Altogether Now, Can We Say “Selection Bias”?

Theory three — anecdotes are not evidence.

Maureen Dowd was pushing this lamebrain idea about female whistleblowers awhile ago. It actually makes a lot of sense provided you ignore male whistle blowers. Plus it is a lot more fun to turn out hackneyed theories based on limited evidence than do a Google search for whistleblowers.

But it makes little more sense than if I went through and assembled a few anecdotes from the past year about mothers who murdered their children and then wondered aloud why women are so darn violent.

Robert Horry and the Lakers

Robert Horry’s clutch 3 pointer in yesterday’s NBA playoff game is the reason I occasionally still watch the NBA. Having that opportunity and actually making the shot is the sort of thing that kids on playground fantasize about endlessly, and watching Horry actually make that shot was exhilirating (yes, I was on my feet shouting at the television as his shot swished through the net).

Sacramento’s Chris Webber and Vlade Divac both chalked the shot down to a lucky play — Divac just happened to punch the basketball to precisely the point on the court where Horry was standing.

But that ignores the fact that a) luck did not pull the Lakers out of a 20-point first quarter deficit to trailing by just two with 11 seconds to go, and b) much of success in life is about taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves, often through sheer dumb luck.

And what really made the win priceless was Horry’s reaction — while his teammates and everyone in the Staples Center were screaming and throwing up their hands, Horry’s demeanor was cocky but subdued as if to say, “Of course it went in — what else were you expecting?”

Colleen Rowley’s “Bombshell Memo”

Time magazine has appropriately called FBI counsel Colleen Rowley’s memo to FBI director Robert Mueller “The Bombshell Memo”.

The most disturbing thing about the memo has to be that the higher ups that Rowley dealt with in the FBI were so dismissive of the Minneapolis field office’s views of the risk posed by Zacarias Moussaoui, that this continued into the post-9/11 period. In her memo, Rowley writes,

Just minutes after I saw the first news of the World Trade Center attack(s), I was standing outside the office of Minneapolis ASAC M. Chris Briesse waiting for him to finish with a phone call, when he received a call on another line from this S[upervisory] S[pecial] A[gent]. Since I figured I knew what the call may be about and wanted to ask, in light of the unfolding events and the apparent urgency of the situation, if we should now immediately attempt to obtain a criminal search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop and personal property, I took the call. I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the “hugest coincidence” at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The SSA stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, “coincidence” and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their (HQ’s) permission because we might “screw up” something else going on elsewhere in the country.

This from the same SSA that had previously dismissed French intelligence information about Moussaoui’s terrorist connections as worthless, and, according to Rowley, had acted to sabotage efforts to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop.

Why would an FBI agent be this obtuse? Rowe cites disincentives within the Bureau to take risks, but ultimately those disincentives come back to the schizophrenic views that the American public has of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

You can see this depicted in films where the two popular genres of police-oriented movies are alternatively a) the super cop who kicks ass, saves the day, and rarely considers the constitutional rights of suspects and b) the corrupt cop who usually does all of the above but is condemned for it. It is as if Americans do not realize that the cops from Lethal Weapon and Training Day are almost identical (though, for some reason, the Lethal Weapon cops are cheered when they step outside the limits of the law while clearly audiences are not meant to cheer for Denzel Washington’s corrupt narcotics officer).

Within the FBI, this sort of dichotomy seems to have induced bureaucratic paralysis. On the one hand, the American public wants the FBI to catch the bad guys no matter what. On the other hand, when the risk taking leads to screw ups like Waco, Ruby Ridge or COINTELPRO, we are suddenly shocked that the FBI would so routinely sidestep constitutional protections.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress quickly passed and the President signed the Patriot Act. That act was decried by many civil libertarians, pundits and not a few politicians — many of whom are now wondering why the FBI did not search Moussauoi’s laptop sooner.

Similarly, on the one hand the political climate dictates that even in the post-9/11 era, airports cannot target Arab men for special treatment. On the other hand, much of the debate over a memo authored by an FBI agent in Phoenix center around why the FBI did not conduct a nationwide investigation of Arab men at flight training schools.

Is it really that surprising in this sort of environment that an FBI bureaucrat would decide to take a safe, easy choice rather than risk making national headlines?

NIH Announces New Species on which Genomic Effort Will Focus

The National Institutes of Health recently announced which species would be given priority in federal genetic sequencing programs. The NIH took proposals from genetic researchers and ultimately selected the chimpanzee, the chicken, the honeybee, the sea urchin, the protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila and a family of fungi.

The federal government currently spends $155 million annually divided between the Whitehead Institute, Baylor College of Medicine and Washington University School of Medicine.

Once those centers finish existing genetic sequencing efforts, including putting the finishing touches on the sequencing of the human genome, work will begin on sequencing the genomes of the species given priority by the NIH.

Source:

Species chosen for Genome Project. Rick Weiss, The Washington Post, May 23, 2002.

Israeli Researcher Produces Featherless Chicken

Israeli researcher Avigdor Cahaner announced this month that he used selective breeding to produce a featherless chicken. Cahaner claimed the chicken would have several advantages to breeds currently used for food, while animal rights activists countered that this was a case of “sick science.”

Cahaner produced his chicken by cross-breeding a boiler chicken with another breed that has a naturally bare neck. The result was a feather-free chicken.

On the one hand, the chicken would grow faster and would be somewhat more environmentally friendly since farmers would not have to deal with plucking and disposing of feathers. On the other hand, featherless chickens tend to be more susceptible to parasites and other problems and, in previous attempts to create featherless chickens, the males have been unable to mate.

Of course to animal rights activists, it is just wrong to try to improve chicken breeds at all. Joyce D’Silva of Compassion in World Farming told New Scientist,

It’s a prime example of sick science and the suggestion that it would be an improvement for developing countries is obscene.

Factory farming is such an inappropriate technology for developing countries because it uses scarce resources like water, electricity and grain that could be used for human consumption, to produce meat that only the middle classes can afford.

Of course, water, electricity and grain are usually in short supply in the developing world not due to factory farming but rather to the gross mismanagement by governments and other institutions in the developing world.

Sources:

Featherless chicken creates a flap. Emma Young, The New Scientist, May 21, 2002.

Bald chicken ‘needs no plucking’. The BBC, May 21, 2002.