No body likes being demonized, not even TSOs

TSA Screeners Dislike the Pat-Downs, Too
[Via Daring Fireball]

Steven Frischling:

A few days ago I contacted 20 TSA Transportation Security Officers (TSO) to ask their opinions of the new “enhanced” pat downs. Of the 20 I reached out to, 17 responded. All 17 who responded are at airports where the new “enhanced” pat down is in place … and the responses were all the same, that front line TSOs do not like the new pat downs and that they do not want to perform them. I expected most to not like the pat downs … but what I didn’t expect was that all 17 mentioned their morale being broken down.

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While this is not a perfect analogy, I do find that this sort of view – ‘I really hate working for such a bad organization and wish I did not have to do the bad things they told me to’ – reminds me of this great clip from Clerks, discussing the various workers on the 2nd Death Star – Personal Politics:

“…personal politics comes into play heavily when choosing jobs.” Love it.

Hope I can start multitasking with my iPad today

Apple to release iOS 4.2 for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch today
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple on Monday announced it will release iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch later today, bringing multitasking, folders and other iOS 4 features to the iPad for the first time.

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It will be very exciting to see the iPad with all the bells and whistles that the iPhone has had. I may even load it without taking my standard “wait three days to make sure it does what it is supposed to do” rule regarding software updates.

Another Pew poll demonstrates managed ignorance

by cdrummbks

Why H. L. Mencken is popular with nerds

[Via Discover Magazine | RSS]

The 800-Pound Mama Grizzly Problem: Ms. Palin, in fact, draws almost as …

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Take the News IQ test. Last time I mentioned this demonstration of managed ignorance, 5% of the people got them all right. This time we are down to 1%.

And managed ignorance is again apparent. It people had no idea of any of the right answers and just answered randomly, we would expect that 1.5% would get all 12 questions wrong. Even random chance would get at least 1 right. One question only had 2 possibilities.

Yet 4% of the respondents got all 12 wrong! That is almost 3 times higher than what we would expect to get by random chance.

People were not answering randomly. A large group ‘knew’ the wrong answer. When forced to make a choice, they would pick the wrong one, at a much higher rate than expected if they chose randomly.

Looking at the data in greater detail, there are some eyeopeners that help us see why so many did not get all the questions right.. People just do not understand TARP at all. Only 16% of the people got that one right – more than half of it. The same amount thought that none of it had been repaid and a whopping 36% thought less than half. Only 28% said they did not know what the answer was. 56% was sure they knew the answer and they were wrong. This is even a higher percentage wrong than seen in the last Pwe poll.

More people thought the inflation rate was closer to 10% than knew the right answer – 1%. But almost 50% did not have any idea at all what the inflation rate was. Similarly with the Prime Minister question. 60% simply said they did not know.

But with TARP, many were so sure of the wrong answer. SOmething is going on when so many people are not just ignorant of an area – ignorant simply meaning they do not know. This is the sort of managed ignorance I’ve mentioned before.

I hope we can more away from this sort of managed ignorance where people ‘know’ the wrong thing to a day when they simply can say they do not know. A day of simple ignorance.

Getting the numbers wrong and cherry-picking — typical for a denialist

by ♥ellie♥

Wegman scandal: where was the due diligence?
[Via Deltoid]

Deep Climate continues his examination of the Wegman report. It would seem that Wegman’s “reproduction” of McIntyre’s results amounted to nothing more than running McIntyre’s code without understanding what it did. And while Mann’s “short centring” method does tend to produce a hockey-stick McIntyre greatly exaggerated the extent that it does so.

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Lots of background and investigation but one essential part – the denialists ran a simulation generating 10,000 graphs but then only used the top 1% that looked the way they wanted them to.

Makes me wonder what the other 99% actually looked like.

Would you wear Hitler’s Sweater?

by Chas Redmond

A Real-Life Version of the Hitler’s Sweater Experiment
[Via Big Think]

Colonel Russell Williams is one of those double-life people—an able military commander who was also a rapist and murderer. The crimes for which he was sentenced last month were shockingly evil, and that led the Canadian military last week to enact a real-life version of a well-known psychology …

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While I think the article was a little simplistic with regard to how the military makes decisions and maintains morale – it is not a rationalistic machine and uses symbols all the time – it does have an interesting point. Objects become imbued with the ‘spirit’ of their owners.

And the ending, where we find out how Canada dealt with Williams’ stuff is just great. And it prevents anyone from benefiting personally from them. I wish we had ceremonies like that for all sorts of people.