Earlier this week, a business school professor and an economics graduate student released preliminary results of a study on whether there is racial bias in NBA refereeing. The study, which is very interesting, has also stirred up quite a controversy.

The study, which analyzed every game from 1991 to 2004, using box scores to determine the racial composition of the refereeing crew and players on the court, found that:

the rate at which fouls are earned by black players is largely invariant to the racial composition of the refereeing crew. By contrast the rate at which fouls are earned by white players responds quite strongly to referee race. Further regression-based tests yield a similar pattern (see in particular the coefficient on %white referees in Table 4), suggesting that the impact of the biases we document is on white players, who are either favored by white referees, or disfavored by black referees.

The study argues that this referee bias largely explains why white starters have a higher winning percentage than black starters (51.8% versus 49.7%) and why teams give that blacks more playing time than their opponents win games less frequently (48.6%).

The study's authors don't provide an explanation for the referee bias, although they point to economic theory that suggests unconscious discrimination exists. It could be that black referees are penalizing whites; it could be that white referees are rewarding whites. Regardless, they argue, the net result has a discriminatory bias against teams which are more likely to play black players.

It's almost comical watching the media cover this story, which has been mostly panned. The most amusing thing to witness is when they interview current NBA players about the study. What NBA player in the world is going to criticize refs? That's a big no-no in the world of sports. Second of all, most NBA players probably aren't experts in statistical analysis. Finally, according to the study, black referees are actually more likely to call fouls on black players. It's just that they are even more likely to call falls on whites (or whites less likely to call fouls on whites). The study's argument is that since most NBA referees are white, the bias works against teams that plays more blacks.

Whatever the reasons for and effects of the disparity, it is indisputable that they exist, and it is extremely unlikely that they are due to random chance. The study is an interesting and important contribution to the study of implicit biases.

It is clear that the study has identified a set of facts which have made some people very uncomfortable. But the fact that it makes them uncomfortable does not mean we should ignore the study. In fact, perhaps it increases the study's importance. Discomfort, after all, need not be a permanent condition. Things do change, and sometimes for the better.

One blogger showing signs of such discomfort is Steve Sailer, a proponent of the genetic roots of income (and other) inequality who argues that race determines athletic success, particularly in basketball. (He should be surprised to learn that teams that play more blacks are less likely to win than teams that play whites – a fact that does not bode well for his theory that athletic success is rooted in genetics and can be explained by biodiversity.) After a somewhat rambling refutation of the New York Times' coverage of the study, Sailer resurrects one of his favorite myths:

If you are interested in a blatant example of old guard stupidity in sports having a disparate impact by ethnicity that the media relentlessly ignored for decades because it was benefiting a minority group, here's my 2003 article "Baseball's Hidden Ethnic Bias."

Sailer sees the study and its media coverage as yet more proof of bias against whites. I have to give the man credit for being consistently obsessed, yet it seems sometimes that there is little room in his world for dispassionate analysis, a fact which is disappointing because the topics that interest him are so very important to our nation.

(By the way, the short reply to Sailer's baseball essay that it is completely full of bullshit. He's a man without facts on this issue. And I'll be posting on this site in the next few days the facts that prove my case. Hopefully, he'll see the mistakes he made in his analysis. Although he's a guy with strong opinions, my optimistic sense of human nature hopes that he's a guy who can see his mistakes and might one day be able to play a role resolving rather than escalating racial and ethnic problems.)

I hope there's more studies like this one on the NBA. Professional sports provides a common frame of reference for so many Americans, so it is hardly surprising that we often discuss national issues within the context of its playing fields. It's not just race. Sure, you have Rush Limbaugh and Jimmy The Greek on race, but you also have Tim Hardaway and Jon Ameci on homosexuality, and Pat Tillman and Mohammed Ali on politics. And the more we engage with each other as a nation on these types of issues, the better all of our lives will be.

Well, this is enough to make me want to head straight to the nearest house of worship and pray!

Seriously, it's a reflection of the best quality of George W. Bush. He's done unspeakable damage to the rest of the world, but he does seem truly blind to race, ethnicity, and creed when it comes to who he hires.

It's also proof that tolerance, while necessary, is not sufficient.

A few days ago, I posted that you can't share recorded TV between Media Centers using Windows Vista Home Premium because the genius product planners at Microsoft decided to remove gpedit.msc (the group policy editor) from the Home Premium sku. A Microsoft program manager hinted that I was wrong, but since it was an unsupported feature, she said she couldn't help me.

Well, I've finally figured out what you need to do to be able to share recorded TV using Media Center on Vista Home Premium. Here's the scoop:

• FIRST: Share your recorded TV folder with anonymous login permissions. Here's instructions for how to do that. Return to this page once you get to the step requiring gpedit.msc.

• SECOND: Next, you need to make changes to your computer's local policies to allow other machines to see recorded TV. To do this, you'll need to be familiar with regedit. Be careful with regedit if you've never used it before. I'll assume that you have, though. So after opening regedit:

• First, make sure that anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts is turned off. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa and find the restrictanonymoussam REG_DWORD. Sit this to 0.
• Second, you need to allow anonymous access to your recorded TV share. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters. If there is a NullSessionShares REG_MULTI_SZ, add the name of your share. Don't add the path! Just the name of the share, like "Recorded TV". If NullSessionShares doesn't exist, create a new multi-string value, name it NullSessionShares, and put the name of the share in.
• If you don't use passwords, you _might_ need to find the "LimitBlankPasswordUse" DWORD at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa and set it to 0. I don't think you need to change this unless you're having problems, though.

Now you're done with step 2!

• THIRD: Now you need need to enable the Media Center you want to watch the shared TV on to be able to see the newly shared TV folder. On the machine that you want to watch TV on (not the one sharing it!), find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording. If there isn't a REG_MULTI_SZ called "WatchedFolders", create it. Now type in the UNC path to the share (like \\htpc-tv\recorded tv). Uses spaces if there are spaces. (Note that this also works with XP Media Center.)

You're done! Recorded TV should be up and working. Thanks to JackLuminous at The Green Button who pointed me in the right direction.

This blog entry examines a recent posting by Steve Sailer, a moderately influential and extremely conservative commentator on race, gender, and immigration issues. Although Sailer's post is a commentary on the Iraq War (which he opposes), it is representative of the same types of logical and factual mistakes he makes in many of his other more inflammatory musings about race and genetics. Since this post is about a comparatively sedate topic, it presents the opportunity to critique Sailer's intellectual abilities without allowing allegations of racism or sexism to cloud a dispassionate assessment of his thought process.

In his post, Sailer begins by noting that both Rice and Rumsfeld offered misleading accounts of post-WWII Germany to justify their troubles in post-Saddam Iraq. (Rice and Rumsfeld’s assertions have been thoroughly debunked.)

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out.

Sailer then wonders how Rice and Rumsfeld could be so wrong:

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire

August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces. …

Here's the problem I have with what Sailer said: there is no evidence that Rice, Rumsfeld, or anyone else in the administration took what Simberg wrote literally. For starters, on his blog, the news agency is "Routers" not "Reuters." Moreover, when Fox News published the piece it was offered with the following preamble:

If today's journalists were sent back in time to cover World War II, a Reuter's dispatch dated Aug. 12, 1945, might look something like this:

I don't agree with Simberg's take on the situation, but it's pretty clear that he is making a point about the media and political environment in 2003. Moreover, it's clear that Simberg was hardly original in trying to link post-war Germany with post-war Iraq. Simberg says:

There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There's no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.

I'm not attacking Simberg as a plagiarist, I'm just saying that he wasn't the first person to publicly compare the two situations. It should have been immediately obvious that the comparison was badly flawed, but then again, Simberg is not a historian. And it is admittedly much easier to see just how wrong the comparison was now that another four years have passed.

I hold Rice and Rumsfeld to higher standards of truthiness than Simberg. Not only should they have known more about World War II history, they probably actually did, and they certainly knew enough about what was happening on the ground in Iraq to know their historical analogy was false.

Simberg's blog posting was not the only potential source of the Rice-Rumsfeld distortion. Given the availability -- at an earlier date -- of many similar such theories, there is no particular reason to believe that Simberg is the root of what Rice and Rumsfeld said. As even Sailer admits:

We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

So after several hundred words, Sailer ultimately takes back most of what he has previously written. Yet I wonder how many casual readers will realize that he has taken five steps forward and four steps back?

But, almost like magic, Sailer continues his dissertation as if he had never taken those four steps backwards, asking what he now offers as the central question:

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.)  So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

Even if you hadn't taken the time to research Sailer's initial claim that Simberg's piece informed Rice's and Rumsfeld's speeches, alarm bells should be going off. First, Sailer claims that Rice and Rumsfeld's statements were based on a "misreading" of Simberg. Second, Sailer admits that he doesn't know if his first claim is true. Next, he wonders why they would have ever believed that you could draw a parallel between WWII and the war in Iraq.

But he never addresses the question of whether Rice and Rumsfeld actually believed what they were saying. Given the tendency of political figures to optimize for winning arguments rather pursuing truth, I would not by default assume that when a political figure says something that he or she believes it. While it's almost always true that they believe that what they are saying will help them get what they want, that does not mean that they believe that what they are saying is true.

But if he hasn't lost you so far, here's where Sailer really goes off the deep end:

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.

So, to recap, Sailer is arguing that:

1. Rice and Rumsfeld's speechwriters saw a satirical blog posting comparing post-war Germany and post-war Iraq and used a clearly ahistorical news article intended to parody today's media and politicians as their primary source material.
2. He might be wrong about #1. (Sailer is wrong; he fails to mention that even the blog's author notes he was inspired by other sources.)
3. Rice and Rumsfeld actually believe what their speechwriters wrote, even though they should know better.
4. The reason why they believe what they said is "an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities."

Ultimately, Sailer's article is another bizarrely constructed defense of what I'll call his "ostrich theory" that "if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy." When he says "morally opposed to noticing patterns" he means patterns about race and ethnicity, which he generally believes are rooted in genetics, or what he calls "biodiversity."

In this case, he builds support for his "ostrich theory" with casual disregard for the evidence and with giant leaps of faith. Normally, the targets of his scorn are white liberals, but this article is sort of an equal opportunity smear. It's quite ironic then that Slate provided one of the very first critiques of Rice and Rumsfeld. Perhaps more ironic is that the Washington Times, a conservative paper that is the antithesis of Sailer's hated New York Times, provided a defense of Rice's comments:

"SS officers called werewolves engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Ba'athist and Fedayeen remnants" in post-Saddam Iraq, Miss Rice told a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in San Antonio last month.

Historians point out, however, that the Nazi Secret Service officially disbanded the werewolves shortly before Germany surrendered.

Nevertheless, other radicals who viewed Adolf Hitler as a martyr — many of them associated with the Hitler Youth — continued to call themselves "werewolves" and engaged in violence up to a year after the war ended.

The werewolves were blamed for the assassination of the mayor of Aachen, Germany, in May 1945.

So if we are going to take Sailer's argument seriously -- and I don't think we should -- then I guess we have to conclude that conservatives are too focused on being political correct. After all, its liberals who were the leading forces in debunking Rice and Rumsfeld. Meanwhile, conservative voices supported them.

The level of absurdity to which this line of thinking must descend captures the essence of Steve Sailer's thinking. Despite his excellent rhetorical skills, he's not the greatest analyst, and all too often it turns out that things that he thinks facts are in fact false, and things that he thinks are logical are in fact illogical.

It's hard to take Sailer, who has an obvious chip on his shoulder, terribly seriously. If it weren't for the fact that so many people do take the time to read what he has to say, I'd find it hard not chuckle while reading him. (Actually, he still makes me laugh, I just can't help it.)

Sailer is the type of guy who many will simply dismiss as a racist nut and move on. But even though I disagree with his views on race, I wouldn't put him in the same category as David Duke. At the very least, Sailer is much smarter than racists like Duke. And although Sailer has occasionally voiced opinions that even commentators from the National Review say are disgusting, his rhetoric is normally quite disarming, and to the casual conservative reader, probably quite convincing. Hopefully, any of Sailer's fans who have made their way all the way through this long blog post will be better equipped to analyze what he says -- and the mistakes he is likely to make -- when they read him next.

Thank dear leader that we're keeping people like this out of our country:

Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power, Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz. Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.

It's even better that we're keeping the ideologically unpure away from our precious minds:

'Ideological exclusion provision'

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled "How Class Works" at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios's visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under "the ideological exclusion provision" of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It's a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

I am just so proud of our nation, finally showing the courage to stand up for what we really believe in after having been forced to live through so many years of tyrannical notions of freedom and limited government.

Thank heavens that the media and our politicians have finally kicked into high gear to protect us from crazed rampaging killers. From the New York Times:

Virginia Ends a Loophole in Gun Laws

By IAN URBINA
Published: May 1, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 30 — Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia closed a loophole Monday in the state’s gun laws that allowed a mentally disturbed Virginia Tech student to buy the guns used in a shooting rampage that left 33 dead at the university on April 16.

And this weekend, 60 Minutes aired a story hammering home the point that there are 2.7 million people with mental illnesses who should not be allowed to buy guns. Hooray for 60 Minutes bravely tackling an issue that only a media whore desperate for ratings would dare touch! But I have to admit that I grew a bit concerned about the merits of their story when I noticed that the 2.7 million statistic came from a New York Times article published seven years ago. That's right, the cracker jack fact checkers at 60 Minutes are using data that is (technically speaking) from the last millennium.

The article that CBS cribbed its facts from was part of a multi-part series on rampage killers. From the article:

That is the profile of the 102 killers in 100 rampage attacks examined by The New York Times in a computer-assisted study looking back more than 50 years and including the shootings in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.,  and one by a World War II veteran on a residential street in Camden, N.J., in 1949. Four hundred twenty-five people were killed and  510 people were injured in the attacks. The database, which primarily focused on cases in the last decade, is believed to be the largest ever compiled on this phenomenon in the United States.

Though the attacks are rare when compared with other American murders, they  have provoked an intense national discussion about crime, education and American culture. The Times found, however, that the debate may have largely overlooked a critical issue: At least half of the killers showed signs of serious mental health problems.

If you detect a tinge of glibness in my tone, please understand that it is directed at the media and politicians. These rampage killings, including the recent one at Virginia Tech, are all horrible tragedies, and no one can ever minimize their impact. But the extent to which the mass media and politicians are now obsessing over preventing another such tragedy completely misses how these killings fit into the larger picture of intentional killing in the United States, including both homicide and suicide.

From 1976 to 2004, there were over 550,000 murders in the United States. 96.4% of those victims were killed in single-victim homicides. In other words, only 3.6% of all homicide victims were killed along with one or more other victims. And 83.6% of those victims were killed in slayings with just two victims. In fact, only 0.6% of all murder victims were killed in incidents with three more more victims. And of the 552,156 murders during that time period, just 384 occurred in incidents with 5 or more victims. I didn't learn how to compute percentages that small during my time in college, but I'm pretty sure it would be a minuscule one.

The media has spent a great deal of time focusing on the need for the government to protect "us" from "them" (the mentally ill). Clearly, the threat of random rampage killings from mentally ill people is extremely small by any standard when you look at the larger picture.

For example, from 1976-2004, 64,329 people were killed by intimates (spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends). 63.5% of those victims were female. You were 132 times more likely to be killed by your current or former husband, wife, girlfriend, or boyfriend than in a rampage killing!

But as long as the media is going to discuss the dangerous nexus of mental illness and violence, why don't they talk more about suicide? Suicide is, after all, twice as common as homicide. Heck, statistically speaking, you were more than 2,300x more likely to kill yourself than to be killed in a rampage killing with five more victims! Roughly two-thirds of all intentional deaths in the United States are suicides, and the overwhelming majority of suicide victims are male with white men having by far the highest suicide rate of any demographic group.

From 2001 to 2004 alone, more than 100,000 people committed suicide. In fact, more college students around the country have already killed themselves since the massacre at Virginia Tech than were actually killed on that horrible day.

One fact that is obvious is that the most effective weapon used in suicide is a gun. 86% of self-harm cases involving a gun are fatal. Just 5% of self-harm incidents not involving a gun are fatal. It's no surprise that 54% of all suicides involve a gun.

Although I'm not in favor of draconian gun bans, I do think it's reasonable to have discussions about what kinds of gun policies we should have in this country. It seems quite likely that sensible improvements in our laws can save lives. Probably even more important is educating people about the risks involved with gun ownership, particularly in households with an occupant at risk of suicide. But most clear of all is that the media's obsession with Virginia Tech has almost nothing to do with solving real problems facing our nation. To put it in statistical terms, when it comes to gun violence and mental illness, they are spending 95% of their time talking about 0.6% (or less) of the problem. But as long as more people are watching their broadcasts, they can charge more for advertising, and at the end of the day, that's all they really care about.

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