Some years ago, there was an odd feature of the scores on the SAT exam that students in the US take in large numbers and that many colleges use as one of their admission criteria. They found that the overall average SAT score was declining but that when the scores were disaggregated by ethnicity, the average scores of every subgroup (white, black, Hispanic, Asian) was rising.
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I mentioned in a previous post that my schadenfeude has limits when it comes to actual physical harm done to people and their families. But I have no limits to my enjoyment when it comes to how the odious, sexist, serial harasser Roger Ailes of Fox News got his comeuppance at the hands of someone who was widely seen as a dumb blonde. As I have noted before, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson may have played a dumb blonde on her network but she is no fool.
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We are already being inundated with opinion polls on all the election races going on and this blizzard will likely intensfty as we get closer to November. In order to help us keep a grip on reality, Harry Enten provides a list of things to bear in mind confronted by poll numbers. I have given just the headers but Enten’s post explains the rationale for each.
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So on Wednesday we had Donald Trump going to Mexico and meeting with their president Enrique Pena Nieto. Following it, he lavishly praised the Mexican people and said that the two had a cordial discussion, and that they did not discuss the wall or who would pay for it (something that the Mexican president later contradicted), suggesting to observers that he was going to change his approach on the divisive issue of immigration.
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It is interesting how conventions quickly develop for situations where people are put in close proximity, such as in elevators. There is even a name for the study of how people relate to others in public spaces: proxemics. This post looks at what we know about elevator behavior, such as how people arrange themselves as they enter, that people look at the numbers, possibly as a way to avoid eye contact with others, and that “Men leave more space between themselves and other men than women do with other women”.
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We have come really close to eradicating the deadly disease of polio and so any setbacks have to be viewed with concern. NPR’s Jason Beaubien, who has been doing some excellent reporting on health issues in Africa, says that the recent discovery of two new cases in the northeast of Nigeria (near the border with Chad) has health experts worried because that country had gone for two years without any cases and was on track to be next country to be declared polio-free.
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In a previous post, I wrote about how voter volatility has dropped sharply beginning with the 1996 elections, resulting in much greater stability in voter patterns. This has resulted in the cementing of party preferences in about 80% of the states leading to a semi-permanent red state-blue state map of the US, with just a handful of about 10 states (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin being the largest of this small group) considered swing states whose outcome is now considered to be still up for grabs.
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