The Polls Say The Democrats Will Control The Senate And They Are Probably Right

I've written about polls before and how much I dislike them. Their track record for presidential primaries isn't very good at all and I think presidential campaigns, the public and the news services get too caught up in the data. They try to see trends in time and space that aren't there. But I have to give credit where credit is due, and while the success of polls can be scattershot, the fact is that polls for US Senate races have - at least in the aggregate - done a very good job of predicting winners over the last two elections.

In 2006 and 2008 combined, there were 26 senatorial races where significant polling took place before the election. Using the averages of those polls to predict winners resulted in only one off pick, the 2008 Minnesota race. Now a good deal of the success of the polls was the result of many races never being close in the first place. Only 10 of those races had an average poll prediction with less than a seven point margin of victory. The polls were successful in picking the winner in three out of the four races with a predicted margin of victory less than four percent. That's not enough of a sample to say how good polls are at picking the close battles. My guess is that poll stated error bounds in predictions are too small.

If you look at all of the races, you find that the predicted margin of victory is often significantly off, and there is a strong tendency for polls to under-predict victory margins by a few percentage points of more. The biggest errors tend to be associated with races that were predicted to be blowouts.

What does this mean for the 2010 Senate? If poll results can be believed - and I think they can be believed - there are seven very tight races this year. For five of them at this point in time the predicted margin of victory is less than any reasonable expected error in polling, 2.6 percent. Four of them, if the averages are to be believed, lean slightly Republican. One leans Democratic. The other two races that are tight lean Democratic in a way that's close to the bounds of expected error.

In a nutshell, for the Republicans to win the US Senate, they are going to have to win all four of the Republican leaners - Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Illinois - and the one Democratic leaner, Washington. All five races are statistical dead heats, so that's the equivalent of tossing heads five times in a row. Then the Republicans are going to have to win one out of two states, California and West Virginia, where polls so far show a margin of victory for Democrats that's in the three to five percent range. What are the chances of all this happening? Slim and none. The Democrats will hold the Senate. The House is another matter entirely.

I note that I recently gave some money to Russ Feingold, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Wisconsin. The polls heretofore show him to have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Of particular note is a Daily Kos Democratic poll that shows that a majority of the electorate disapproves of his performance.

Have I thrown my money away? Maybe. But this is a race where I think the polls may be misjudging the electorate. The Green Bay Press Gazette - a conservative newspaper - finds Feingold's opponent Ron Johnson to be so much of an empty suit that even they can't support him. They state, "We think that with time, Johnson could become a viable candidate for national office...." Ouch.

There is one week to go. The nationwide Tea Party fervor ginned up by the press seems to be waning. Voters seem to be moving from being mad as hell to just being resigned and tired. I'm half thinking and half hoping that my money was well spent. But maybe this is just one of those elections where stupid wins and does so with ease.

A Visit To Yad Vashem

After I dropped my daughter off at the airport near Tel Aviv a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go back to Jerusalem for a couple of hours and visit Yad Vashem. I wanted to see what resources were there to look up names of my relatives. It was hard to find the place - which was on the edge of West Jerusalem - but I kept asking directions from people in neighboring cars, usually in Hebrew, and once in Yiddish to a black hat driving who was a bit startled to hear me speak "mama looshen". Eventually, I got there.

Yad Vashem was already crowded by 10 AM. Soldiers are required to make a visit and there was troop after troop taking docent-led tours. But mostly there were busloads of Christian European tourists. There were hardly any people that came on their own. The museum was actually so crowded near the entryway that I decided to go through the exhibits backwards. I got about halfway through before I ran into the wave of 10 AM tourists and stopped. I already knew the story. I didn't have to see the whole thing. What I saw was well done, serious and emotional without being affected.

I watched as an old man stood and looked around with his son, who was about my age, and talked in Yiddish. "This is how it was," the old man said, his head scanning the visuals and looking a little overwhelmed.

Part of me wondered who needs to see this? Not me. I lived these experiences just about every day of my childhood. The European visitors? It's the ones who have no wish to see such things that should visit, not the kind-hearted souls that I saw that day. The soldiers, all fresh faced and so young? I can understand the wish of the Israeli Army to have its troops be aware of the Holocaust, although Israeli students already study it in school.

If you read the British press or writings on Israel by the American left, there are two twisted strains of thought concerning the Holocaust that come up not infrequently. One is that Israel plays the "Holocaust card" to generate sympathy and justify its misdeeds. Israel has supposedly turned the Holocaust into a political tool. This idea is both idiotic and callous. Yes, the Israeli state would never have been created without the Holocaust. Yes, there is the fervent belief that mass murder of Jews will never be allowed to happen again. But there is no trivialization of the Holocaust for political reasons.

I think what the left and the British press are saying is that they wish the Holocaust wouldn't be so powerful an event. They don't like the Israeli state, but they can't get rid of it. If only the Holocaust weren't so tragic a symbol, I think is what they are saying.

I heard this same sentiment once while having a conversation with a Palestinian from Gaza. "Don't you think the Jews overemphasize the Holocaust?" He asked me. I was driving a van when he asked me this question. I nearly pulled over and thought about slugging him. "There are 15 people in this van," I said. "Imagine 200,000 vans like this. Those are the Jews of Poland, including all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Now imagine the people in 180,000 of those vans being pulled over and systematically murdered. That's what happened in Poland. You want me to trivialize this mass murder?"

This brings me to the second twisted strain of thought that I have read in the British press: that the Holocaust has made the Jewish people and the state of Israel too paranoid and too sensitive to slight and insult. The idea is that we Jews are psychologically damaged, so much so that we can't be trusted to govern a nation responsibly. This strain of thought is anti-Semitic plain and simple. It's bad enough that Europe - suffused with centuries of anti-Semitism - at best turned a blind eye to mass murder. Now some of those same anti-Semites are saying that because of the "scars" of mass murder, Jews continue to be suspect. It's not only anti-Semitic to express such a view, it's also horribly cruel.

As I noted earlier, I went to Yad Vashem not to visit the museum, but to see what resources were available for research in its library. There wasn't much there. There are testimonies of people who bore witness - some direct witnesses, most from friends and relatives who simply knew what happened - to the millions who died. There are some four million testimonies like this so far. The picture above comes from the physical collection of those testimonies, binder upon binder of pages in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names.

I looked online on one of Yad Vashem's computers and noticed that there were no pages for any of my family who died. My parents I know visited Yad Vashem. So had some of my relatives in Israel. But somehow no one filled out any forms in memory of their lost loved ones. I wanted to make up for that omission.

I could have filled out the witness forms online. But there was something about taking a piece of paper and filling out the forms physically at Yad Vashem. I took two sheets of paper, one for my grandfather and one for my great grandfather. I filled in the names and their backgrounds. I could have filled out several more forms for other relatives as well, but I wanted to make sure I had the details right before I did so.

It felt both satisfying and terribly sad to write down, ever so briefly, what I knew of these two people. I handed a clerk the forms. He took them without looking at me, and put them in a file drawer at his feet.

Am I psychologically scarred by the Holocaust? Certainly. I lived with and loved two people who would never and could never forget what happened to them during WWII. But my parents loved me dearly and I've known many who have suffered far worse during their childhoods than I did because of all those dark WWII stories. I happen to think those stories and the mood of my childhood home - aware of the past and defiantly trying to be joyous and productive despite that past - gave me strength.

You go on regardless. After visiting Yad Vashem, I went to Herzliyah, a coastal town named after the father of Zionism. I lived there at my great aunt and uncle's flat when I was a teen. I barely recognized the city, it had become so gentrified. When I was there as a kid, there was an older man, a Holocaust survivor who would hang out on the street near our flat day after day and just stare off into space. I asked my aunt about him once - the man was disturbing and scary - and she said he'd lost his wife and children in the War. That's how he was. He wasn't ever going to get better.

That man died I don't know when. My great aunt and uncle died several years ago. There are no daily reminders of the Holocaust in Herzliyah anymore. There are no daily reminders of the Holocaust anywhere in Israel or the US for that matter. All we have are places like Yad Vashem. Is that enough to keep the world from losing its humanity again? I thoroughly doubt it. Be that as it may, I'm thankful that Yad Vashem is there for those that wish and need to be reminded.

Democrats Hate Science Too

I read recently that President Obama will be appearing on an upcoming segment of the science TV show Mythbusters. I think that's just great. No I've never watched the show. I'd probably wince if I did. But even cheesy popular science has value and, who knows, this show may actually be pretty good popular science. Any time a president supports geekiness and science in action is just great.

That all said, Obama has not, despite rhetoric used in his campaign, been a big user of science. OK, he and the Democrats are better than the Republicans, who in general still deny both evolution and global warming. Republicans are in fact complete idiots when it comes to science. They loathe us calculator toting geeks as much as they loathe liberals with Ivy League educations. Basically if it looks smart and acts smart, Republicans hate it. They are the party that wholly embraces and is proud of ignorance.

OK, enough Republican bashing. Democrats and Obama hate science too. They are better when it comes to evolution and global warming, yes. But I don't know if their agreement with scientific orthodoxy on these issues represents an acceptance of science as much as it is in accord with their generally gloomy world view. If you're a dark soul, which your typical Democrat tends to be, then maybe it's cool to think you come from apes and maybe it's cool to think in a Malthusian way of fouling your own nest by burning fossil fuels. Maybe Democrats aren't being rational, but just globbing on to something that they like emotionally.

Why do I think Democrats hate science almost as much as Republicans? First, I've had to deal with Democrats on the issue of high level radioactive waste storage. All they seem to care about is that high level radioactive waste is dangerous (which is true) and Harry Reid doesn't want it in Nevada (also true). If you point out that keeping high level waste at power plants near metropolitan areas around the country is not exactly a good idea and that Yucca Mountain, Nevada is probably as good as it gets for a place to store the waste since the area has been nuked to hell already by atomic testing, they don't listen. The science of nuclear waste - the billions spent on testing Yucca Mountain - doesn't matter. The Democrats and Obama say no. When politics are at play, science gets thrown into the ash can for both Democrats and Republicans.

Ditto for the BP oil gusher in the Gulf. After so much bad news on all fronts - the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan - the last thing that the Obama administration wanted was scientists making proclamations of just how bad this gushing well was. So throughout the crisis the administration consistently downplayed the well's negative impact and worked with BP to keep science from being done that might prove to be bad PR.

First the administration went with rates of oil loss that were obviously way, way too low. Then they tried to dismiss the idea that there were any deep gulf oil plumes. The farce continued whey they made the ad hoc claim that 25 percent of the lost oil had already been consumed by bacteria. This wasn't the Obama administration embracing science. Rather they were embracing science fiction.

The aspect of the Obama administration ignoring or purposely pushing aside science that I noticed the most was in their handling of the effort to plug the well. There was all this falderal about top kill, which got everyone excited even though the odds of that procedure working were nil. It was a big side show. Then a plug was installed, which was great, and there was all this talk of the plug capping the spill, which it sort of did. But when it was clear that the pressure readings indicated that there was some leakage of the oil into rock formations above the oil reservoir - known as cross-formational flow to those in the well biz - all of a sudden the news went dead as to the pressure in the well. Why? Because no one wanted people talking about cross-formational flow.

In the end the well was plugged from below, which was definitely the right thing to do. But the way the Obama administration handled both the transmission of information over the months of the spill and handled scientists trying to work on various aspects of the spill was likely not a whole lot different than how Republicans would have done it. Keep the scientists away. Refute statements by scientists that convey bad news. Obama likes to say that he values science. But his actions say he values science only when it is politically convenient to do so.

A Grown Up Nation

"When there is peace in the Middle East, everyone will realize that the real war is between the Christians and the Moslems and the Jews don't really matter." That quote comes from a cousin of mine. He said it as we were walking the streets of Tel Aviv on the way to the beach. It was Saturday at dusk and the cafes were full of people eating al fresco along the sidewalks. I hadn't been to Israel in a long time, thirty seven years.

A lot can happen in thirty seven years. People warned me I wouldn't recognize the country, it had changed so much. And they were right. Thirty seven years ago, Israel was an austere kind of place. Life was hard and a leisure class barely existed. Now Israel's median family income is close to that of the UK. Investments in high-tech have created a class of multimillionaires that simply didn't exist twenty years ago. And cafes with night life are aplenty.

My cousin's mother was born in Libya and his father was born in Poland. In the 1950s, Jews simply were not wanted in both countries. Israel was the only real option for his parents. When people tell me that a Jewish state isn't necessary, I have to wonder what planet these people live on.

My cousin assumes that peace is inevitable. I'm not so certain. I talked to quite a few Palestinians in Jerusalem during my visit. None of them were interested in compromise. One merchant complained to me about the lack of tourists, about how people were too scared to come to Jerusalem. I noted that if there was peace, he'd have more tourists than he knew what to do with, that he'd be rich. He looked at me like I was from the moon. "The kind of peace you want isn't possible," he said. He wanted the Jewish state to disappear. That's not going to happen.

I understand the Palestinian's pain over the creation of Israel. I understand their frustration over being under the control of a Jewish state. But it's been 60 years since the creation of Israel and 40 since Jerusalem was no longer in Arab control. Israel is not going away. Jerusalem may well be an international city one day, but the chance that Jerusalem will return to be being an Arab city is zero. Until Palestinians accept this, peace is indeed impossible.

The change in Israel over the last thirty seven years isn't just about economic comfort. The Israel I remember was full of hubris over what it could accomplish with military might. Time and time again I would run into men who truly believed they were masters of the universe or at least masters of the Middle East. You could see it in the swagger of Israeli soldiers, in the confrontational way people would talk to you even about mundane things. The country was suffused with arrogance and many men were simply unbearable to be around. The swagger and hubris are mostly gone now.

The thousands of lives lost in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the disaster of the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s had a profound impact on how Israelis view their military. It's no longer expected to accomplish miracles. Future wars will be hard fought. The gains from wars can at best be illusory. Instead of hubris, there is now a realism about Israel's place in the world and in the Middle East.

When I last visited Israel it was all of twenty-five years old and I like to think that it was in an ugly adolescent phase. Now it's all grown up. The view of Israel that you read in European newspapers of it being a military aggressor and the creator of an apartheid state is just a new version of the old anti-Semitism that has defined Europe's view of Judaism for centuries. Instead, the Israel I saw was one with a clear identity as a Jewish state and with a sense of calm and pride in its existence. Israel and the Israeli people have mellowed.

After I talked with my cousin, I drove up to a community farm on the outskirts of Tel Aviv for the birthday party of my surrogate mother from when I lived there thirty seven years ago. She's eighty-five now. She came from the Czech Republic. Her husband, who died a few years ago, came from Poland. Both were fervent Zionists. About twenty five years ago, they came to visit me in the US and her husband launched into a speech haranguing me for living in the United States when I could be making a useful contribution to the Jewish people.

I thought about that speech at the birthday party. Dozens of people sat around and sang songs while the birthday "girl" - radiant with joy - and her daughter played accordion and guitar. I even got up and sang a song of my own. These were delightful people to be with and yes, they were my people.

Could I live in Israel? Certainly. Do I want to? No. But I will always be a supporter of the country and its people. For me, a Jewish state is a necessity. I can find fault with Israel just as I can find fault with the US. But I will never let my ability to find flaws change my fundamental pride in the existence of a Jewish state.

Hollywood Can Save The American School System

For almost 100 years, Hollywood has been assaulted in print and in speech for causing the degradation of American culture. It's supposedly the reason for violence in our youth. It promotes idol worship of our criminals and maybe even worship of the devil. It degrades women, encouraging our young maidens to neglect their studies and become tramps or worse. At best it's a distraction from our day to day. But mostly, it promotes the kind of behavior in our children that is antithetical to good morals and counterproductive to achieving an educated populace. In a nutshell, for almost 100 years people have been saying that movies make us stupid.

Now I won't tip my hand as to how I feel about these assessments. Actually, I will. People are by and large stupid with or without movies. I mean, have you hung around people with 100 IQs? It's depressing. Back to the subject at hand.

Public education in this country used to be held in high esteem, but for upwards of forty years, it has been the subject to the kind of derision that makes criticism of Hollywood tame in comparison. Johnny can't read. Janey can't read. I swear that every 12 minutes someone in this country comes up with a plan to reform American education. Those reforms don't work. There are those who believe that education should be privatized. But those people are just nut job right wingers who have conveniently forgotten that it was public education that made America a world economic power, that in the absence of public education America would be a backwater. Public education is a necessity. How can we make it work?

Since everyone in America has their own plan for education reform, I should have mine. And I do! It came to me while I was watching the movie The Social Network the other day. I liked the movie, very entertaining. It's portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was so juicily mean - he's the 2010 equivalent of "greed is good" Gordon Gecko - that in an effort to salvage his reputation as a human being Mr. Zuckerberg up and donated 100 million dollars to the Newark, New Jersey school system.

Thinking of Zuckerberg's donation made a lightbulb go on in my head. Hollywood can, in a complete reversal, save American education. If it plays its cards right no one will ever criticize Hollywood for destroying the fabric of America ever again.

All Hollywood needs to do is follow the blueprint of The Social Network and put out more nasty biopics of billionaires, lots more. There are about 400 billionaires in the US. If every one of those billionaires had a nasty biopic made about them - and believe me there are no nice billionaires in this world - all of those billionaires just might try to rehabilitate their public reputations by making a large donation to something.

Now let's say we encourage those billionaires, seeking to prove that they are wonderful human beings, to follow the Zuckerberg model. Every one of them gets to pick a public school system to give 100 mil. That's 40 billion dollars, ten times more than Obama is spending on his big education effort, Race to the Top. That's a big chunk of cash.

Now you say that money can't solve our problems with education. Maybe. But one thing those nasty billionaires will demand with their donations - because they are greedy bastards who won't want a dime of their money to go to waste - is accountability. They'd probably even get competitive with each other about whose 100 mil has the most impact. And right-wingers will love the idea of "entrepreneurs" leading education professionals around like pets on a leash because of their mega-buck donations.

There might even be a good movie or two to come out of this. I mean look at Bill Gates. That guy I'm sure has done a boat load of illegal and slimy things. There's a great story in their somewhere just waiting to hit the silver screen. And who knows what shenanigans have taken place with the Walton family (no not the TV Waltons with John Boy, the Walmart Waltons).

Hollywood can make up for its sins and probably make up a ton of money in the process by putting out a slew of bad boy billionaire films. The end result would be nothing less than the resurrection of American public education.

The Ph.D. Glut and National Academy Ratings

The National Academy of Sciences came out with their first rankings of Ph.D. programs in over a decade. It was a huge task, I'm sure, to make these assessments. And while I'm not inclined to value rankings, if I did rank schools in a serious way (ignoring my jokey rankyourcollege.com web site), I'd do much the same thing as the NAS. I'd come up with a bunch of metrics by asking experts what they felt was important. Then I'd run Monte Carlo simulations where I randomly changed the weight of each metric to come up with a range of rankings.

No you don't get a single number from such an approach. But you do get some interesting information about the relative merits of each school. The folks who did this work for the NAS should be commended for producing something of value rather than some statistically meaningless ordering of departments.

There are some 5000 Ph.D. departments examined in the NAS report across over 200 universities. That's a tremendous number of Ph.D. programs and as the report notes, there are more Ph.D. programs now than ever before. Ph.D. programs are like that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. They keep growing in number. And they are a menace. They keep devouring smart young students who are being deluded into believing that there will be jobs for them after their seven years or so of study. For most, those jobs aren't there.

How many of these Ph.D. programs are necessary? I'm going to make a very crude stab at answering this question by examining a field of Ph.D. study that I know well, Earth and Environmental Sciences. Over my years as an academic, I graduated four Ph.D. students. That's not a whole lot, but I consciously kept the number low because I didn't want to contribute to a glut of unemployed Ph.D.'s. Two of my students ended up with tenure track academic jobs at good schools, which in this day and age is a miracle. One was working for Exxon last I checked and Exxon loved her last I checked. The other was working for the federal government in a good paying job last I heard. OK, let's get away from the personal and onto the general.

The NAS ranked 140 Ph.D programs in the earth and environmental sciences. Which of them are really worthwhile? To examine this question, I want to look at what I view as the most important aspect of quality in a graduate program, the research impact of its professorate. In a good department, almost all professors should be publishing. Their papers should be well cited. And since awards for intellectual prowess are handed out easily by professional organizations, professors should have received awards.

I'm going to make the following ad hoc cut off based on the assumption that a good department should have on average professors with significantly but not grossly less impact than I had when I was an academic. My cutoffs for a good department are: 1) faculty should on average publish 2 or more peer reviewed articles a year; 2) their papers should be cited on average at least two times a year; 3) about half the faculty should have a real award from a professional organization attesting to their intellectual contributions.

Out of the 140 departments evaluated in the earth and environmental sciences, less than 20 meet this criterion for a good department:

Caltech ES&T
Caltech Geochemistry
Caltech Geology
Caltech Geophysics
Caltech Planetary Science
Columbia Earth & Environmental Sciences
Georgia Tech Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
Harvard Earth & Planetary Sciences
MIT Geology, Geochemistry & Geophysics
Princeton Geosciences
Stanford Geophysics
UC Berkeley Earth & Planetary Sciences
UCLA Geology
UCLA Geophysics
UC Santa Cruz
U Michigan Geology

That's it. The rest in my estimation just don't cut it. Their faculty members are on average not very good. Less than 12 percent of the Ph.D. departments ranked are truly of intellectual value if you believe my assessment.

Now my cutoffs, while they seem reasonable to me, are probably a bit too tough. There are another 16 or so programs that come close to the ones above. But beyond 30 or so programs there's really not much meat there. You could easily shut down 100 Ph.D. programs in the earth and environmental sciences and the world wouldn't even notice.

What should those 100 departments of little distinction do? There is a need for M.S. students in many aspects of the earth and environmental sciences. I graduated about a dozen M.S. students and all of them easily found good jobs. I imagine another 30 to 40 schools that currently have Ph.D. programs could serve the demand for earth and environmental science M.S. students in government and industry.

As for the rest, they really have no reason for being at the M.S. or Ph.D. level. They are producing students with dim employment prospects. I can't tell you how strongly I feel that professors that accept students when they damn well know there are no jobs for them are scoundrels.

Now I'll make an even bolder step (or more absurd step depending on your view). I'll scale my crude analysis to all of the NAS schools and programs examined. I'm going to assume that my numbers apply to every field of study examined.

Given that only 25 percent of all earth and environmental science Ph.D programs are of any intellectual value (according to me at any rate), it's probably a decent guess that only about 1200 of the 5000 or so Ph.D. programs really need to be in existence. The rest are there to satisfy the egos of the professorate and their associated schools. They are, like vanity presses, vanity Ph.D. programs. In a world free of vanity, they would likely for good reason, all be shut down.