Blogwatch
The newest version of a popular piece of statistical analysis software is not allowed to leave the country. I hope this export issue gets fixed soon (not that I’ve used SPSS myself in, oh, decades).
Women and Unemployment Benefits.
Improvements in Face Recognition.
Tanzanian politics – Change and challenge
Thursday morning I went to interview a Tanzanian living in a suburb off the New Bagamoyo Road on a whole different matter (climate changes), but we could not avoid discussing politics. I then also realised that this is not just something the papers write; the population of Tanzania have become engaged in the changes, they read about it, they listen to the radio and they discuss it.
But things had to become tangible before that happened.
When the Tanzanians got their electricity bills for January 2008 there was an increase of 30%. Not because they had consumed more electricity, because power is still lacking. When the government ‘bought’ the generator from the Richmond firm, they borrowed 179 mio. US dollars in the bank. The generator was never delievered and the power problem was never solved. Now people don’t have proper power, but they have to pay off the loan over their electricity bills.
Suddenly it became evident that there is a strong connection between corruption and their everyday lives. This is the thing which set off the changes, but it is also the challenge of the new government….
Also, some interesting stuff on names.
A new-born rhinoceros in Kenya and about 68 male children in different hospitals in Kenya have been named Kofi Annan in honour of the former UN Secretary General.
Read it all here: http://www.africanews.com/site/list_message/11056?data[source]=rss#m11 056
This often happens in Africa: that you name your child according to the circumstances under which it was born. The lucky ones in Kenya will be called Annan, the more unfortunate ones I have come across were called: (now, keep on reading, I am telling you the truth) Poverty, Born-to-kill and Burried Alive. Malish is also usual, and means ‘sorry’ (all Southern Sudan) – similar to being called ‘Pole Pole’ in Tanzania? I have heard about ‘Promiscous’ and ‘Door’ and ‘Window’, too, from Southern Africa….
Thoughts, Tips and Tools for Bloggers
I might have linked this one already, since I’ve had it marked for a while, but I’m not sure: Love is Hard Work: Stability and the Seven Year Itch.
Map of Asian American Interracial Couples.
Constructed Preferences For Creationism.
But psychologists have found repeatedly that question framing makes a difference. People choose a low-risk, low-payoff gamble over a high-risk, high-payoff one, but rate the latter as more attractive. People are more willing to go a medical procedure that 9 in 10 people survive than a procedure that kills 1 in 10 people. People are willing to pay the same amount to clean up one polluted lake in Ontario as they are to clean up all of the polluted lakes in Ontario. People’s preferred price for a bottle of wine can be doubled or halved by asking them whether they’d pay more or less than the last two digits of their Social Security Number, prior to asking them to name their price.
What has become clear is that this is not a case of “rhetorical tricks” fooling people into misstating their true preferences. Rather, on non-core questions — questions to which your answer isn’t central to how you see yourself and live your life — people don’t have preexisting preferences. Their preferences are constructed on the fly. Once presented with a question, they try to figure out what preference to have. In such a situation, they take cues from how the question is presented. Since different questions give different cues, they come up with different, yet still genuine, preferences in different situations.
This reminds me of a couple of years ago, when there was voluminous discussion on the blogs I read of a study in which 9 out of 10 British women were reported to find casual sex immoral. Some people were appalled that so many women could be making judgments about casual sex; other people took it as a sign of the profound differences in sexual attitudes between men and women (which, OK, may be true, but I’m not sure how fully you can derive that from in-depth interviews with 46 women and no men – maybe more men than you’d think would have said the same). But I had to think then, and still think now, that it’s hard to infer much, good or bad, from the news reports, because we don’t know the wording of the questions the women were asked. And, though few women are going to have no preexisting preferences on casual sex – it is, after all, something more people have to make decisions about in their daily lives than have to make up their minds about evolution – many may have complex attitudes.
The team from the University of Sheffield asked women about their general attitudes to sex and concerns about casual sex emerged.
They found that although participants thought one-night stands were immoral, they did not condemn women for having them as many of them had indulged themselves.
But there was a view that those that did had “something lacking in their lives”.
It sounds to me as if the degree of disapproval of “no strings attached” sex shifted with the exact question being asked – which is actually reasonable, given people’s real life experiences of “no strings attached” sex – experiences that are often negative, but usually, when negative, still stuff you can pick up from, move on, and change your behavior in the future.
Anyway, just one example of how it’s hard to tell how to weigh a survey result without knowing more about the questions; there are lots of others.
I am sure most people have heard of towns divided by a state line, so why did the U. S. Government not expect to find resistance to where they want to build the Border fence, since there are properties that lie in two countries.