28,993 men and 34,369 women, 20 to 74 years old, from NHANES I (1971 — 1974) through NHANES (2009 — 2010), and looked at the caloric intake of the participants and their energy expenditure, predicted by height, weight, age and sex. The results show that — based on the self-reported recall of food and beverages — the vast majority of the NHANES data “are physiologically implausible, and therefore invalid,” Archer said.

In other words, the “calories in” reported by participants and the “calories out,” don’t add up and it would be impossible to survive on most of the reported energy intakes. This misreporting of energy intake varied among participants, and was greatest in obese men and women who underreported their intake by an average 25 percent and 41 percent (i.e., 716 and 856 Calories per-day respectively).

Souhan’s steps to turning the Viking ship around

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:31

In the Star Tribune, Jim Souhan has a few suggestions for head coach Leslie Frazier and general manager Rick Spielman that might just set the Vikings on course for a playoff berth this year:

1. Transition to Josh Freeman as quickly as possible.

Even when Christian Ponder was at his best, he didn’t take full advantage of defenses crowding the line of scrimmage to stop Adrian Peterson. Matt Cassel, while playing well last week, didn’t even take full advantage because he threw inaccurately on deep routes.

Whatever his flaws, Freeman is willing and able to throw deep, and he is working with quality receivers. If the Vikings can force defenses to choose between stopping Peterson and stopping the deep passing game, the offense could become unstoppable.

2. Keep Peterson on the field.

[…]

3. Find a role for Patterson.

It’s simplistic to say that rookie receiver Cordarrelle Patterson should be on the field all the time. Peterson is most productive when running behind fullback Jerome Felton. Kyle Rudolph is a Pro Bowl tight end. Greg Jennings should be the No. 1 receiver, and Jerome Simpson has made the most of his opportunities this season. Put Patterson on the field, and either Felton, Rudolph or Simpson has to come off.

While playing Patterson for a tremendous number of snaps might not make sense, getting him the ball more often when he takes the field is common sense. At the very least, Patterson should be on the field when Felton is not. Patterson might be the second-most-spectacular athlete on the roster, after Peterson. He should play a larger role.

4. Put Bishop on the field.

Vikings linebackers are having a terrible season as a whole. Desmond Bishop might not be the player he once was, he may not even be an every-down linebacker, but he’s good enough to start for this defense.

5. Put Rhodes on the field.

Josh Robinson should not be starting at cornerback in the NFL. Rookie Xavier Rhodes might make some mistakes if he replaces Robinson as a starter, but he’s a superior athlete who will also make positive plays. Robinson is the weakest link on what has been a mediocre defense.

This is a season of positional turmoil for the Vikings, and some areas where the team has traditionally had solid play are much weaker than anyone expected. The whole defence has taken a few steps back and even the strong individual performers are not as good this year as in previous seasons (Harrison Smith, Chad Greenway, even Jared Allen and Kevin Williams). Cornerback Josh Robinson has been cover-your-eyes awful in coverage … almost everything thrown his way gets caught, and often for big gains. Marcus Sherels, who most people assumed only made the team due to his special team work, has been one of the most efficient defensive backs this year, but he’s one of the few bright spots on the defensive roster. Xavier Rhodes has played hot and cold, but he’s certainly demonstrated that he should be ahead of Robinson on the depth chart. Chris Cook is — all together now — coming back from injury, and it’s not clear if he’ll be healthy soon.

I realize that Leslie Frazier has a strong desire to protect his veteran players and bring rookies up to speed gradually, but Patterson and Rhodes have certainly played well enough so far to earn more playing time. I don’t know that Bishop is as solid, but the linebackers are another group not playing up to expectations … let’s find out if Bishop can return to his earlier form.

Afghan troops and abandoned tribal traditions

Filed under: Asia, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Strategy Page explains why Afghan soldiers will not be giving up the “spray and pray” combat style any time soon:

While Afghans admire the superior fighting ability of NATO troops, they have a difficult time adopting the equipment and techniques that make these foreigners more lethal and less vulnerable on the battlefield. The problem is that most Afghans are still basically tribal warriors at heart. In a battle even those with good shooting skills will fire wildly and move about with more spirit than sense. The average Afghan, brought up to follow the traditional warrior traditions, is not trained to carry out a lot of smart battlefield moves and is easily panicked. The Pushtun tribesmen of this part of the world have a tradition of fleeing a lost battle and not fighting to the last man. Thus, if you can make the Afghans think they are about to be surrounded by superior forces they will flee. U.S. and Afghan government forces not only have better training and leadership but also know these traditional tribal tactics and how best to exploit them.

The problem NATO trainers and advisors have is that too many Afghan troops and police will, under the stress of combat, revert back to their tribal ways. That means going head-to-head with the enemy for a shootout and maybe even some hand-to-hand action. The NATO advisors who accompany most Afghan battalions, to observe how well the training is used and advise on how to deal with problems, find that the Afghan commanders and NCOs have a hard time stopping their troops from going old school and often just go along with it. This despite the fact that the Afghan commanders are smart guys and are well aware of how much more effective the Western tactics are. But the Afghan commanders also realize that once most foreign troops are gone at the end of 2014, there may be no more NATO air support and it may take a while before the Afghan Air Force can provide much smart bomb capability. So it makes some sense to develop tactics that combine Western and Afghan methods. The NATO advisors are thinking short term while the Afghan commanders are taking the long view.

[…]

The decline of the traditional Afghan marksmanship dates back three decades. Back before the Russians showed up in 1979, the best weapon an Afghan could hope to have was a World War II, or World War I, era bolt action rifle. These weapons were eclipsed in the 1980s by a lot of free (for Afghans fighting the invading Russians) AK-47s and the RPG rocket launchers. The young guys took to the AK-37 and the thrill of emptying a 30 round magazine on full automatic. Not bad for a brief firefight and suddenly hardly anyone, except a few old timers, wanted to use the old bolt action rifle or learn how to hit anything with single shots. The RPG rocket launcher became the favored way to take out long-distance (up to 500 meters) targets. It was portable artillery for the tribal warrior and great fun for a warrior to use.

It was not noticed much outside of Afghanistan that this shift in weaponry brought to an end a long Afghan tradition of precision, long range shooting. Before the 1980s, this skill was treasured for both hunting and warfare. When doing neither, Afghan men played games centered on marksmanship. One, for example, involved a group of men chipping in and buying a goat. The animal was then tethered to a rock, often on a hill, and then the half dozen or so men moved several hundred meters away and drew lots to see who would fire in what order. The first man to drop the goat won it. Since Afghanistan was the poorest nation in Asia, ammo was expensive, and older men taught the young boys all the proper moves needed to get that first shot off accurately and make it count.

Not quite as I remember it (from hiding behind the settee in the living room)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Published on 10 Oct 2013

Trailer for the newly-recovered and remastered Patrick Troughton Doctor Who episode The Enemy of the World. Unseen in the UK for 45 years, and formerly considered missing, The Enemy of the World sees Troughton play the dual-role of the Doctor and also Salamander – the “saviour of the world”. Or is he… Also starring Frazer Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria.

October 11, 2013

The “truth” about the “Illuminati”

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:34

Jesse Walker is invited to free-associate on a series of words or phrases by the staff of TNB. One of the terms they just happened to mention was “Illuminati”:

The Bavarian Illuminati — the actual historical organization, not the all-powerful cabal of legend — were founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed about a decade later. They weren’t the first group to call themselves Illuminati, and they weren’t the first Illuminati to appear in a New World conspiracy theory. In Chiapas in the 1580s, a bishop became convinced that some of the local Indians were “giving cult to the Devil and plotting against our Christian religion.” The secret sect’s beliefs, he added, resembled those of the Spanish heretics known as the Alumbrados, or Illuminati.

But the Bavarians were the biggies. Their alleged machinations set off a panic in Federalist circles at the end of the 1790s. The New England minister Jedidiah Morse sermonized that he had “an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of *Illuminati* … consisting of *one hundred* members”; among other things, the plotters allegedly had a plan “to invade the southern states from [Haiti] with an army of blacks … to excite an insurrection among the negroes.” Another Federalist writer warned that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the cabal. The order entered pop culture, too. In Sally Wood’s novel *Julia and the Illuminated Baron*, published in 1800 and set in prerevolutionary France, a lady Illuminatus describes their initiation ceremony: “disrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered.” She adds, “This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins.”

In the 20th century the Illuminati became stock villains on the far right, appearing alternately as a revolutionary force and as the secret rulers of the world. In the 1960s they started cropping up in countercultural and leftist tales too, thanks partly to some pranksters who thought it would be fun to seed the underground press with stories about Illuminati activities. A couple of those pranksters wrote the cult novel Illuminatus! in the 1970s, and that helped re-inject the idea into mass culture. These days, of course, the Illuminati are everywhere. Er, I mean *stories about* the Illuminati are everywhere.

All of these theories are quite clearly mistaken or deliberately fraudulent … unlike the shadowy Council of 300!

Creating an “air gap” for computer security

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Bruce Schneier explains why you’d want to do this … and how much of a pain it can be to set up and work with:

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible.

I also recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer or local network of computers from the Internet. (The name comes from the literal gap of air between the computer and the Internet; the word predates wireless networks.)

But this is more complicated than it sounds, and requires explanation.

Since we know that computers connected to the Internet are vulnerable to outside hacking, an air gap should protect against those attacks. There are a lot of systems that use — or should use — air gaps: classified military networks, nuclear power plant controls, medical equipment, avionics, and so on.

Osama Bin Laden used one. I hope human rights organizations in repressive countries are doing the same.

Air gaps might be conceptually simple, but they’re hard to maintain in practice. The truth is that nobody wants a computer that never receives files from the Internet and never sends files out into the Internet. What they want is a computer that’s not directly connected to the Internet, albeit with some secure way of moving files on and off.

He also provides a list of ten rules (or recommendations, I guess) you should follow if you want to set up an air-gapped machine of your own.

Jonah Goldberg on Scooby Doo

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

For this week’s Goldberg File email, Jonah Goldberg ran an old piece from some time in the last few years, talking about the cultural implications of the TV show Scooby Doo:

So my daughter and I have been talking about Scooby Doo a lot. She thinks the show, in all its myriad incarnations, is riveting. She will interrupt conversations with “Oh, Daddy, did you know …” and I will expect to hear about something from school or from her daily life, and she will commence to tell me something about Shaggy or Velma or Scooby.

The show has gone through a lot of changes over the years (the Wikipedia entry is disturbingly interesting; one of these days I must remember to carve it into a great chain of toilet seats). In case you didn’t know, the show now features real monsters and ghosts quite often. Not always, but often enough. For decades, the monsters weren’t real, merely the attempts of hucksters and con men. Now the makers of the show teach little kids that there really are vampires and witches.

At first, I thought this scandalous. I always thought the point of the show was to teach little kids not to be scared of things that go bump in the night.

But this is actually the least offensive thing about the show. Bear with me.

Recently, I caught the tail end of one of the newer episodes, and I was dismayed to discover that the perpetrator of the scary hoax was not the bad guy. He was something of an environmentalist/historic preservationist who wanted to keep some greedy corporate fat cats from developing some land. It seemed like something close to an endorsement of ecoterrorism.

Obviously, I was going to turn this revelation into an NR cover story. But as I pondered it, I thought more deeply about the original series. The show starts in 1969. The kids of Mystery Inc., who seem to have absolutely no parental supervision, are clearly counter-cultural. Freddie may not be gay, but he wears an ascot, and, for anyone under the age of 60, that alone is an invitation to a beating. And given that the show was launched in 1969, he may just be dressing that way to duck the draft. (Indeed, why the heck aren’t Fred and Shaggy knee-deep in some rice paddy somewhere?) Velma, meanwhile, certainly looks like she runs a pottery shop in Burlington, Vt., if you know what I mean.

And Shaggy, well, he’s a filthy hippy who always has the munchies. ‘Nuff said.

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:55

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The first October release is coming next week and will feature the return of some content from the original Halloween event. Blood and Madness will be released on Tuesday and we have previews of the new and updated content. In addition, we’ve also got the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Alice Munro’s Nobel a vote of confidence for other Canadian dissidents

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:10

The Washington Post‘s Max Fisher plays it straight with this report on the recent Nobel Prize awarded to “dissident Canadian writer Alice Munro”:

Munro has long been celebrated by Western writers. American novelist Cynthia Ozick once described her as “our Chekhov,” comparing her to the Russian playwright known for challenging Russia’s restrictive Tsar-era social codes.

State media in Canada reacted positively to the news, calling it a great victory for the Canadian nation and the state ideology. Still, Munro is expected to come under intense pressure from Canadian exile communities, who are already calling on the author to use this moment to focus greater attention on the lack of political freedoms in Canada.

Rights groups such as Amnesty International are urging Ottawa to allow Munro permission to travel abroad to accept the prize in December. Though Canadian Nobel winners have been permitted to fly to Oslo to accept the prize in years past, the political nature of Munro’s work and recent Canadian tensions with the European Union have called this into question.

In the meantime, some of Munro’s admirers in the West have expressed hope that the author’s works may finally be fully translated into English.

QotD: Political memoirs

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Any statement in a politician’s memoirs can represent one of six different levels of reality:
a. What happened.
b. What he believed happened.
c. What he would have liked to have happened.
d. What he wants to believe happened.
e. What he wants other people to believe happened.
f. What he wants other people to believe he believed happened.

Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com

October 10, 2013

Periscope view of HMS Illustrious, courtesy HMCS Corner Brook

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Submariners love other ships … as potential targets:

In 2007 HMCS Corner Brook, a diesel-electric submarine of the Canadian navy, sneaked up on Illustrious during an exercise in the Atlantic.

HMS Illustrious in HMCS Corner Brook's periscopeTo prove they could have sunk the carrier, Corner Brook’s crew snapped a photo through the periscope — and the Canadian navy helpfully published it. “The picture represents hard evidence that the submarine was well within attack parameters and would have been successful in an attack,” boasted Cmdr. Luc Cassivi, commander of the Canadian submarine division.

Corner Brook, a former British submarine displacing only 2,400 tons, is no more capable than Dallas — and probably much less so once crew training is taken into account. American submariners spend far more time at sea than their Canadian counterparts.

Dallas and Corner Brook scored their simulated carrier kills against allied warships in the context of a scripted exercise. But many other close encounters between subs and flattops have occurred between rival nations deep at sea, in a usually bloodless duel that is nevertheless deadly serious.

QotD: Micro-economics with a Chinese twist

Filed under: China, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:53

China’s great economic renaissance began when Deng Xiaoping said that creating a modern China required “opening and reform.” Xiaoping hedged on the precise definition of “opening and reform.” In 1989 he sent tanks and infantry to Tiananmen Square to demonstrate that the process had severe limitations.

But micro-economic innovation? Xiaoping sought a micro-economic revolution. Xiaoping wanted Chinese entrepreneurs to fulfill what economist Joseph Schumpeter dubbed the entrepreneur’s function: “to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production.” The micro-economic opportunity, however, came with the Tiananmen restriction: The Party must remain supreme.

China’s first-generation entrepreneurs of micro-economic innovators pulled it off. In 1980 China had a GDP of about $190 billion. In 1998, the year after Xiaoping died, China’s GDP topped $1 trillion. In 2013 China has the world’s second largest economy, with a GDP of over $7 trillion.

Wei Gu is The Wall Street Journal‘s “China Wealth and Luxury editor” — and in 1980 who’d have predicted that job? In a recent article titled “China’s Second-Generation Entrepreneurs A Different Breed,” Gu reported that the “foreign educated” children of Chinese entrepreneurs are not enthralled with “the endless wining and dining of government officials that is necessary to do business in China.” In China, since personal whim still trumps law, businesspeople must constantly curry favor with government officials. It amounts to micro-economic lobbying.

Austin Bay, “China’s Toughest Economic Problem Is Political”, Strategy Page, 2013-10-8

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