The Unseen Benefits of Technology

Reston Patch has a post on the Fairfax County 9-1-1 Call Center.

“Back in the olden days, 18 months ago, much of the on-site emergency response coordination between departments had to be completed by telephone at the dispatch center,” said Steve Souder, the 9-1-1 Call Center’s director. Sometimes this would require multiple phone calls back and forth.
“Before cell phones, if an accident occurred on a highway, someone would have to drive to the next exit and get off to look for a pay phone,” Souder recalls.  “The caller had to have coins available to place a call and once the 9-1-1 call was placed, hoped they remembered approximately where and in which direction the accident took place.” ....

The call is automatically assigned a code for the type of emergency—police only, fire, basic life service—and as the communicator enters details, that information immediately becomes available to police, fire and rescue dispatchers who place calls to responders.
Since all police, fire and rescue units are equipped with global positioning systems, dispatchers can immediately tell who is closest to the emergency. The police department can immediately pull up a history of responses for a given address. Public safety communicators also have instructions on how to walk the caller through life-saving techniques until responders arrive. 

Answering 9-1-1 calls requires the ability to handle the more than 100 different languages spoken in Fairfax County. The county uses the services of Language Line headquartered in Monterey, CA to assist in taking the call.

The net result of all this should be faster response to emergencies, with long term effects on reduced deaths from accidents, reduced hospital costs from accidents, less property damage from fires, more effective police protection.  Of course none of these gains will show up on the front page of the newspapers, nor will any be credited as more effective government.

Will Christopher Hitchens Go to Heaven?

Reading "American Grace, How Religion Unites Us and Divides Us" by Robert Putnam of "Bowling Alone" fame and David Campbell.  In one section  they cite a poll showing that most people think most people will go to heaven: that is, most Catholics believe Protestants can go to heaven, believe Jews can go to heaven, etc. So Americans mostly are tolerant and don't hold strictly to theological teachings. At least, that's what Putnam and Campbell say.  But I note the survey didn't think to ask whether atheists and agnostics, like maybe Christopher Hitchens or Albert Einstein, could go to heaven.  I wonder what such a survey question would reveal: is entry to heaven based on the life one led or the beliefs one has? I also wonder who will get into the heaven which features 76 virgins?  Is heaven segregated by belief?

In America Mosques Become (Protestant) Churches

One point made in American Grace (a book I've just started reading) is that, in the U.S. the original template in religion is the Protestant congregation(al) church.  That template is very different from the pattern of religion in many other countries.  The evolution of religion in the U.S. has been for other denominations/religions to become more like the Protestant congregational  church. It may be  this is because the U.S. has a competitive religious marketplace, so every religion has had to complete with the original template.  It's the old tale: competing organizations tend to imitate each other

What Wisdom Do Statisticians Have

From a Nate Silver post((on a theory predicting the Republicans are almost sure to maintain control of the House in 2012):

The issue with this model, and some others like it, is what’s known in the statistical business as overfitting. This occurs when the number of variables is large relative to the sample size: in this case, the full version of Mr. Enten’s model contains six variables, but is used to explain only 15 cases (Congressional elections in presidential years since 1952).
A general rule of thumb is that you should have no more than one variable for every 10 or 15 cases in your data set. So a model to explain what happened in 15 elections should ideally contain no more than one or two inputs. By a strict interpretation, in fact, not only should a model like this one not contain more than one or two input variables, but the statistician should not even consider more than one or two variables as candidates for the model, since otherwise he can cherry-pick the ones that happen to fit the data the best (a related problem known as data dredging).
If you ignore these principles, you may wind up with a model that fits the noise in the data rather than the signal.

 Seems to me there's a relationship with our construction of narratives.  The more detail, the more variables, we can stick in and still have a cohesive story the more satisfying it is. So what Silver says is that stories aren't scientific explanations, they're history.

Simulators for Everything

University Diaries points to this dairy cow simulator for vet training, and for artificial inseminators.

The Question of the Day

From Joel Achenbach:

How do we become the organized people who are ready for the Big One when the ordinary tasks of daily life — the mundane stuff — the tedious grind of being a taxpaying citizen — are already overwhelming us?

Second Thoughts on "Industrial Farming"

I usually resist the meme among the food movement of dissing the "industrial farmer", ".  However, I saw this "Agrosecurity Checklist" on the extension.org site and noted the extensive references to "employees", which is a reminder that farming has changed from my mental picture of it.  I just don't think of farmers as having employees, at least not full-time employees, but many do now.

The Ride of the Valkyries--and the Furies?

Maureen Dowd writes about the idea that the Obama people who ended up pushing for the no-fly zone were women: Rice, Power, Clinton.  She missed the fact that two of the people commanding the effort were Major Gen. Margaret Woodward and Rear Adm. Peg Klein.  For Furies, see this.

The Washing Machine, and Clean Water

Via Ezra Klein, a TED talk claiming the washing machine is the great invention, by Hans Rosling. Actually, he uses it more metaphorically to discuss growth of wealth and population and green concerns. But it triggered my memory:

My mother would remember Mondays on the farm.  Monday was wash day, of course.  There were ironing day and baking day and I forget what else.  When she was young, they had a "dog power" to run the washing machine, and their dog would know and hide on Mondays, which was a story she'd repeat regularly over the years.  I never asked, but I assume they heated water for washing as we did, using a coal/wood stove, possibly with a boiler on the stove, or through a heating coil contained within the stove. I assume the washer simply agitated the clothes in the water, with a separate wringer (set of rollers to squeeze water out of the clothes. I vaguely remember the two big wash tubs used for rinsing the clothes, which then would be run through the wringer to wring out the water (could almost make a tongue-twister out of that). Then of course the clothes would be hung on the line to dry.

Mom's washing machine was a wringer washer, with no dog to run away and a wringer as part of the machine.  It still presupposed a supply of heated water. And clothes were still hung to dry. It definitely required more work than today's washer which simply requires loading soap and clothes and pressing buttons.

So my point: while Rosling is right to talk about the importance of the washing machine in freeing women to learn to read, and to read books to their children, the machine itself and the detergents available to us, assume the presence of clean, preferably heated water.  In that sense, public utilities, taking the human waste away by keeping it separate from the clean water provided for drinking and washing, become the greatest invention.

A Political Scientist (International Relations) on How To Arrange a Marriage

Dan Drezner passes on a great lesson in marriage planning, dressed up as commentary on Libya.