Reflections on the health care ruling and the reactions

I was occupied for most of yesterday and did not have time to follow the reactions to the news that almost every aspect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) had been upheld by the US Supreme Court. When late at night I did catch up on the coverage, there seemed to be basically four groups of stories.

One was the predictable and favorite one of speculating about the impact this will have on the November elections. Every single issue from now until November will suffer this same fate because it enables pundits to indulge in content-free talk, their favorite kind. . [Read more…]

The problem of false positive results

My post on physics researchers searching for the Higgs particle needing to get the chance of statistical errors down to below the five-sigma level (or 0.000028%) generated some discussion on the problems that can arise (mainly the increased likelihood of false positive results) in other areas such as the social sciences where the threshold for acceptability is often as high as 5%. [Read more…]

Cue the war on Catholic nuns

I have written before (see here and here) about how the Vatican has cracked own on American nuns because they seem to be more interested in wasting their time doing such things as teaching and helping the poor and sick, leaving them little time to do the true work of god such as propagating Papa Ratzi’s message of hate against homosexuality, contraception, and abortion. [Read more…]

Crazy Arizona

On Monday, the US Supreme Court struck down most of the provisions of the Arizona law SB 1070. As NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports, the sections that were struck down were “provisions that made it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek or engage in work or to fail to carry documents proving they are in the country legally. Also struck down was the provision that authorized state and local law enforcement officers to arrest anyone based solely on the suspicion that the individual is in the country illegally.” [Read more…]