scraping metadata from Civitas’s creepy “Moral Monday” database

In case you haven’t heard, the North Carolina General Assembly has run amok.

It’s hard to believe that things could get worse: the last NCGA approved Ammendment One, which declared that straight marriage was the only recognized family. And they tried to outlaw accelerating sea level rise by declaring that straight lines were the only recognized graph.

And yet after the 2012 election, things turned upside down.

• Senator Tom Tucker displayed amazing arrogance and unfamiliarity with his job description when he told a reporter: “I am the senator, you are the citizen. You need to be quiet” (Huffington Post)
• A House resolution was proposed which would allow the establishment of a state religion, as well as incorporating prayer as a public institution (WRAL)
• Another bill was proposed to criminalize womens’ nipples. (DTH)
• The budget committee has considered making ends meet by closing NC’s public universities (a tactic known as, ‘eating your seed corn’) (N&O)
• The Senate has passed a bill rolling back 40 years of environmental protections in order to make way for fracking, in defiance of the state Department of Environment’s recommendations. (McClatchyDC)

That’s just some of the more bizarre social experimentation going on; there’s been plenty of garden-variety attacks on voting rights, public education and social services for the poor.

The point of all this is, a lot of people are justifiably annoyed. So much so, that weekly protests at the state capitol have broken out, headed by the state NAACP and dubbed ‘Moral Mondays’. Peaceful protesters have been arrested by the score, then the hundred, for voicing their disgust with a runaway legislature.

Conservatives have fought back, and some have fought dirty. In one especially skeezy move, the right-wing Civitas Institute has published a public database of information on the protesters, including their photograph, and city of residence. It’s creepy, but now that it exists, it’s a window into what is happening on Moral Mondays.

The Civitas data record a total of 457 arrests. Of these, all but 8 gave their residence as in North Carolina. That is to say, 98% of the arrested are clearly locals. This data reinforces an earlier survey which found the same proportion in the protesters as a whole. This matters because some, including governor Pat McCrory have tried to dismiss the protests as the work of outside agitators.

Something disappointing about the Civitas effort is that the infographics provided are drab and at times completely inappropriate. (I mean, really?)

To show them how it’s done, let’s map out some information. Here are the absolute number of arrests, categorized by county and by city. Unfortunately, the city data which were available from the NC DOT did not have all of the cities in the arrest data, leading to 65 of 85 cities being represented in the map, explaining why some counties (eg, Cherokee) report arrests but contain no cities reporting arrest. This may introduce a bias in which smaller cities and towns are not represented when city-based data are used.

Fig 1a. Moral Monday arrests, binned by county.

Fig 1b. Moral Monday arrests, binned by city

Fig 1c. Composite map of 1a and 1b.

A few things seem to pop out: Arrests are geographically centered around the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh), with other major centers around cities (eg, Charlotte, Wilmington, and Asheville). Comparing to other political maps (such as Amendment One or the 2012 presidential election), this pattern is not surprising, however, why it is happening is less clear.

Airbag Saved My Life: the Carolina Review’s Clinical Derpitude Continues

I had thought that once I graduated college, annoying student publications would quit being so… annoying. Alas, this isn’t the case. A previous article examined the quality of analysis at the Carolina Review, UNC’s ‘journal of conservative thought and opinion’; let’s see if things have approved any in the handful of years that I’ve been away.

Okay, checking their blog… mhmm… skim the headlines, clickety clicky….

… oh sweet cthulu, rise from your watery slumber and please make it stop.

The linked article describes environmentalism as factually challenged and lacking a vision of “the overall big picture”; let us categorically examine the main evidence presented in support of this thesis:

1. “global warming, or climate change, or whatever they feel like calling it now” has been grossly exaggerated.
2. Lighter cars are inherently more dangerous than gas-guzzlers.
3. Recycling is bad.
4. Fossil fuels can be greenwashed.

Ready? Let’s go.

“Why is [head of NASA’s GISS program and accomplished geophysicist Dr. James] Hanson [sic] so important?” – Carolina Review columnist Alex Thomas

I was disappointed by the coverage of climate change. I expected it to be lousy, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be so… unsatisfying. The only evidence presented is the claim that Dr. Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony was critically flawed, greatly overestimating the amount of temperature change to come. This is a PRATT, a Point Refuted A Thousand Times, so my treatment will be a bit superficial.  (For more detail, read this)

Some of Hansen’s scenarios gave realistic predictions, and some didn’t. The real question is why.

A climate simulation isn’t a magickal box that spits out numbers. In order to run it, you have to input certain parameters, like how bright the sun is, the greenhouse gas concentrations, and so on. For the past you might have direct measurements or proxy records; the future is not only unwritten, but contingent upon human agency. So you have to come up with plausible scenarios for what’s coming. Maybe we cut down on fossil fuel usage; maybe we ramp it up; maybe we relax clean air standards; maybe we have a nuclear war. You run the scenarios you’re interested in on climate models, and you compare, contrast, and interpret the output. One of the scenarios that Dr. Hansen used (“Scenario A”) overestimated greenhouse gas emissions – but not carbon dioxide. Scenario A assumed that we continued to emit CFCs, which are potent greenhouse gasses. Because they threatened the ozone layer, CFCs were phased out under the Montreal Protocols, which went into effect in 1989 – the year after Hansen’s testimony. Nowhere in the Carolina Review article do we hear about such confounding factors, nor the general success of government regulation in cutting down on ozone depletors. Nor is there mention that Scenarios B and C match observations well (see above), nor that Hansen’s 1981 predictions were freakinshly accurate. * Also, why is Dr. Hansen important? Because he was an adviser to Al Gore, of course!

“Usually investigators only present and discuss the risk to occupants of the car or truck in question—as if society at large has no stake in the mayhem caused by some vehicles as long as those riding in them aren’t themselves killed.” – Wenzel and Ross 2008

Intelligent Design apologetics from the Carolina Review

Editor’s note: I am very busy and/or have major writer’s block. I am thus recycling my greater hits. Here we see a review of a review (a metareview if you will) of Ben Stein’s dawkumentary “Expelled”. The original review appeared in the Carolina Review. For those unfamiliar with CR (you blessed souls!), it is UNC-CH’s ” journal of conservative thought and opinion”. It is a perennial lulz-bucket, attributing climate change to solar forcings and/or Milankovich cycles, mangling ocean acidification, and wondering out loud, in public, why a 2008 paper was not included in the IPCC AR4 (published in 2007). They consider community reclamation of a long-standing eyesore to be a ‘hostile act‘ worthy of paramilitary response, citing the presence of ‘posters’. Here’s my response to one of their more abysmal publications. The article it responds to can be found here; my critique originally ran in CackalakConspiracy, back in a time when I still cared about typos.

Walker’s review, like Stein’s movie, is full of florid talk about “freedom”: freedom of speech, religion, science (the last ironic, for the creationist/intelligent design movement has done everything it can to prevent science from being taught in public schools). America has “an amazing record for upholding freedoms.” Stein rolls footage of Soviets and Nazis; Walker calls the dismantling of science and science education “a struggle against a great tyranny.”

But this talk of freedom is merely an emotional appeal. The speech of creationist “scientists” and ID advocates is not being squelched; it is just not taken seriously. For whatever successes creationism may have in philosophy or religion, it has failed as a science. This is why the mainstream rejects creationism for funding, publishing and inclusion in school curricula, not because of atheistic preconceptions. Film critic Roger Ebert drew this analogy: The final question on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” asks you for a scientific explanation for the patterning of life on Earth. You phone not just a friend, but the scientists of the world, who overwhelmingly advise you to choose (A) evolutionary biology. Yet you choose (B), intelligent design, and claim censorship upon being denied your millions. This is not an expulsion; it is a flunking.

Walker characterizes evolution and ID as rival “theories” in the “scientific community”. However, in science the word ‘theory’ does not mean a guess or an opinion the way it does in popular speech; it refers to an explanatory construct which is used to interpret data and to make predictions. By this standard, evolution wins hands down and ID falls flat on its face. Because any piece of data can be interpreted as evidence for a Designer (for example, by sufficiently muddying the proposed design goals), ID makes no predictions and no explanations (a “theory” that accommodates anything explains nothing). On the other hand, evolution makes several strong predictions about the world (the existence of a nested hierarchy of physical traits, for example.) ID is not a rival scientific theory; it is an attempt to inject religious propaganda into public education.

We don’t accept non-explanations elsewhere in science. Why should the origins and evolution of life on earth be different? Image from the internets….

Nor is evolution “all a question of faith,” a rival religion. It is purely descriptive, not perscriptive. It has no infalliable holy text; it has no ritual structure; it has no ineffable mystery. Though some may use it to bolster their religious beliefs like “renowned evolutionary biology [sic] and atheist Richard Dawkins,” the theory of evolution is no more a religion than the theory of gravity or relativity. Walker claims that “by definition and practice creationists and ID scientists are quite different”. This is incorrect, both because ID is not science and because it is accurately classified as a subset of creationism. Classical creationism and ID are both are antiscientific programs with thinly veiled religious agendas. They both negate accepted evolutionary biology, often along with other aspects of mainstream science such as molecular biology, genetics, and paleontology. Both reject “naturalism” in the scientific study of life, as though science was not based upon methodological naturalism to begin with. Both tend to blame various social ills on the theory of evolution, and erroneously infer from this that it is incorrect. Perhaps most tellingly, Expelled’s own publicity team advertised the movie as “Evolution vs creationism”. 

dry ice in occupied durham

And what,

you might be asking yourselves,

have they been doing all these recent months instead of writing high-octane science friction and science fact here on the intarwubs?

Frozen carbon dioxide turns directly into a gas. How sublime! The dry ice is so cold that it causes water vapor in the air to condense, forming a fog.

Answer: All sorts of zany things! During a recent Really Free Market hosted by Occupy Durham, I had the opportunity to do another chemistry show.  Like the demonstration in my CO2 Problems video, I used soapy water and phenol red pH indicator to help illustrate the properties of frozen carbon dioxide. The color change is particularly dramatic, and is a good tie-in to the environmental effects of CO2. The greenhouse effect seems harder to demonstrate effectively – if anyone has a good way of demonstrating the idea, let me know!

“]

dry ice and phenol red, bubblin' away... { pix courtesy of Specious }

One thing I showed in this demo which wasn’t in CO2 Problems is the strange noises that dry ice makes in response to metal. If you try to cut a piece of dry ice with a knife, or press a paperclip into it, the ice will make a horrible screeching shriek. It’s most dramatic if you put a larger chunk of dry ice into a metal pot – it will scream and skitter around! My explanation? The warm, thermally conductive metal speeds up the sublimation of CO2 near its edge; the expanding gas pushes the metal away briefly and then the pressure buildup dissipates, bringing the metal back in contact with the ice. This oscillation makes the screeching noise. Try it out yourself and see if you think I’m right!