Abusing the placebo effect

Take two pills and drink plenty of liquids, or you can use the pills to sweeten your coffee. Homeopathy has been around since 1796, the result of a false syllogism by one Samuel Hannemann, and it is very big in my neighborhood. A local private school’s house physician is a homeopath. Fortunately, the year my daughter went to that school she did not get sick so I didn’t have to explain to anyone why he was getting nowhere near her.

Homeopahty is the notion that symptoms of a disease can be cured by administering extremely small amounts of a substance that will produce the same symptoms in a healthy person, the “law of similars.” Two centuries of scientific study have failed to show the slightest evidence it actually works.

The fine British science writer David Bradley found an interesting letter in a rather obscure British medical journal, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, suggesting that homeopath even fails as a placebo instigator.

What’s wrong with giving a patient a placebo? The letter, written by Edzard Ernst at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, argues there are two kinds of professionals who prescribe homeopathic remedies. One, the people who actually believe it works. They give it to patients and patients get better. They get better, of course because in most cases, when you are sick your body just gets better if you leave it alone, and because of the placebo effect. Ernst argues those practitioners are simply unethical.

The other kind prescribes homeopathic remedies because of the placebo effect. What does it matter how the patient gets well as long as the patient gets well. I'll give you this pill, you think it will make you better, and often it will. The logic, Ernst writes, is “ethically flawed.”

It would, almost by definition, involve deceiving patients. If we tell our patients that a homeopathic remedy is devoid of specific therapeutic effects, we cannot expect them to respond with clinical improvement. To generate a positive response, we must maximise expectations — and this can only be achieved by using deception. Not telling the truth undermines trust and is unethical. What follows is simple: the prescription of homeopathic medicines is in conflict with fundamental principles of medical ethics.

More important, of course, is that the patient might use the homeopathic remedy instead of getting scientifically based treatment, something I see around here. In the case of a life-threatening disorder, that is serious stuff. For instance, the UK organization of homeopaths has been advertising they have been successfully treating flu for two centuries. They have not.

The main argument against homeopathic remedies as useful placebos is that a physician can make use of the placebo effect without actually administering a placebo. Just tell the patient this antibiotic is an absolute wonder drug, it always works,  and you have given the patient real medicine and added the benefit of a placebo. Giving homeopathic compounds may produce the placebo effect but does absolutely nothing else--except provide income for the practitioner.

By the way, Bradley has calculated that the effects of a homeopathic compound actually working--he uses a compound with less than one molecule of sulfur--is 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 against.

The Tides of Newtok

The post office at Newtok, AK. Mail comes by air several times a week. Zip code 99559.

If it costs $100 million to move 400 Eskimos, what will it cost to move Miami?--Joseph Patrick, 64, believes in retrospect, the villagers knew something was wrong back in the 1950s right after the Yup'ik moved into the new site, but it wasn’t until twenty years later they realized their world was turning upside down. Patrick is one of the Newtok elders, and if you travel to the village, the community insists you speak to them for they hold the wisdom of the place. They remember back in the day, before Newtok was doomed.

Until the 1950s, this community was located on higher ground, a place called Old Kealavic, about ten miles from the current location, where they lived in sod dwellings, half buried in the tundra. The students in the Old Kealavic community traveled to Bethel, St. Mary’s, Sitka or Anchorage for education, but in 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided that all Alaskan natives needed schools. Most of Alaska’s Eskimos and Indians found themselves settled into villages, usually beyond the state’s road system, villages built around their schools. These Yup’ik were moved from Old Kealavic to a new site. They called the new settlement Newtok. [The word Eskimo is not a pejorative in Alaska as it is in Canada and Greenland, where Inuit is preferred.]

The two men sat in a lounge in a newest Newtok school while the school’s young principle, Grant Kashatok, translated from the Yup’ik. The river then was frozen farther out, they said, and the mouth of the river, where it spilled into the sea, was colder then. Gradually it became shallower, the water became warmer and eventually the shoreline began moving further out. That means they soon found they had to travel farther to fish and hunt. Every year, it seemed, it got worse.

“We don’t have an ocean to go down to when we go hunting now,” Michael John, 71, said.
While the sea was retreating, the river was coming closer, and the permafrost beneath the town (permafrost that underlies most of Alaska) was melting right under them. They decided a decade ago, it was time to look for a place to move the settlement again.

A group of elders explored the area around the village to see if they could find a place. They preferred “old sites,” places where the Yup'ik had lived before to see if they could return, but the old sites were sinking too.

The elders had no trouble finding the sites. Because of erosion, the old bodies in the cemeteries were exposed on the surface.

☀

Access to most of the villages of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in western Alaska is through Bethel, a frontier town of 7,000 on the Kuskokwim River. It is a bustling if cluttered port town, the economic base for the huge delta region. The area’s hospital is here, so is the administrative center for the native corporations. Hunters and fishers use it as a base--the delta is rich in wildlife, although part of it is a wildlife preserve. Mostly Bethel is a victim of its location.

Bethel has six miles of paved road that connect to nothing. The cars have no place to go once they get to Bethel by air or barge and never get to exceed fifty miles an hour.1 Like all Alaskan communities, including parts of Anchorage and Fairbanks, the custom of dumping your junk on the lawns or in the driveways prevails. I was told the reason Alaskans rarely throw anything out is that it is so expensive to bring in and because you never know when you need a spare part. Also, there is no real place to put it. Central dumps are not universally supported, in part because the ground is usually frozen. The result is an Arctic Appalachian culture, with old cars, couches, refrigerators, snowmobiles, animal skins and bones everywhere, particularly in front or back yards.

While Bethel is served by Alaska Airlines 737s from Anchorage, flights to the villages are organized by two competing bush airlines using single-engine planes. Airport security at Bethel is a throwback to the pre-9/11 days and even ticketing is informal. The pilot meets you at the doorway, collects your ticket, escorts you to the plane, helps load the baggage (you have to tell him your weight) and helps you into the aircraft. No one gets searched.


One day in May, one of my students, Amy Chaussé, and I flew across the tundra through snow squalls at between 400 and 700 feet, a thrilling, smooth and beautiful ride in a Cessna 208. Like most bush planes, the Cessna had half its sixteen seats removed for freight, the planes being the only way of getting mail and goods to the villages until the river ice melts, which doesn’t happen until late May, early June. I got to sit in the copilot’s seat. While some of the thousands of lakes and ponds were still frozen, the tundra grass was visible everywhere with only a hem of snow in pockets and in the shallow ridges. Now and again, the ground would be obscured by another squall, but the air stayed smooth. Occasionally an airstrip and a few houses would appear, another village, and ninety-four miles from Bethel, the village of Newtok. Flying in Alaska is statistically the most dangerous aviation in the world, but this flight was a joy.

Newtok sits on the north bank of the Ninglick River, one of the countless tributaries of the mighty Yukon, one of the world’s great rivers, which runs 2,000 miles from western Canada, up through interior Alaska, past the Arctic Circle and down toward the Bering Sea, eventually spreading like a coral fan across the vast tundra. There is no one mouth to the Yukon, but hundreds of outlets through the arteries and veins of the delta and the Ninglick is one. A second tributary, the Kealavik (also called the Newtok) once ran on the east side of the town, but years ago, it cut a new path, a shortcut to the Ninglick, bypassing the village.

The weather at Newtok is not awful by interior Alaskan standards, with maximum highs in the summer at fifty-six to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and lows in the winter at eighteen to nineteen above zero. It has gotten as warm as eighty and as cold as negative thirty-five, but those are the extremes. Newtok gets better than two feet of snow every year. Freeze-up begins in early November on the rivers, late November on the Bering Sea, fifteen miles away. The ice on the river can be six to eight feet thick. Breakup is in May. The permafrost is not uniform, which accounts for the little puddles and ponds in the tundra, but at its thickest, it can go 600 feet down.

In Yup’ik tradition, houses should be round, but in Newtok the only thing round is the light blue tank holding the diesel fuel for the generators. The shacks sit on stilts to keep them off the permafrost. Electric cables run everywhere. Wooden planks serve as walkways. There being no vehicles except snow machines and ATVs, there is no need for streets.

The people of Newtok are members of the Central Alaskan Yup’ik group who populate the central coast of Western Alaska, across the sea from their cousins in Siberia. The Yup’ik have been there for about 2,000 years, and the Newtok Yup’ik share a heritage with Yup'ik on Nelson Island across the river. Collectively, they are known as Qaluyaarmiut, the dip net people, for the way they fish. Eskimos are generally collected as language groups, not tribes, and the Yup’ik are the largest, about 20,000 souls. Their first contact with Europeans was in the 1840s, when a Russian explorer, Lt. Lavrenty Zagoskin, of the Russian America Company, came through while surveying the delta. An occasional missionary visited and converted a few Yup’iks from their animist religion since, but they were something of a moving target, nomadic most of the year. The Eskimos spent spring and summer at hunting camps following the caribou and marine mammals, and then collected in settlements to pass the winter. As late as the 1960s, they would pack their belongings on dogsleds and gather at the banks of the Ninglick. They survived then--and to less extent now--harvesting fish and mammals from the sea, particularly seals and walruses. Like most natives, they gave up dogsleds decades ago in favor of gas-driven ATVs and snow machines.

Most Yup’ik in the community that became Newtok were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world until the 1920s, in part because the nearest road is eighty miles away. Then Alaska formed the Territorial Guard (now the Alaska National Guard) and men from the community began to see more of the outside world and the isolation ended.

The exact population depends on who you ask. Officially the census says are 353 people in Newtok, but the locals say there are about a hundred more. In the spring of 2008, the number was listed by authorities at 467. According to the 2000 census, there were eighty-seven housing units with four buildings empty. There are fewer buildings now. Except for young school teachers brought in from outside, the population is entirely Yup'ik. More than half the population was not in the workforce at the time of the census, and the median household income was $32,188. Things have not changed much since. There is a health clinic--sometimes staffed by a nurse--but for anything serious people are flown to Bethel or Anchorage. Drinking water comes from a nearby lake and goes into a water treatment plant. In the winter, melted ice provides the water. There is no sewage system; Newtok is a “honey bucket” community.

☀

At least 180 Eskimo villages now are threatened by climate change and six of them--Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyukuk, Kivalina and Newtok--have only a few more years to live. In some cases, the Army Corps of Engineers has recommended Dutch-style sea walls to keep the villages from being washed away. In the case of three towns, Newtok, Kivalina and Shishmaref, the only salvation is to pick them up and move them. That is stunningly expensive and the political will to produce the money is not there. No one believes they will be the only towns that will confront this conundrum. Things are going to get much worse.

Alaska as more than 30,000 miles of coastline, and 80 percent of its population lives on the coast. The sea is rising, the storms are howling. Shishmaref and Kivalina, are getting blown away. Last year the 300 residents of Kivalina had to be evacuated because of an impending storm. Authorities were afraid the wind would knock over the diesel fuel tank and spread toxic liquid over the settlement. Newtok is victimized by both erosion and melting permafrost and living there has become untenable.

The troubles of Newtok can be seen on the wooden planking, which was fairly flat and straight when it was laid down but now dips and weaves between the buildings. By May, the predominant feature of the village is mud as the top level of soil, only inches thin above the permafrost and frozen through the winter, melts. One result of mud, the poverty and the culture, is filth. The sole exception is the new school, built in modular form ten years ago, the center of Newtok’s universe. It could be plopped in any upper-class suburban American community and be appreciated. Thanks to oil and gas royalties, many of the newer schools in Alaska are physically exceptional, often beautiful and usually well-equipped. Newtok's school is no exception, a haven in the mire. It also is jammed. In a town of around 400, there are 120 children in the school, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, all sharing the same facilities.

The school library (the only library in the village) is tiny, and the book selection odd: a great deal of fantasy and science fiction, sports books, a few classics, and several complete collections of Harry Potter. Even the shelving is idiosyncratic, with the Ultimate Baseball Book (a sport absolutely impossible to play on tundra) next to Using Maps and Globes and The Mystery of Stonehenge; a biography of every professional sports team sits next to books on teenage suicide (not irrelevant in village communities), and a history of the Crow Indians next to Robert Ballard’s book on the Titanic. Almost all the books are in English. The Yup'ik have a written language, designed for them by Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century, but it is clumsy and archaic and in the 1960s, Irene Reed at the University of Alaska designed the newer, more modern one used now. Some of the books in the school library have the Moravian script on one side, the Reed script on the other because many of the older people predate Dr. Reed. As in most Alaskan villages, the children were forbidden to speak their native language in school but that changed years ago. The first two years of school are in Yup’ik (and the teachers Eskimo) and then they switch to English.

Like most Alaskan villages, Newtok and its school are well-connected by satellite to the rest of the world. Satellite dishes connect computers in the tribal office and the school to the Internet, and the village’s administrative offices are computerized. One schoolroom contains several dozen white Apple Macbooks.

In the schools, children are encouraged to learn a trade such as plumbing, carpentry or an electrical vocation in hopes of bringing the skill and knowledge back to the village. The school is likely the largest employer in Newtok.

Many of the people have phone service and many of the homes get a cable connection to the satellite feeds. If you ask the Newtok inhabitants what they do in their spare time, they will tell you they watch movies.

Heidi Post, a non-Eskimo school teacher from Michigan, in Newtok for the last two years, thought Newtok was “gross” and “disgusting” when she came for the first time, she told Amy Chaussé. But she stayed and is now part of the community, engaged to a young Yup’ik man. Her initial reaction is hardly unreasonable. Skinned fish hang from wooden posts on top of shack homes, floors are smeared with blood and guts from baby seals that are cut up in the middle of the small dwellings. She would try to teach her students about sanitation and cleanliness but was informed that they don’t get sick. She’s a kasaq (pronounced gussuk) which means white person, and only kasaqs get sick, she was told. That is patently untrue. Indeed, Alaska is the only state requiring children to get hepatitis B vaccine before they can enter school because of disease in honey bucket homes and towns. For all practical purposes, the Eskimo villages of America’s Alaska are the Third World. The villagers have high rates of lung and skin infections, largely because there are no sewage systems. While 99.4 percent of American homes have indoor plumbing, only two-thirds of the Alaskan villages do. It costs as much as $50,000 to add plumbing to a house because the pipes can’t be easily buried in the permafrost--yet--and even in oil-rich Alaska, that’s expensive. Moreover, the pipes are prone to freeze. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children in these villages were hospitalized for pneumonia eleven times as often as the national average.

Children socialize in front of the school. The rate of gastrointestinal disease was not much higher, however, because there is access to clean drinking water; it was the water used to wash that carried pathogens. The school principal reminds the children to wipe their feet before they enter their own homes and urge their parents to occasionally mop the floor of their homes with bleach. Post says they don’t bother because the next day the women are preparing food again, which often involves dismembering a marine mammal.

Although there is no normal plumbing in Newtok, the faucets in the school produce water. You are told not to drink it because of E-coli, and there are water distilleries by every fountain and sink in the school. The toilets flush and the showers drain, with everything flowing to the main open sewer lagoon a few hundred feet from the school. The lagoon is largely contained by permafrost, which is, of course, melting. You can’t flush toilet paper because it will clog up the pipes. In many Eskimo communities, soiled toilet paper is put in plastic bags and thrown out with the rest of the garbage, a habit some of the people take with them if they move into the cities. The lagoon is where the village’s waste is dumped. Post says there is a huge dump for garbage that is burned a few times in the summer when it is dry but the villager’s do not go out there often, which is evident from trash from soda cans and diapers littered in the muck.
The sidewalks of NewtokThere is a central laundry facility.

The lights stay on in the school 24/7 so the pipes do not freeze and if the generator turns off it may not come on again. The school acts as hotel for visitors. For a small fee, you camp out on mattresses on the floor. Just call in advance. There is a full kitchen and food can be obtained from either of two small stores.

Post describes how the children love the school because it is so clean and she will sometimes “threaten” disobedient children with sending them home.

The school has a large budget to transport its sport teams to neighboring villages, usually by plane or by snow machines. Moving around is easier in the winter when everything is frozen solid and you can use ice roads. Traveling to other towns is how young people meet, date and get married. Post says relationships between young people within the town are discouraged. The elders will intervene if they witness a couple getting too close, she said. The elders will pull the young ones aside and tell them “No, you are brother and sister and must not date.” Post explains that “brother and sister” isn’t literal but in the Yup’ik sense, meaning the entire village is one big family (and they are most likely all blood related). Sociologists who have studied the Eskimo communities don’t believe a word of it. The winters are very long and very dark and there is not very much to do. The men of the village take turns being police, and occasionally, an Alaska State Trooper will fly in, but mostly it is a safe, peaceful town.

Post is fond of the children of Newtok and loves her job. Eskimo children, boys and girls, are irresistible, black eyes and hair and honey-colored skin, round faces that seem most natural when grinning. They are decidedly not shy around strangers. It was impossible for Chaussé or me to move anywhere in Newtok without a cloud of children surrounding us. Chaussé bought candy, which made us particularly welcome, but the children wouldn’t think of begging. They were simply enjoying having company.

The school season just ended when Chaussé and I visited, and Post was off for the summer, returning to her mother’s home with her Yup’ik fiance, George Charles. She wore an ivory carved ring on her finger. She will soon become part of the one big family in Newtok.

☀

The river keeps eating away at the land, creeping closer and closer to the buildings. Newtok is below sea level. The ice that normally protected the village from storms is melting, and the storms have been far more savage than the village elders remember, with winds sometimes reaching hurricane velocity.

The community center is the one building in Newtok that most reflects the village’s plight. It’s popular with teenagers and older people who play bingo at night, but the floor is buckled and wavy as the permafrost beneath it melts. During spring, you will see the locals scooping out water while playing their game. There is no playground for young kids, only the school gym. There isn’t a safe place to put a playground because the equipment will just sink in the thawing permafrost, so the youngest kids play in the gym and out in front of the school, a few yards from the sewer lagoon. The wooden houses have to be lifted or adjusted regularly to compensate for the softening ground. The community center will not get fixed.

According to Orson Smith of the University of Alaska Anchorage, the erosion at Newtok is the result of storm surges, usually caused by the wind. The winds do not have to be particularly strong, just persistent and blowing over long lengths of ocean, something called “fetch.” That wind also blows waves against the shore, in Newtok’s case, from both rivers. The convergence of the Ninglick and the Kealavik made matters worse, changing the angle of the tides. The angle of the wind is important: obviously it has to be blowing toward the land, and of course, the closer to the perpendicular, the worst the effect on the coastline. Normally, sediment is carried away from the shoreline in the winter, and the shoreline gets to rebuild in the calmer summer when the process is reversed. Because of the climate changes, however, that rebuilding does not come close to replacing what the winter washes away in coastal Alaska, Smith says. In many areas, the storms clobber the edge of frozen ground, which resists the battering, and the waves undercut cliffs and bluffs. Buildings are toppling in Shishamef as the low cliffs collapse. When permafrost melts, the land subsides, making it an easier target for the waves.

Like for much of Alaska, good data are nonexistent or ambiguous so no one knows exactly how high the water gets when the area floods, only that it has gotten much worse in the last ten years. It now floods regularly twice a year. In 2005, Newtok was completely inundated. The more erosion, the easier it is for storm surges to hit the town.

The easiest way to avoid this tidal disaster is to get out of its way, which is what the people of Newtok would love to do.

The plight of the village reached a crisis stage when the barge landing on the Ninglick was declared unsafe and Newtok could no longer get summer supplies up the river from the Bering Sea--including diesel fuel to run the generators. Now everything must be flown in and that’s expensive.

“We got suspended from Northland Services [the barge company] because we lost our barge landing,” says Stanley Tom, who has risen to be the community organizer of Newtok. “No landing whatsoever…. It eroded away. It was a solid foundation and the barge companies cannot land. This is tundra, permafrost and it’s just going to sink down. If you leave material on the beach and if there is a south wind, it’s going to erode away and fall off.”

Fortunately for Newtok, they have Tom, forty-seven, father of nine (with a grandson and adopted niece living with him). He is a master at public relations and working the bureaucracy, and almost everyone in Alaska agrees that Newtok is likely to be one of the first town moved--if any town gets moved--and it will be Tom’s victory. “I have sleepless nights,” he says. “After the work, I’m like thinking. I really want my village to have a good clean village.”

Besides running his family’s small general store, Tom is the town’s administrator. He has acquired an astounding collection of documents in his battle, some outgoing to state and federal officials, and some incoming from the same. They cram filing cabinets and computer disks in his offices.

He is not a native to Newtok. He was born in the nearby village of Tununak, but his family traveled between the two villages, and he finally settled in Newtok as a teenager. He was named mayor at the age of twenty-four and has been reasonably in control of the village since then, even after the elders dissolved the village government and decided to govern by traditional rules.

Everyone agrees that Newtok is lost. Tom says that creates two issues. One, where the town should go, and two, and the more difficult question, is who is going to pay for the move. The first question has probably been answered; the second question isn’t close to an answer because no one wants to pay for it.

At first, the elders could not agree among six possible sites. That got whittled down to three by authorities but Tom and the villagers selected a fourth, nine miles away and across the river on Nelson Island. The site has the advantage of being on the south bank of the river, away from the thrust of the erosion. The new village will be called Mertarvik. Other Yup’ik who already live on the island don’t object to their neighbors moving closer.

The state Department of Transportation, is building a barge landing near Mertarvik, Tom says. All the other sites were too rocky and too high. The fact they can put the landing there is a de facto concession for the location, he says. The reconnaissance for the new runway has been completed and a well for water has been drilled.

“We are moving. There is no way of stopping us,” he says. “This winter they are going to bring in equipment to build roads near a quarry so they can test the rocks.”

© Text and photos [except for the Yup''ik girl] by Joel N. Shurkin, 2009. All rights reserved.
© Photo of Yup'ik girl by Amy Chassé, 2009. All rights reserved.

BREAKING NEWS--Apple car will be called the iMO

What would happen if Steve Jobs took over a car company?--It might be called the iMo.

One of the things Congress might consider if it agrees to help bail out the Big Three automakers is that at least one of them be run by Apple’s Steve Jobs.

I wish that was my idea, but it isn’t. Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonym for one of the best technology writers in the business (I’ll never reveal who he is. Never!) came up with the idea in his PBS column here, and it is beautiful to behold. The name iMo, is a bit of imagination from a British designer who is now in a lot of trouble.

Cringely’s point is that the car companies are stuck in the past and shackled with conventional wisdom. No one ever accused Steve Jobs of either. If Jobs transformed say GM the same way he transformed Apple, it would be a whole new paradigm.

And if you want to know more about it, click here. More below

When Jobs returned to Apple from exile in 1997, the company was a basket case, even worse than General Motors. Michael Dell, of the eponymous computer company, suggested the only rational thing Jobs could do was liquidate Apple and return the money to the stockholders. Now, Apple is vastly more valuable than Dell, has transformed the modern world with products that everyone else, including Dell, is working very hard and unsuccessfully, to imitate. (Any websites out there breathlessly anticipating the next Dell product?) Think of what the iPod has done to music (Apple now is the world’s largest distributor of music now), and the iPhone to mobile devices (the second best-selling mobile phone in the world and every company is trying to imitate it). The reason Windows sucks and is actually losing market shares mainly is because it is a feeble imitation of Mac OS-X and has been for years. Apple is debt free and has enough cash in the bank to buy all three car companies with change left over. Buying Dell would come out of petty cash.

Here’s what Cringely and I think Jobs would do:

• Eliminate brands--the American car companies compete not only with each other and with the foreign brands, but themselves. Why have all those brands? GM eliminated the Oldsmobile (but added Saturn), and Chrysler cut the Plymouth, but Cringely thinks more slashing is necessary. I own a Mercury Mariner Hybrid (excellent car, by the way) but it is identical to the Ford Escape Hybrid except for the grill. Why do this? Know anyone who owns a Pontiac? Jobs understood that you need to simplify your product line. Identify your best customers (in Apple’s case, the graphics and creative people) and aim right at them.
• Eliminate losers--Jobs eliminated products that didn’t make money. Sounds simple, but explain why GM still sells Hummers? Indeed, it is the biggest SUV and the smallest cars, Cringely says, that make the least profit. (The big SUVs were hilariously profitable until oil soared to $100 a barrel). Why try to make a car for everyone? Leave the little cars to Kia and Hundai. Concentrate.
• Forget the notion there is an eternal conflict between product people and financial people. Cringely points out that the best proof that you can have that there are people who do both well, and companies that do both well, is Steve Jobs and Apple.
• Bank on new technologies--Detroit works on the basis that what went into a car and what made a car run for the last 100 years is still the best way of doing things. Think of gasoline and the internal combustion engine. Jobs has been superb at identifying new technologies and riding them to the bank. Pick one, any one. Hybrid? Electric? Hydrogen? Mice on a treadmill? Chose one and run with it.
• Emphasize radical design--If Apple is famous for anything it is design. You either buy into the aesthetic or you don’t, but enough people like me do to sell lots of products. Jobs would make cars that reflected that attitude--radical, beautiful, intuitive. You can look at a desk from afar and tell if the computer on it is an Apple or a HP or Dell imitation of an Apple. You would see a Jobs’ company’s car a block away.
• Don’t sell the cars people want; sell cars you convince people they want--Everyone loved the Sony Walkman until Apple came out with the iPod and convinced people they really, really wanted one. Everyone loves the Blackberry so Apple came out with the iPhone and convinced enough people that’s what they wanted. Detroit's excuse has always been it is selling Americans the cars they want. Big mistake. Eight or so years ago, Jobs eliminated floppy disk drives from Apples. Everyone said that was a mistake. Comuters need floppy drives. Jobs convinced customers they didn't need them at all and now no new compuers have floppy drives. Make them want the cars you sell. And lastly:
• Don’t make cars--Cringely thinks Jobs would get his car company out of the manufacturing business and outsource that function. Apple no longer makes its own computers; companies in China and Taiwan build them. Cringely thinks Jobs would announce that his car company design and market cars, not build them. Then he would open the manufacturing for bidding. He’d close all his plants, fire all his workers (Cringely thinks that you get tumult when you lay off only a percentage of workers; things are more peaceful if everyone goes--I demur). It would have several advantages, including having a company far more flexible and facile and well as cutting costs. Close the plants and outsource.
  

And the iMO? It is the whimsical work of British designer Anthony Jannerelly, who will undoubtedly hear from Apple's lawyers in the next day or two. Wired has a story here.

We'll get to lower back pain and sex later.

Just take the damned pill and shut up—As we’ve discussed, the three things physicians know the least about are sex, nutrition and lower back pain Today we are going to talk about nutrition--again.

In the last decade, nutrition experts and the media have been swept away with antioxidants, like C and vitamin E. I’ve written about them. They are supposed to prevent coronary heart disease and various forms of cancer. Or not. “Not” is back in vogue. Keep in mind that next year everybody will probably have changed their minds again.

A study in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that vitamins C and E do not reduce the risk of prostate cancer or any other cancer for that matter. The study, out of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was put out on early release by JAMA because of the results and has stellar credentials. The subjects were members of the Physicians’ Health Study II, a most reputable source, and was randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled factorial trial. Factorial means high math. This kind of study is the gold standard for science, as the cliché goes. But maybe not.

The physicians, all 14,641 men, 50 years or older, were chosen randomly and either took 400 IU of vitamin E, the standard dose, every other day, and 500 mg of vitamin C every day, or a placebo. The study lasted 8 years.

In the end, there were 1008 confirmed cases of prostate cancer and 1943 total cancers. Vitamin E had no statistical effect on the incidence of prostate cancer or total cancers. Neither did C. Nor was there an effect statistically on colorectal, lung or other site-specific cancers.

In this large, long-term trial of male physicians, neither vitamin E nor C supplementation reduced the risk of prostate or total cancer [the study authors write] These data provide no support for the use of these supplements for the prevention of cancer in middle-aged and older men.

In another study in the same issue, selenium also is useless. Earlier studies showed both were effective.

Well, hold on. The problem with these kinds of studies is the group of subjects. For one thing, the physicians in the study were very well nourished, perhaps more so than many other men. They certainly would be more conscious of health than most, making them different than your average guy, with a whole different life style.

We don’t know what else they ate or what other nutrients they took that might have also had an effect. Whether that changed the results we cannot know. The best news is that there was no apparent harm. Additionally, it is likely that these men had regular PSA tests, more so than non-physicians, which may have skewed the sample, although I don't know if that would effect the results.

Interestingly, the JAMA articles come with a third, an editorial, casting some shadows on prostate studies, so I'm not the only skeptic in the crowd. The editorial does conclude that physicians shouldn't recommend vitamins E or C to patients to prevent prostate cancer.

I have no idea what to tell you. I take 400 IUs of E and 500 mgs of C every day and I’m not dead yet.

The Age of Edison is Over

Turn on the light so I can see this record label, please--The inventions of Thomas Edison, which became the hallmarks of 20th century civilization, are dead, dying, substantially altered, or doomed. The new century will be something else: the Post Edison Age. It is hard to imagine one man who had more influence.

The phonograph record was replaced by analog tape 30 years ago, and then digital disks, and even they are now being replaced by digital Internet downloads, which give purer sound, can be copied without loss and can last forever. The incandescent light bulb will be an anachronism in five years, falling to the compact fluorescent bulbs which use less power and last much longer. The power grid had grown in ways Edison could not have anticipated. The motion picture--images on celluloid film projected on a screen--is gradually being replaced by digital recording and projection, which gives a clearer picture without deterioration and allows for easier digital effects and better sound. And everyone is working on ways to substitute the current alkaline batteries with more efficient ones. Even the electric chair is passé.

Within 10 years, we will be using almost nothing that came from Wizard of Menlo Park. His time has just passed.

Edison was not a scientist and never pretended to be one. His most famous contribution to science, the Edison Effect, which anticipated the discovery of electrons 15 years later, was an accidental discovery and Edison left it to physicists to explain it. (In 1882, one of his assistants, William Hammer, discovered that when he turned on the filaments in an experiment light bulb, there was a blue glow around the positive pole and its shadow on the negative--we now know it was electrons moving from one to the other).

Edison did not invent the telegraph, of course, but his first inventions materially improved them, making it possible to send two messages at once, something Samuel Morse and the European co-inventors couldn’t do, and making it easier for someone hearing disabled, as Edison was, to read telegraph messages. Edison was so successful, he gave up a career as a telegrapher to be a full-time inventor.

While experimenting with underwater cables, he found that electrical resistance and the conductivity of carbon varied with pressure, a major theoretical discovery that allowed Edison to come up with carbon pressure relays to replace magnetic ones, improving Bell’s telephone network.

He produced the first electric printer for the telegraph, and in 1877, the phonograph, a matter of serendipity. (Edison was bright enough to appreciate accidents and thought nothing of reversing course to explore something). He was trying to find a way to record telegraph messages and found that using a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter on wax-lined paper, he could get a rough approximation of sound if you moved the paper. The vibrations left a path on the paper. He switched to tin foil instead of paper and wrapped it on a spinning cylinder. It took 10 years of refinement, but soon there was one in almost every home and Edison became world-famous. (The first recoding was Edison reciting “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” That would eventually replaced with hip-hop.)

In the 1870s, Edison bragged he could produce an electric light bulb, and with the backing of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, began work in Menlo Park, south of Newark. It proved more difficult than he anticipated and while he was failing, he built a practical generator that became the basis for the electric power grid, first installed in London in 1882. In October, 1879, he produced the first bulb using a carbon filament and he could demonstrate it to backers two months later. The steamship Columbia installed the first samples and became the first structure to use an electric lighting system. The first office building plugged in January 1881 in New York.

In 1888, using the concept of a zoetrope, a peek-in device that gave the illusion of motion to pictures flashed at a regular speed, Edison developed first the Kinetoscope, which vastly improved the zoetrope, and created the world’s first motion picture company in West Orange, N.J., to produce something to see on his new viewer. He then adapted a projector invented by Thomas Armat, which he called the Vitascope, and which became the first theatrical movie projector. He later found a way to synchronize the phonograph to the Vitascope and added sound to motion pictures.

Most homes lacked electricity and Edison wanted a power source for phonographs. That also was harder than he thought until (1912) Henry Ford, a friend, asked him to develop a battery Ford could put in his cars to crank up the starter. Ford produced research funds. Out of Edison's lab came the alkaline storage battery.

Edison acquired 389 patents for the electric light and power grid, 195 patents for the phonograph, 150 for the telegraph, 141 for the storage battery, and 34 for telephone inventions. His company became General Electric and he was, for a while, the main stockholder.

The electric chair? Edison’s power plants produced direct current and Edison believed the future rested in DC, not on the alternating current (AC) advocated by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. He thought AC was dangerous and to prove it, he helped develop the electric chair, which used AC to kill its guests. He lost that battle.

Now the digital world has replaced some of his inventions and we have moved on. But the 20th century was Edison’s. All hail!

The Night of the Living Bots

Walk this way, master--It couldn’t last. The forces of virtue and honor--i.e., the guys who spend their time battling spam--had an all-to-brief victory last month. They managed to take down one of the leading spigots of spam, a boulevard of the botnets. Spam levels all over the world dropped by perhaps as much as 65%. It was a victory for the folks at the Security Fix column of the Washington Post, who managed to nail one of the worst offenders.

Botnets are networks of bots. For those of you still mired in the 20th century, a bot is a zombie that turns your computer into its slave. I knew that would be of help. It is a piece of malicious software that takes over your computer when you are not looking and sends out malware to the Internet, including spam, worms and Trojan Horses. [You do realize that 30 years ago that sentence would nave been totally incomprehensible]. There you are, working diligently and honorably while your computer is spewing out spam to the network and you probably don't notice, although it may get a little slow on Explorer. The largest botnets enslave millions of computers around the world, the reason why there has been so much concern in your inbox for you penis size (even if you don't have one), your pharmaceutical needs, and business transactions with the daughter of some Nigerian dictator.

Contrary to urban legends, botnets can take over Macs, but this is rare and requires the intercession of Windows servers. Same for Linux. Windows computers are the culprits.

Early in November, spam fighters shut down Mc Colo of San Jose, Calif,, one of the most notorious spam service providers, the result of a Post investigation. The result was instantaneous: according to Betanews.com, the net quieted down immediately. Among those botnets turned off when the plug was pulled were two of the most evil, Asprox and Rustock. Mc Colo also had the distinction of being one of the last American ISP providers doing spam.

No one in the zombie-watching business was sanguine. They knew the botnet folks would find a way around the break, probably by moving offshore to Eastern Europe, places like Estonia. Sure enough, late last week, spam traffic increased noticeably. Asprox and Rustock are back. Traffic levels haven’t reached pre-Mc Colo levels yet because the biggest of the botnets, something called Srizbi, hasn’t found a home. It has been the dominant force for the dark side since February, shooting out a Trojan horse. But no one doubts it is coming. It sucks in users by offering nude pictures of movie stars. Open the mail and your machine is theirs. I am as fond of Salma Hayek as the next man but even I am bright enough not to open mail from people I don’t know. And there aren’t any Windows machines around here.

In the meantime, I am Sandra Deloutrage, the widow of the late Nigerian President Murry Deloutrage. My husband left me $45 million in a bank in Croatia and I need your assistance in retrieving the money. You could buy a bridge...

I have run out of excuses--THE BLOG IS BACK

As I was saying before I was interrupted by real life--I am happy to report ...Of Cabbages and Kings is returning. I have run out of excuses for not posting and since I am, as we say in the writing business, between contracts, I certainly have the time. So, just to catch up with what the hell is going on outside of politics:

Mommy, there is a hairy elephant in the banana trees-- Michael Critchton died a week too soon. He missed a letter in Nature reporting that an international team of scientists had decoded about 80% of the genetic code of the wooly mammoth. It's not that they are close to actually reconstructing one of the creatures, but it is an interesting step in that direction. They tested the hair of two animals who lived about 20,000 years ago and whose bodies were preserved in permafrost. In combination, think they have identified 70% of the genome of the mammoth. Wooly mammoths are closer to contemporary elephants than humans are to chimps, so instead of some day trying to reconstruct a mammoth from mammoth DNA, the quickest route to recreating the beast may be to use elephant DNA and add genes that are unique to the mammoth. Now they just have to sequence elephants.

But that was a virtual penis, dear--Let's say a woman catches her husband screwing another woman. She gets appropriately pissed, throws him out of the house and often files for divorce. Now, however the world has changed. People go to places like Second Life as avatars of varying fictionality [sic]. What would a woman do if she found her husband's avatar shtupping the avatar of another woman? Is that adultry? Virtual adultry? This is going to be hard to follow but we'll try.

Two Brits, Amy Taylor (28, a.k.a. "Laura Skye" in tight cowboy garb) and David Pollard (40, a.k.a. "David Barmy," suave and goateed), who actually met on line and moved in together, had avatars on Second Life. One day Taylor discovered Pollard having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute on line. She ended the relationship between "Skye" and "Barmy" on Second Life but kept living with him in the real world.

To test him, she hired a virtual private eye to try and seduce "Barmy" and he passed the test. So Taylor and Pollard actually got married both on Second Life and in what passes for reality. But it didn't last. She caught him on line having a deep and intimate discussion with an American avatar and divorced him, both on Second Life and in the real world. She told the Guardian: "It may have started on-line but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much," she said. "His was the ultimate betrayal. He had been lying to me." Pollard insists his avatar and the other avatar were just friends.

Aren't you glad I'm back?

"I'm mad as hell and won't take it any more!"

OK, we're not moving to Canada--In the wonderful Paddy Cheyefsky film "Network," there is a scene in which Americans slam open their windows and shout the above. They are mad as hell and they won't take it any more. That's what happened yesterday. It was a total rejection of Bush, Cheney and the neocons. It was a rejection of the Republican party and a repudiation of the conservative movement. This allegedly "right of center" country just had a tectonic shift to the left. And about damned time.

OK, how did all that polling turn out? All the polls predicted an Obama victory but a lot of them were really off. Obama won 52-46, a six point victory that many, but not all of the pollsters got right. Some, like Zogby (Reuters), Gallup, CBS-New York Times, and ABC-Washington Post, were wrong, giving Obama far more of a margin than he actually got. Pollster.com, which I used a lot, got Obama's percentage right but got McCain's wrong by 2, which is pretty close. Nate Silver and Fivethirtyeight, got it right on the money. (Zogby sent out a nasty little note criticizing Silver and his background in SABR baseball statitics after Silver criticized one of Zogby's weirder results. Silver got his revenge). The poll that got it right on the money was the Rasmussen. Both academic polls, Pollyvote and Princeton were correct. So, polling works even in strange elections.

I spent yesterday in Harrisburg, PA as a canvasser for Obama. I can tell you first hand how he won.

Every voter in Harrisburg had been canvassed and everyone who showed an interest in voting for Obama has been listed on a computer printout. I did canvassing. That means we went to every one of those people to make sure they had voted or were going to. We were the second shift, meaning they had already been canvassed once during the day. Most people were not home, of course. But there would be a third shift to get them at supper time. If they said they tried to vote but had trouble, we had a number to call to straighten it out. If they said they needed a ride, I had a number to call and a car would show up within an hour to take them to the polling place. (They had more volunteer drivers than there were people needing a ride). We went floor to floor in a senior citizens home, knocking on doors. So every potential Obama voter in Harrisburg was visited three times today and had no excuses for not showing up to vote. Several times Obama canvassers crossed each other on the street. The African-Americans we visited were particularly jolly and they damned well voted.

I ended the day in an Irish bar with my partner with a pumpkin beer.

Free at last! Free at last! Almost--UPDATED

[UPDATE: The final polls have merged at something of a consensus. Obama by 6]

If anyone asks, I've been a shoe salesman all this time--Either Barack Obama will win the presidency tomorrow or American journalism and public opinion research (political division) will awake Wednesday with all their credibility destroyed. If that happens, both deserve it.

If John McCain actually wins, every political pollster would have been wrong, and every political reporter who based his or her stories on those polls (and they shouldn't for other reasons we can go into later) would have been wrong and and there is no reason to believe those idiots again.

I don't think that is going to happen. With voting one day away (except for the one-third of American voters who have already voted) here is how things stand--if the polls are right:

Every poll, tracking and daily, has Obama ahead by margins ranging from 4 to 13 points. How could that be? All use different techniques to draw their samples and do the actual polling (humans on the telephone vs. computers on the telephone), but more importantly, all use different methods of deciding who is going to vote and who has already voted. Some call cell phones, some don't. So, some of the polls will be wrong, we know that. Polling in these matters usually come within 2 points of reality. If your poll predicts a guy will win by 4 and he wins by 2.6, most pollsters would think it was a normal year. If you come in with 13 and the margin is 4, you have screwed up. As usual, the tracking polls and the daily polls have converged and agree, and some of the polls coming in Monday morning seem to be heading toward Obama +6, which is on the edge of a landslide. These include a few surveys that tend to have a Republican tilt.

I should point out that most experts believe that it doesn't matter which polls are correct: if Obama has anything between a 3 and a 13 point lead, he wins. That plurality will bring the state votes along with it.

The internet sites that average and aggregate the polling, often using statistical manipulations, all seem to agree that Obama will win by 5-6 points and with better than 300 electoral college votes.

(One interesting note, Pollster.com has a story on how Obama gets around a 4 point jump if pollsters get to cells phones).

At this stage, the national poll numbers and the state-by-state poll numbers are in tune. If one goes up, the other does as well. There is no sign whatsover that McCain has tightened either the national or state polling in any substantial manner, certainly not enough to overcome a 5-6 deficit in one day. That doesn't happen. This campaign was essentially over after the second debate and the collapse of the economy. The numbers haven't changed materially since.

We all know how Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey in 1948 despite predictions from pollsters he would not. The fault then (and in New Hampshire this year) was that they stopped polling too early and missed a late surge. That is not happening this time; pollsters are out in the field as you read this and I'll update it later today when those polls come in. And it is hard to imagine a late surge that would overcome a 5 point deficit. These are not predictions, but with 24 hours or so left, they might as well be.

Some folks, often in economics departments, will stick their necks out and make predictions and most of those sites think Obama will win by 6-7 points, with electoral college votes around 350.

What to watch for? If Obama wins Virginia and/or North Carolina by anything resembling a healthy margin (and those polls close early eastern time), the cake is baked. Go to sleep. If he loses those, bring out your sleeping bags and switch from decaf--it will be, in the words of Bette Davis, "a bumpy ride."

Unless all these polls, everything we know about public opinion surveys, all the bright pundits and reporters are flat wrong. Then, remember, I was always a shoe salesman.

j

Those of you with fingernails left

All right children, gather around--Last weekend before this goddam thing ends. I will have to clear off half the aps on my iPhone, which blurts at me any time something happens in the campaign, and that is sick, sick I tell you.

So, with four days left here's what's cooking on the polls. As I reported earlier, polling usually tightens in the last week of a campaign and that seemed to be happening, at least with the national polls, but that trend is now halted. The general consensus is that Obama is ahead by around 6 points, meaning McCain has to gain more than a point a day to catch up and that pretty much can't be done. Obama retains a strong lead in the states. He has all the Kerry states and is walking off with not a few Bush 2004 states. McCain has zero Kerry states and is now even having to defend himself in Arizona.

The P0llster (Ralph Blumenthal and company out of the University of Wisconsin) aggregate has Obama up by 5.5 points with 311 electoral votes, which actually is on the conservative side. The Gallup tracking poll of likely voters (the one modified for the best estimate of who will vote this year--more about that below) has Obama up by 8, with 353 votes (270 wins). RealClearPolitics, something of the gold standard in aggregating polls, has The One up by 6 and 311 EVs. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Obama a 96.3% chance of winning, has him ahead by 5.6 points and 346 EVs. Nate Silver's estmate is that the odds on an Obama landslide are 36% and Obama doesn't have to win Pennsylvania if he gets Virginia and Nevada. Hotline's poll in the National Journal has That One up by 7; Pollyvote (Wharton) at 5.6, Princeton up by 8 and TalkingPoint'sMemo.com, 6.3. A new poll from CBS and the New York Times has Obama up by 11 but that is an outlier.

A word of warning. What is screwing up consistency are two things: one, in some states voting has already begun and in a few states like Colorado and New Mexico, a substantial percentage of the ballots have already been cast. This makes exit polls on election day problematic, I think. The good news is that Obama seems to be highly favored by earlier voters as near as anyone can tell. It does take a bit of precision away. Two, if the young folks show up as they have promised to do (but history tells us they might not) Obama will have a tsunami. If they don't, this could be a whole different race. Selecting who is likely to vote is the hardest part of polling and this year it is harder than usual. Gallup, for instance, has two polls: one with a sample of people who actually voted in 2004 and one including people who did not but say they will this time. The latter has Obama doing better. Some polls use 2004 as a benchmark; many do not. They vary.

Oh, and by he way. All the polls now show that the greatest drag on McCain isn't George Bush; it's Sarah Palin. Most Americans think she is unqualified for the job. Imagine that.

In short, looking good. If McCain does win, American journalism and political polling will never recover.

I can't wait till this is over.

What to watch for in the polls--forget precision

With the national polls running from Obama+1 to Obama +14, what the hell are we to make of it?--If you are profoundly, and in my case, pathetically, addicted to the polls, you might be confused by all of this. Me too. But here are some tips on what you can expect in the next week-and-a-half.

1. In most--not all--presidential elections, the polls showed a tightening of the race in the last few weeks or days. People change their minds or chicken out or drop out. This has not happened yet. John McCain seemed to be making some gains last week, but that has been offset by a reversal this week. The polling aggregators, the guys who take all the polls and do things with the numbers, all seem to agree that Obama leads by about 6 points and that hasn't changed much in the last few weeks. The lead is pretty steady. If you look at the charts, particularly from politico.com, and turn the sensitivity down (use the tool button), you will see the true vector--which is fairly flat.

2. The lagtime between the national popularity polls and the state polls shrinks. Now there is about a two day delay: if one of the candidates moves in the national polls, it is reflected in state polls two days or so later. As we get closer to the election, that gap closes. The state polls are still reflecting McCain's uptick a few days ago. And of course, as I mentioned before, ignore the day-to-day changes. They are likely statistical noise.

3. In the days before the election, the polls will begin to converge toward one number. The outliers will move toward that number, meeting the other polls at whatever number it is going to be on election day. Add a grain of salt: Polling ends a day or so before the election and will miss very late shifts in the electorate. That's what happened in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire; the polls missed a late move for Hillary Clinton. That could happen in the national race but is not likely. If Obama really is 6 points ahead, that won't change between Sunday and Tuesday barring a terrorist attack or something.

4. All the statisticians who are projecting the winner (including those who claim they are not making predictions) are predicting an Obama blow-out, again by 6 or 7 points, fairly historic.

5. They could all be full of shit. The ghost of Thomas Dewey will not be exorcised for a long time.

On the other hand.....

OK, make up your goddam minds--Just to give you heartburn, within 24 hours after the posting below, two polls came in with Obama and McClain in a statistical tie. The range now runs from +1 to +14.

Aaargh!

Very very softly. It's over.

The Phillies are in the World Series, Obama is winning the election. There may be a God--The Pew Research Center, one of the most trusted polling establishments, this afternoon reported that Barack Obama was 14 points ahead of John McCain in the national race. If that is correct, Obama is about to blow this thing open with two weeks to go.

In fairness, that Pew poll is an outlier, higher than any other poll, some of which have it down as close as 2 (another outlier). The general consensus before Pew published was Obama by around 6, still a handsome number. Remember, the record is 8.5 points, Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Fourteen is a bit much.

In the last few days there were signs that the race was tightening the way races always tighten at the end, but that tightening (think sphincter) levelled off the last day or so and the Pew poll (which incidentally had a very large number of respondents, almost 3,000), is either a blip in the polling statistics or the beginning of a blowout.

Polls are not predictors; they are snapshots. But there are statistical ways of projecting one of those snapshots out to the end. Several good sites do that. Here's what some of them say.

• Pollyvote out of the Wharton School, has Obama ahead by 6. This uses a statistical package plus input from political experts and all kinds of razzamataz I won't even try to understand. It has a repution for accuracy.
• Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com, which uses something like baseball's sabermetrics, gives the chances of an Obama victory at 92.5%. The chances of a landslide are 33.43% and Obama is most likely to win 344 electoral votes and the Democrats to wind up with 56 Senate seats.
• The Princeton Election Consortium has Obama winning 362 electoral votes.
• Real Clear Politics, the standard most journalists use, has Obama up by 6.9 points
• Gallup tracking has an 11 lead.
• Pollster.com has Obama up by 6.1. You can see the EV chart to the right.
  

Now, very quietly so the evil spirits don't hear us--no candidate as far behind as John McCain is at this stage of an election, has ever come back to win. Shshsh.

Is that a chasm I see before me?

No wonder they are getting pissed out there--The national tracking polls are now showing a widening for Barack Obama. The Shurkin number (I made that up) went from 5.4 to 6.2 in the last few days. That is the average of three best mathematical averaging websites, Pollster.com, Realclearpolitics.com, and Fivethirtyeight.com, all of which are non-partisan. In other words, I average the averagers. Pollster, which is very well respected, has Obama ahead by 7.4. The Gallup Poll, which is included in all the averaging and is something of the gold standard in these matters, has him ahead by 11.

Fivethirtyeight has the odds of Obama winning at better than 9-1 in 95 out of 100 campaigns. Nate Silver, who runs it, expects Obama to gain during the weekend. He thinks it is clear that everytime there is a debate, Obama's numbers grow. Still one more debate out there, gang. National Journal, also well-respected and non-partisan, did a survey of Republican leaders and found that 8 out of 10 expect an Obama victory in November. The Journal is one of the first to use the "L" word, as in "landslide."

But Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, suggests things are still not set in concrete, what he calls a contrarian view. Besides the Bradley Effect, which we'll discuss in some detail next week, he suggests that too many Obama supporters think this is a slam dunk and won't show up to vote. I don't think so. Too many are really pissed off.

And speaking of pissed off, the crowds at the McCain-Palin events are really getting scary and John McCain and Sarah Palin are stoking them on. McCain stands to lose twice on November 4. He will probably lose the election; he will definately lose his honor. It is certainly, as Politico describes it, a party in panic.

Do keep in mind, this isn't a popularity contest and while the tracking polls are interesting, we elect Presidents by the states. Pollster has Obama winning 320 electoral votes (see graph to the right). The average winning vote in modern history is 402.6, so he is behind in that regard at the moment.

[That's an AP photo up top]

Margins of non-error

That was a ceiling you just bumped into--Two things have happened in the polling today. Barack Obama may have hit a ceiling and is leveling off, and John McCain has gained in several polls. Panic not.

The range in polls now runs from a slim 1 point margin (Hotline Poll) to 11 points in the Gallup tracking poll. The Hotline poll showed a major shift in one day toward McCain (better than 10%), but as I've mentioned before, you can't get too excited about one-day movements. Often it is just noise. Wait a day or so and it will even out.

Some things to remember:

• No candidate, none, has won with better than an 8.51 point margin. That was Bill Clinton's blow-away in 1996. See Chris Bower's piece here. This means that there is a rational ceiling to how large a margin Obama can achieve. Bower says that a landslide is anything between 5 and 8. Obama is there now.
• Several of the sites I've mentioned here average polls, meaning they take the numbers from multiple polls and either just average them out or apply some kind of mathematical formula involving square roots or something, and the size of the sample, to come up with a number that reflects all the polls. Bower points out that historically, those aggregates are 2 points off, meaning any margin of 2 points or less is not a lead. As long as the number stays above 2 points, a candidate is a winner. Realclearpolitics.com has Obama at +5.1. Pollster.com (right) has +5.8. Fivethirtyeight.com has it at 5.4. The Shurkin average is therefore is 5.42.
• Most of Obama's increase is relatively new and relatively new adherents are not particularly solid and could move again, so nothing is in concrete.
• Gamblers sometimes know things. The odds of Obama winning the election are 7-3 on Intratrade. Nate Silver, who uses an algorithm based on polls at Fivethirtyeight has it at 9-1.
• The Polyvote, a mathematical model out of the Wharton School, has Obama ahead by 4.4 points and it accurately predicted the last election. This works well as long as all the polls aren't wrong in the same direction.

Three factors could screw up all the polls.

• Cell phones--a growing number of people now only have cell phones (no land line) and pollsters either have trouble getting to them or don't even try. No one knows how that skews the results, but it tends to reduce the number of young people in the universe, in this case to Obama's detriment.
• The Bradley Effect--no one knows how many people are lying to pollsters about voting for a black man. As I reported earlier, a Stanford study guesses at 6 points, giving McCain an unknown advantage
  
• New voters--The Obama campaign has enrolled a huge number of new voters--mostly young, mostly Obama supporters--and it is likely the polls are missing many of them.

The best guess is that all of the above may cancel it all out. We shall see.

Polling pollsters about polls, or why I have a stomach ache

Let's see, we're ahead 3 points, 6 points, 11 points. Make up your goddam mind--You may have noticed I have added a thingy to the blog, the Pollster.com electoral college map. It will change as Pollster.com changes, and it just changed yesterday to reflect new state polls.

(State polls lag behind the national tracking polls because there are a lot fewer of them. Just remember, it is the states that vote for president, not a popularity contest. Anyone remember President Gore?)

The poll numbers remain all over the place. They only thing they agree on is that Barack Obama is ahead in the national poll and if the election were held today, in the electoral college. The numbers vary, from Zogby's 3 points (they poll for Reuters) to Daily Kos' 11. Both polls are, to me, outliers. One is too low and not notoriously accurate, the other is for a liberal website. That doesn't mean it is slanted or dishonest but it is an outlier, the most optimistic if you are an Obama person. I tend to discount them both, leaving us with a bunch of polls having him 6-8 points up. Historically, it is very difficult for a candidate with John McCain's numbers to come back in 28 days, but this race is unpredictable.

[The Hotline poll has them down to 2 points this morning, a peculiar tightening] I find that odd, since that poll has been peculiarly conservative and hardly moved at all for a week or two.]

The McCain faction has launched the most egregiously dishonorable campaign in my memory, now subtly playing the race card. The good news to me is that the Obama people, having learned their lessons from the Kerry campaign, are fighting back instantly. They obviously had an ad on McCain's participation in the Keating Five scandal sitting in the closet just waiting for the opportunity to turn it loose. So much for the high-minded campaign we were promised.

Okay, where do you go for accurate, non-partisan polling and political information. We've already discussed often my affection for Mark Blumenthal's Pollster.com.
It's his map to the right. He also writes for the National Journal. A commenter (not the spam guy) has mentioned fivethirtyeight.com and I agree completely. (The number comes from the total of electoral college votes).

For balanced political coverage, I recommend two sites, Politico.com and Realclearpolitics.com. Politico.com is interesting for another reason. It is not your normal guy sitting around in his underwear blog (like this one), but has grown into a respected journalism outlet, one of the largest and best on the Internet. It is the new wave in journalism and worth monitoring.

Now, for the best biased--to the left, of course--sources of information. My favorite remains the Huffington Post. Slightly more centered is Josh Marshall's talkingpointsmemo.com. It was Marshall's site that uncovered the firing of the nine U.S. prosecutors, forcing the mainstream media to follow. It is the only website to win a Polk Award, I believe.

For right wing sites, you are on your own. My stomach won't bear it.

Excuse me Capt. Queeg. Can you stop making that noise

John is having a bad day--OK, more on the election. Since I am obsessed with it I might as well quit trying to write about anything else. The Alaska proposal is off to my agent and I can indulge my obsession.

An interesting column in the Des Moines Register's website hints at what many have begun to suspect: Sen. John McCain is losing it. Not just losing the election; losing it. McCain was at a meet-the-editor conference at the Register last week, normal campaign stuff, and anyone watching could see something was wrong. His body language, the way he held his face, his petulent anwers to what were clearly pertinent questions. At least one editor at the meeting had a similar reaction and suggests that McCain may be too unstable to be President. See here. For video, go here.

McCain is losing. McCain is pissed off. Running around like a headless chicken during the Congressional battle for the bailout bill isn't leadership, it's hysteria.

Current polling is not likely to change his mood. Tracking polls, all completed after the vice presidentail debate, shows Barack Obama's lead expanding and he is now approaching double digits.

Explanation: tracking polls should be called rolling polls and are done on a daily basis, accumulating three days worth of data. That means, for instance, they will poll on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Then they poll on Sunday and drop the data from Thursday. On Monday, they drop the Friday data. All the polls out today have the three days since the Biden-Palin debate. The data are clear, Alaska's dingbat governor did McCain very little good with the general electorate.

All this is reflected in the state polls and some of the numbers are astonishing. Minnesota was listed as a close contest--until last week. Obama now is ahead by as much as 11 or 18, depending on which poll you watch. North Carolina was always considered a solid Republican state. Now it is a toss-up; Obama now leads slightly and in one poll has reached the 50% mark. He now leads in Virginia--Virginia, for God's sake--by double digits in one poll. McCain has already given up in Michigan, which is interesting in itself.

Political campaigns are like chess matches in many ways. When you are losing, you often sacrifice pieces to protect the king. What McCain did in Michigan is sacrifice a piece (a bishop or a knight in this case) to protect the campaign. The difference is that in chess, you don't announce it ahead of time.

In the next posting I'll produce a list of the best places to poll watch on the internet. You already know one, www.pollster.com. There are others I'll pass on.

So who is Capt. Queeg? Movie fans?

Roman Hruska meets Sarah Palin

"Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos."--Sen. Roman Hruska, R. Nebraska, on defending the appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court of a mediocrity.

OK, we're back. Been busy. Ramping up again.

The polls are all over the place as usual, but the unmistakable trend is toward Barak Obama. The polls have him ahead in the national count by anywhere from 4 to 11 points. More importantly, this is spreading to the states, particularly the most important states. He is ahead in places he was not expected to be ahead, like Virginia and Colorado.

The bounce the Republicans got from their convention is gone and Sarah Palin is now a drag on the ticket. She has succeeded in scaring the hell out of increasing numbers of people and has become a national joke. I'm a little sorry for her: she has no business playing in this league. John McCain, who is really getting cranky these days and is busy channeling Herbert Hoover, shouldn't have picked her and she shouldn't have accepted. She is pushing independents away faster than she gained them at the convention.

On the polls: Even Rasmussen, which has been the most tilted toward McCain, now has Obama ahead by 7, Associated Press, 7, New York Times/CBS at 9, Gallup at 4. The most conservative of the polls, Diageo/Hotline, is at 5, and the most liberal, the poll run on Daily Kos, 11.

What makes this particularly interesting is that voters tend to solidify around October. It is rare for a campaign to roar from behind (or blow it) when one candidate has a large lead over the other by October. Most people have made up their minds. The numbers also are interesting for another reason: the Bradley Effect. That is the phenomenon in which voters will tell pollsters they have no problem voting for a black guy, go into the booth and vote for the white guy. They lie so they won't sound racist to the interviewer. No one knows (although we are about to find out) how much the effect skews polling, but the best numbers I've found say it is about 6%. In other words. He will need more than a 6% advantage over McCain to win. He is now at or above that number in the polls.

What seems to be happening is that the voters have clicked into place. There is also the potential for a landslide in the state voting, although making any predictions in this race is really odd behavior.

Nonetheless, here is one: John McCain will throw another Hail Mary, something dramatic to get himself into back into the conversation and change the subject. Every day the economy is the overarching news story is a day he loses support. I don't know what it will be, but he clearly knows he is losing, is pissed off, and frantic. Watch for a pass. And, whatever it is, it probably won't work. His last two, Sarah Palin and parachuting into the Wall Street bailout blew up in his face.

Some odds and ends:

• The only place you can see Russia from Alaska is on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Sea. About 150 Eskimos live there; Sarah Palin has never visited. As CNN reported, Big Diomede Island, which is Russia, is four miles away and is highly visible. Except for those 150 people (many of whom never heard of Palin) you cannot see Russia from Alaska.
• Palin said Alaska is a microcosm of America, which makes her able to undertand "Joe Sixpack." Alaska is not a microcosm of America. Alaskans describe their state as the only foreign country that still likes Americans--but not too much. It is an idiosyncratic, totally weird place. I happen to love it in part because it is not like the rest of America.
• Sarah Palin is who Roman Hruska might have had in mind.