Expelled from Expelled

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, who is actually featured in the dishonest Ben Stein intelligent design propaganda movie "Expelled," was denied admittance to a screening and asked to leave the premises. His guest, however, was permitted to attend, and was apparently, quite astonishingly, unrecognized--Richard Dawkins. (Myers provides a few more details here.)

The New York Times contacted "Expelled" producer Mark Mathis about it, and he claimed that Dawkins was intentionally allowed in and insinuating that Myers would cause trouble at the screening. (Anyone who has met Myers in person knows this is ridiculous.)

Here's video of P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins describing their respective experiences.

Jeffrey Overstreet gives what appears to be the spin that will be used to respond to this event, based on the clearly mistaken description of Myers' removal from student Stuart Blessman:

I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins’ academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in. Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket, and when he confirmed that he didn’t, they then escorted him off the premises. Nowhere was one of the film’s producers to be found, and the man certainly didn’t identify himself. If a producer had been nearby, it’s possible that he would have been admitted, but the theatre’s management didn’t want to take any chances.

Myers points out:

I had an invitation. I had applied through the channels Expelled set up. I applied under my own name, and was approved. I have the first email that confirmed it, and the second email reminder, all from Motive Entertainment. Wanna see them?

You were not near me when the security guard told me I was being kicked out. No one was. He first asked me to step aside, away from the line, and he told me directly that the producer had requested that I be evicted. Theater management had nothing to do with it.

I returned to my family to explain what was happening. That’s when a theater manager came along and told me I’d have to leave right away. You might have been in a position to hear something then, but it certainly wasn’t that I was not on their pre-submitted list. I was.

If you were right there, you would have noticed my wife, daughter, and her boyfriend in line too. They got reservations in exactly the same way I did. They were not kicked out. How did that happen? Did they have invitations and they just didn’t tell me?

UPDATE: Pharyngula commenter Sastra offers this hypothesis as to what "Expelled" producer Mathis might have been thinking:

Richard Dawkins writes:
Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn't immediately leave the premises... did he not know that PZ is one of the country's most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter?

You know, as I read this, something occurred to me regarding the reasoning behind Mathis' "bungling incompetence," as Dawkins calls it. I wonder if Mathis made a serious blunder in his assumptions on what PZ's reaction to being thrown out of the theater would be.

He just made a film where all the academics are whining and looking pathetic about being rejected, humiliated, and tossed unceremoniously out of academia and the Halls of Science. He has been surrounding himself with people playing the poor-me victim card, claiming ignominous oppression and unfair suppression.

What then if Mathis assumed that PZ Myer's reaction would not be "delighted and mocking laughter," but what he was used to -- whimpering bellyaching. And then he could use that to make a point.

PZ was to have gone to Phayngula to lick his wounds. "People, I have sad news. I am so ashamed and humiliated. I was kicked out of the theater when I went to see Expelled. I have never heard of someone doing something like that to an academic like me. It felt awful."

And then Mathis and his publicists would go in for the kill:

Ah-ha! Now the scientist knows JUST HOW IT FEELS! What has been done to other academics was done to him! And he complains, too. How ironic is THAT??"

Instead, PZ reacts with amusement. Extreme amusement. And, worse, there is the Dawkins angle, which no, Mathis had not been expecting when he decided to play a game and toss PZ out. If PZ whines, he wins on tit for tat. If PZ creates a nasty, messy scene, he wins on 'look at the immoral fascist-like atheist temper.' But instead, PZ laughs and laughs, and with Dawkins in the theater Mathis just looks like a fool.

More I think about it, the more I think Mathis underestimated PZ's sense of humor about things, and how he would not be mortified by the incident, but jubilant. He's been around too many pretentious professorial sob-sisters. He thought they were all like that.

UPDATE: Several All of the pending screenings of "Expelled" have been removed from the registration website. That includes screenings scheduled for Santa Clara, CA, Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA. It also includes Tempe, AZ, as John Lynch points out.

UPDATE: Richard Dawkins has written a review of the film. Short version: "A shoddy, second-rate piece of work. ... Positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. ... clunking ... artless ... self-indulgent ... goes shamelessly for cheap laughs."

UPDATE: "Expelled" screenwriter Kevin Miller agrees with Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet that the controversy over P.Z. Myers' removal is actually beneficial for the film. I think that's highly unlikely.

UPDATE: At the "Expelled" show that P.Z. Myers was not permitted to attend, Kristine Harley asked Mark Mathis during the Q&A why he told Myers, Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and others that he was working on a film called "Crossroads" instead of "Expelled." He answered that this was just a working title for the film. But this is apparently not true--Wesley Elsberry has pointed out that they acquired the domain name "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007, while Eugenie Scott was interviewed in April 2007, Myers in April or later 2007, and Dawkins in Summer 2007. Mathis doesn't explain why "Crossroads" was being produced by "Rampant Films" (which had a fake website with innocuous-looking films on it) rather than Premise Media.

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): "Expelled" producer Mark Mathis admits that P.Z. Myers wasn't kicked out for being unruly, but just because he wants to make him pay to see the movie. Mathis claims in Inside Higher Ed that he doesn't like Myers' "untruthful blogging about Expelled," but with no details of what "untruthful blogging" he means.

UPDATE: Ed Brayton pulls no punches when he points out that Walt Ruloff of Premise Media lied about why P.Z. Myers wasn't allowed into the film.

UPDATE: Mooney and Nisbett, supposed experts on "framing" communications about science in such a way as to be persuasive to the general public, have created a firestorm at Science Blogs and gained them the approval of William Dembski and "Expelled" screenwriter Kevin Miller, but disagreements from just about everyone else at ScienceBlogs, bloggers and commenters alike. In hindsight, I think they should conclude that they are the ones who should have remained silent this time. (Some of my favorite posts on this topic are from Orac, Greg Laden, Mark Hoofnagle, Russell Blackford, and Mike/Tangled Up in Blue Guy. Greg Laden has thoughtfully collected a bunch of links on the topic.)

UPDATE (March 25, 2008): P.Z. Myers has posted a roundup of additional coverage. Particularly noteworthy is Scott Hatfield's look at the backgrounds of the people involved with making "Expelled." Troy Britain and Jon Voisey look at the IDers' mutually contradictory accounts of the Myers expulsion incident.

Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math gives a good overview of the framing debate (arguing in favor of the idea that framing is important, but that Mooney and Nisbet have made poor choices regarding framing in this recent kerfuffle.)

Sean Carroll also provides a very good analysis of the framing issue in terms of politicians and critics--Mooney and Nisbet want politicians, but Dawkins and Myers are critics.

UPDATE: "Expelled"'s producers really are a bunch of liars who keep on lying. They've issued a press release claiming that their movie, rather than their stupid action, has been the top subject of discussion on the blogosphere, falsely claim that Richard Dawkins signed up with his "formal surname" Clinton (it's his first name, not his surname, and he didn't sign up at all but was one of Myers' RSVP'd guests), falsely allege that Dawkins and Myers have "slandered" them and their film (without giving a single example), and falsely claim that Myers has asked his readers to try to sneak in to screenings of the movie.

UPDATE (March 28, 2008): The "Expelled" producers had a telephone conference call with questions by email. P.Z. Myers dialed in early, and heard "Leslie and Paul" talking, and they gave out the telephone number to the conference bridge number for presenters (all other participants are muted). So Myers hung up and dialed back in on the presenter line. After listening to the producers dissemble and answer softball questions, he interrupted:

I said, in essence, hang on -- you guys are spinning out a lot of lies here, you should be called on it. I gave a quick gloss on it, and said that, for instance, anti-semitism has a long history in Germany that preceded Darwin, and that they ought to look up the word "pogrom". There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up…so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie.

Then I announced that if any reporters were listening in, they could contact me at pzmyers@gmail.com and I'd be happy to talk to them.

The "Expelled" producers will probably now spin this as Myers having "hacked" their conference bridge or something. Personally, as much as I think this is amusing, I think Myers' actions were unethical and possibly illegal--even if someone stupidly hands out an authentication credential (in this case, the presenter access code for a conferencing event bridge) when they don't realize they're being observed, that doesn't mean that they've authorized someone else to use it.

UPDATE (March 29, 2008): Troy Britain gets to the bottom of exactly how P.Z. Myers originally signed up for the screening he was expelled from.

Wesley Elsberry reports that the "Expelled" producers are now offering financial incentives to groups that go see the movie--the five largest groups will get $1,000 each.

UPDATE (April 10, 2008): "William Wallace" argues that Myers did "gate crash" a "private screening." I don't think anyone questions that these screenings were "private" in the sense that you couldn't just walk up and attend, you had to pre-register. But the pre-registration process was openly advertised on public web pages and there was no indication that it was limited to those who were explicitly invited due to membership in a church or similar organization. In the case of the conference call, Panda's Thumb bloggers were directly invited by email as a group (and some individually as well), though Myers did not receive one directly addressed to him.

Most antiterrorism spending is wasteful

The March 6, 2008 issue of The Economist features lots of interesting articles (it includes one of the quarterly technology reviews), one of which is "Feel safer now?" This is a report on a study by economists in Texas and Alabama commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus, which looks at the effects of increased spending on counterterrorism efforts and "homeland security" globally since 2001, and the effects. They calculate that while such spending has increased by somewhere between $65 billion and $200 billion a year, the benefits are far smaller than the costs of terrorism, which were about $17 billion in 2005. While the spending may have prevented some incidents, even if this extra spending prevented 30 attacks like the July 2005 London bombings every year, it would still be more expensive than the damage from terrorism. The authors suggest that the benefits from increased counterterrorism spending have been about 5-8 cents per each dollar of spending, whereas if instead money was spent specifically on disrupting terrorist finances, $5-$15 of benefits could be obtained for each dollar spent.

Sheldrake vs. Dawkins

The March 2008 issue of Fortean Times has an interesting article by Rupert Sheldrake titled "Richard Dawkins calls." In it, he describes his meeting with Dawkins for the filming of a segment originally planned to be part of Enemies of Reason, broadcast in August 2007. Apparently very little was filmed and nothing was used of the meeting.

Sheldrake was to be interviewed as a defender of scientific evidence for telepathy, which Sheldrake has studied with empirical research, and written and published papers about. (Sheldrake is perhaps best known for his theory of morphogenetic fields, which he wrote about in his book A New Science of Life, which a reviewer for Nature called "the best candidate for burning there has been in years." He believes that the more an idea is used, the easier it becomes for others to think of--along the lines of the "hundredth monkey" phenomenon which was a myth originated by Lyall Watson and promulgated by Ken Keyes, Jr., and debunked by philosopher Ron Amundson.) According to Sheldrake, he was promised that "this documentary, at Channel 4's insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil? was" and that "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry."

But when the meeting occurred, it quickly came to an end because, according to Sheldrake, Dawkins said "I don't want to discuss evidence. ... There isn't time. ... It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about." (A charitable and likely accurate reading of what "that" refers to is specifically evidence for telepathy, though Sheldrake seems to suggest Dawkins means evidence of any kind.) Sheldrake reports that Russell Barnes, the director, also "confirmed that he was not interested in evidence either." (Again, probably referring specifically to evidence for telepathy, rather than evidence in general.) Sheldrake responded that "If you're treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it's not irrational to believe in it. I thought that's what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn't interested in taking part in another low-grade debunking exercise." To which he reports that Dawkins responded, "It's not a low-grade debunking exercise. It's a high-grade debunking exercise." I don't see how anyone can reasonably disagree with Sheldrake's statement.

Sheldrake told them he had received assurances that this would be "a balanced scientific discussion about the evidence," and when Barnes asked to see the emails in question, he showed them. Sheldrake writes, "He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left."

UPDATE (April 25, 2008): Rupert Sheldrake has posted "Richard Dawkins comes to call" on his website, which looks to be more-or-less the same as the FT article. William Dembski has pointed to this article as evidence that Richard Dawkins has done the same kind of duping that he has complained about when the producers of "Expelled" did it to him, but I don't think they're quite the same in a number of respects. While Dawkins was (to his discredit) uninterested in the scientific evidence underlying telepathy that Sheldrake wanted to discuss, footage from Sheldrake wasn't used in the final documentary. The case would have been parallel if Dawkins had pretended to be interested in the scientific evidence, completed the interview, and then used the footage in such a way as to criticize and ridicule Sheldrake. And it would have been parallel to how P.Z. Myers' footage was used in "Expelled" only if Dawkins had conversed with Sheldrake about the scientific evidence for telepathy and then used excerpts from it in a film on another topic that hadn't been mentioned. (Myers wasn't asked questions about intelligent design, only about the relationship between religion and science.)

UPDATE (June 8, 2008): P.Z. Myers has weighed in on this controversy at Pharyngula, arguing that Sheldrake's evidence (which hasn't been discussed, so far as I can see) doesn't count as evidence because of a lack of a plausible mechanism. I disagree that lack of a mechanism means that anomalous data doesn't count as evidence--it is reason to reject a proposed explanation, but it's not a reason to deny that there is anomalous data.

UPDATE (June 15, 2008): Sheldrake responds to Myers:

[W]ith such a farrago of prejudice, ignorance and arrogance, it’s hard to know where to begin. It doesn’t really seem worth replying to people who aren’t interested in the facts but simply in venting their rage.

Myers has not taken the trouble to read any of my experiments on telephone telepathy nor any of my other research on the subject and is obviously as bigoted as Dawkins himself. For example when he refers to my experiments as "exercises in gullibility, anecdote and sloppy statistics" the only thing he refers to is an attack by some sceptics on my staring research based on a fallacious argument which I’ve already refuted in the Skeptical Inquirer.

He has not taken the trouble to look at the telephone telepathy or email telepathy experiments, published in peer-reviewed journals, which are based not on anecdotes but on randomized controlled tests. Then he accuses me of not proposing any theory for telepathy, which in fact I have done. But there’s nothing one can do about ranters of this kind, who are beyond the reach of science and reason.

Some of the comments following his blog are equally sad and remind me of the low level of debate found on the Dawkins website where people vie with each other in their prejudice, sneering and nastiness.

I do believe he has a point.

Terrorist watch list grows past 700,000 names

The ACLU reports that the Terrorist Screening Center's watch list reached 700,000 names in September 2007, and is adding 20,000 new names per month. "At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we'd all be dead."

Names on the list include:

Robert Johnson
Alexandra Hay
Evo Morales (president of Bolivia)
Saddam Hussein (dead former dictator of Iraq)
the 9/11 hijackers (all still dead)
Gary Smith
John Williams
Edward Kennedy (Massachusetts Senator)
John Lewis (U.S. Rep. from Georgia)
Daniel Brown (U.S. soldier detained on way home from Iraq)
James Moore (author of book critical of Bush administration)
Catherine ("Cat") Stevens (wife of Sen. Ted Stevens)
Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens)
Vernon Lewis (retired Major General, U.S. Army)
Robert Campbell (U.S. Navy, retired)
David Nelson
John William Anderson
Don Young (U.S. Rep. from Alaska)

The whole idea of checking names for flight screening is nearly pointless, since terrorists are capable of getting fake ID. It's absolutely idiotic to have extremely common names on the list and subject everyone who happens to have a common name to extra screening every time they fly. The right way to do screening is to use mechanisms like randomly subjecting people to extra screening and to have people undercover trained to identify suspicious behavior in the terminal--and to use multiple mechanisms that are randomly changed from day to day, so that security measures tested on one day will not be the exact measures in place on a later day.

UPDATE (March 18, 2008): Note that the no-fly list is a subset of the terrorist watch list. The former is what I criticize in the last paragraph. An FBI audit has stated that the information the FBI supplies for the terrorist watch list is "outdated and inaccurate."

E.J. Graff on prostitution

The Eliott Spitzer prostitution scandal is bringing the moralizers out of the woodwork. At TPM Cafe, E.J. Graff writes:

I'm tired of hearing about Eliot Spitzer's "classical tragedy." I'm not interested in whether he was targeted by Republicans, especially since the TPMmuckrakers seem to have shown fairly clearly that his shady-looking wire transfers drew ordinary oversight attention. I'm a little sickened to read that paying thousands of dollars for sex is all about buying a "positional good"--if I understand Harold Meyerson correctly (and Harold is magnificent on other subjects, but very strange here), the point of paying $5500 for sex isn't that it gives you better-than-ordinary sex, but rather, that the cost itself makes it *higher status* than buying your way into a lower-cost vagina.
...
To know that your father is paying to use the body of someone just a couple of years older than your own--well, I picture eating disorders ahead for those girls. I picture that in part because Eliot Spitzer cannot be going to a prostitute for the sex. He's a powerful, good-looking, wealthy man, and could seduce a woman if nonmarital sex were all he wanted. No: he wanted to order some woman around, wanted to treat her not like a person but like a collection of body parts put together for his pleasure. To use women this way -- just for the thrill of power -- is appalling. If that's how your dad treats women, that cannot make you feel good as a future woman yourself.
...
We're not talking about a victimless crime. We're talking about a way of degrading and traumatizing women who have already been degraded and traumatized (and sometimes trafficked). Some of my friends who are recovering drug addicts (and, yes, violently abused as children) were once prostitutes, and what they've told me is fully in keeping with the studies: it's alienating, traumatizing, violent, and not what anyone dreams of doing when they grow up.
So here's an idea: let's decriminalize *being* a prostitute ... but criminalize *patronizing* a prostitute.

Leaving aside Graff's attribution of intentions and views to Spitzer on the basis of no evidence of any kind and her last comment advocating the Swedish model that's also advocated by Melissa Farley, contrast her moralizing with H.L. Mencken's views on prostitution in his "The Lady of Joy":

EVEN PROSTITUTION, in the long run, may become more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ.
...
Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prostitute's own class--say her father and brothers--and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic.

Certainly there are prostitutes that meet Graff's description, but I suspect that those working for the Emperor's Club, including Ashley Alexandra Dupre, are more accurately described by Mencken.

Better than listening to either Graff or Mencken is to read what sex workers write about their own experiences (and not just those who have found new careers condemning their previous one), as in Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander's Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry.

BTW, the comments on Graff are far, far better than her article, and are well worth reading. Commenter Common Dreamer in particular points to some actual empirical research on prostitution (including a newspaper article summarizing prostitution researchers' responses to some bad research by a particular individual with an axe to grind). (Compare the comments on that newspaper article to the comments on Graff's article--at least Graff has attracted a much higher quality commenter than the Las Vegas Sun gets.) Common Dreamer points to some references on the ProstitutionProCon website, which looks like a good source for arguments and evidence regarding the question of whether prostitution should be legal.

Homeland Security threat

The Miami Herald has uncovered a new Homeland Security threat--and it's U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents that are committing crimes. Bribery, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, embezzlement, and other crimes have become so prevalent that a senior manager has issued a memo pointing out that agents are supposed to uphold, not break the law:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to stop these types of crimes. Instead, so many of its officers have been charged with committing those crimes themselves that their boss in Washington recently issued an alert about the ''disturbing events'' and the ``increase in the number of employee arrests.''

Thomas S. Winkowski, assistant commissioner of field operations, wrote a memo to more than 20,000 officers nationwide noting that employees must behave professionally at all times -- even when not on the job.

''It is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break the law,'' Winkowski wrote in the Nov. 16 memo obtained by The Miami Herald.

(Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.)

Causing violence

This cectic comic is a good one:







(Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.)

IJ defends Speechnow.org

Speechnow.org is being supported by the Institute for Justice and the Center for Competitive Politics in its lawsuit against federal laws and regulations which forbid it from receiving more than $5,000 in donations per year from any individual and require it to file forms and engage in reporting in order to do what it wants to do.

What does Speechnow.org want to do? It wants to advocate the view that voters should vote for candidates who support the First Amendment and against candidates who do not. It takes no corporate or union money, it doesn't donate to or coordinate with individual candidates or political parties. Yet this is sufficient under current law to restrict its activities and entangle it in red tape, so Speechnow.org has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction.

NSA's data mining and eavesdropping described

The March 10 Wall Street Journal contains a fairly detailed description of the data mining operation being run by the NSA. The program described is more data mining than eavesdropping, though it does involve the collection of transactional data like call detail records for telephone calls, and intercepted Internet data like web search terms and email senders and recipients. Also included is financial transaction data and airline data. I think most of this had already been pieced together, but this is a fairly comprehensive summary in one place. The WSJ story reports that leads generated from the data mining effort are then fed into the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which does warrantless eavesdropping. (An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to the whole operation as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.)

School adopts Singapore math curriculum, sees gains in scores

Ramona Elementary in Los Angeles has adopted a Singapore math curriculum that includes a daily 60-second "sprint" drill to make some basic skills second-nature, and the result has been that the percentage of fifth-graders scoring at grade level went from 45% to 76% in two years. Singapore's students regularly score at the top in international math skill comparisons.

Ramona's students are mostly immigrants, with most of them from Central America; 6 of 10 speak English as a second language.

The books, with the no-nonsense title "Primary Mathematics," are published for the U.S. market by a small company in Oregon, Marshall Cavendish International. They are slim volumes, weighing a fraction of a conventional American text. They have a spare, stripped-down look, and a given page contains no material that isn't directly related to the lesson at hand.

Standing in an empty classroom one recent morning, Ramos flipped through two sets of texts: the Singapore books and those of a conventional math series published by Harcourt. She began with the first lesson in the first chapter of first grade.

In Harcourt Math, there was a picture of eight trees. There were two circles in the sky. The instructions told the students: "There are 2 birds in all." There were no birds on the page.

The instructions directed the students to draw little yellow disks in the circles to represent the birds.

Ramos gave a look of exasperation. Without a visual representation of birds, she said, the math is confusing and overly abstract for a 5- or 6-year-old. "The math doesn't jump out of the page here," she said.

The Singapore first-grade text, by contrast, could hardly have been clearer. It began with a blank rectangle and the number and word for "zero." Below that was a rectangle with a single robot in it, and the number and word for "one." Then a rectangle with two dolls, and the number and word for "two," and so on.

"This page is very pictorial, but it refers to something very concrete," Ramos said. "Something they can understand."

Next to the pictures were dots. Beginning with the number six (represented by six pineapples), the dots were arranged in two rows, so that six was presented as one row of five dots and a second row with one dot.

Day one, first grade: the beginnings of set theory.

"This concept, right at the beginning, is the foundation for very important mathematics," Ramos said. As it progresses, the Singapore math builds on this, often in ways that are invisible to the children.

Word problems in the early grades are always solved the same way: Draw a picture representing the problem and its solution. Then express it with numbers, and finally write it in words. "The whole concept," Ramos says, "is concrete to pictorial to abstract."
...
Many eminent mathematicians agree. In fact, it is difficult to find a mathematician who likes the standard American texts or dislikes Singapore's.

"The Singapore texts don't make a huge deal about the concepts, but they present them in the correct and economical form," said Roger Howe, a professor of mathematics at Yale University. "It provides the basis for a very orderly and systematic conceptual understanding of arithmetic and mathematics."

So why aren't these books more widely used? The L.A. Times article linked above says that the main resistance comes from teachers. The curriculum is not easy to use without special teacher training:

Adding to the difficulty is that the Singapore texts are not as teacher-friendly as most American texts. "They don't come with teachers editions, or two-page fold-outs with comments, or step-by-step instructions about how to give the lessons," said Yale's Howe. "Most U.S. elementary teachers don't currently have that kind of understanding, so successful use of the Singapore books would require substantial professional development."

Although some U.S. schools have had spectacular results using Singapore texts, others have fared less well. A study found that success in Montgomery County, Md., schools using the Singapore books was directly related to teacher training. At schools where teachers weren't trained as well, student achievement declined.

This seems to be further evidence for the recent McKinsey study comparing education internationally that concluded that the best results are obtained by hiring the best teachers, providing them with training and support to get the best out of them, and then intervening to provide students who fall behind with support.