So these are the types of stories that bother me. After reading it, I have learned that I will never, ever, joke, talk to or even smile with any of these guys. But little else. I am left asking several questions. First off, I get the feeling that there is some missing information. Why did Sgt Eggleton described the situation as “more than just a misunderstanding.”? Between the time the kid knocked on the window and the police arrived, did the kid just stand around and keep on knocking or did someone detain him? Why was he held for several hours for armed robbery if he had no gun and his story seemed to check out? Why did the police offer him a job after everything? Something with this is just not right.

Charleston, S.C., teen Kieon Sharp, 18, tried taking the direct approach to landing a new job. Instead, it landed him in jail, on suspicion of armed robbery.

Sharp was hoping to find a job with Brinks security. He had already applied for a job with the company but decided he wanted more information about the day-to-day details of driving one of the company’s armed trucks. And what better way to gather information than going straight to the source? So he went up to a driver inside one of the company’s vehicles and knocked on the window.

The driver mistakenly thought Sharp was holding a gun and called the police. Charleston Police Sgt. Bobby Eggleton described the situation as “more than just a misunderstanding.” In the aftermath of Sharp’s failed informational interview, police held him behind bars for several hours before releasing him.
“He banged on the window and that scared the driver,” Eggleton said. “You don’t approach those guys very often. They are on high alert because they carry a large amount of cash.”

Of course, when police actually searched Sharp they didn’t find a gun, just copies of the job applications he had filled out that day, including one for a position with Brinks. Eggleton said Sharp was cooperative with police and that they even offered Sharp a job application with the city’s street department after he was released on Thursday

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There is a very interesting article today (unfortunately behind a firewall) in the WSJ regarding the difficulty pharmaceutical companies are having reproducing results from studies published by academics in “peer reviewed” journals.

This is one of medicine’s dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can’t be reproduced.

“It’s a very serious and disturbing issue because it obviously misleads people” who implicitly trust findings published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, says Bruce Alberts, editor of Science. On Friday, the U.S. journal is devoting a large chunk of its Dec. 2 issue to the problem of scientific replication.

Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can’t be validated by others, there are major consequences.

Although focused on biomedical/pharmaceutical research, I wonder how much of this problem exists in other areas, particualrly in light of this (my emphasis):

There is also a more insidious and pervasive problem: a preference for positive results.

Unlike pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers rarely conduct experiments in a “blinded” manner. This makes it easier to cherry-pick statistical findings that support a positive result. In the quest for jobs and funding, especially in an era of economic malaise, the growing army of scientists need more successful experiments to their name, not failed ones. An explosion of scientific and academic journals has added to the pressure.

Also, there was this:

According to a report published by the U.K.’s Royal Society, there were 7.1 million researchers working globally across all scientific fields—academic and corporate—in 2007, a 25% increase from five years earlier.

“Among the more obvious yet unquantifiable reasons, there is immense competition among laboratories and a pressure to publish,” wrote Dr. Asadullah and others from Bayer, in their September paper. “There is also a bias toward publishing positive results, as it is easier to get positive results accepted in good journals.”

Science publications are under pressure, too. The number of research journals has jumped 23% between 2001 and 2010, according to Elsevier, which has analyzed the data. Their proliferation has ratcheted up competitive pressure on even elite journals, which can generate buzz by publishing splashy papers, typically containing positive findings, to meet the demands of a 24-hour news cycle.

Dr. Alberts of Science acknowledges that journals increasingly have to strike a balance between publishing studies “with broad appeal,” while making sure they aren’t hyped.

I’m guessing that balance is not always well struck, nor is the problem limited to biomedical science. I’m sure our local scientists can weigh in on this.

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At least, not according to this study. But some of the “research” looks highly questionable. I tend to agree with many of Ace of Spades HQ critiques. How is the “guy who did a hit and run on a car” more likely to be a Christian, Muslim, Atheist or Rapist a good survey question?

Ace also mentions Ricky Gervais, noting there is no relation between the researcher and the prominent British comedian. However, it prompted me to once again think of my biggest problem with his Religious-people-are-idiots movie, The Invention of Lying. The Gervais character invents lying, and subsequently invents a religion involving a man in the sky; then everybody believes him because nobody, except him, understands what lying is, and cannot even conceptualize it.

However, clearly they would have to be able to understand what it was to be wrong. That nobody says, “Well, clearly, you’re mistaken, otherwise I would have heard of this before,” simply destroys the high-concept structure for me. Even if nobody lied, he could clearly be mistaken. If you’re going to make it out that religious people are, for the most part, gullible idiots and that religion is, indeed, an opiate for the masses, then I think you should be smart enough to craft a high-concept film that understands the difference between nobody lying and everyone believing everything anybody ever says about anything is true.

That being said, watch the Coke commercial from The Invention of Lying.

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Vital Statistics:

Jobs Friday. Payroll data came in at 120k, but the big surprise was a 4 tenths of a percent drop in the unemployment rate, from 9.0% in October to 8.6% in November. Average Hourly Earnings were down 10 basis points MOM and up 1.8% YOY. Average weekly hours were 34.3. All of the revisions were to the upside as well.

While the 8.6% number is certainly encouraging, it was driven by 315k Americans leaving the workforce as much as job gains (278k). In fact, the labor participation rate declined to 64% from 64.2%. This is probably why the futures yawned at the number. The job gains were mainly in retail and the losses were in construction and government. The overall picture is of an improving labor market, which is slowly on the mend. Unfortunately, I don’t really think a lot of momentum can be picked up simply because housing construction is MIA, and it is typically housing construction which leads us out of recessions.

Chart: Unemployment Rate

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When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union—like public housing in the United States—look decrepit within a year or two of their construction…

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Senator Doctor Coburn has an op-ed at CNN about ending “welfare for the wealthy.” Perhaps some of us have an opinion on the good doctor’s prescription.

Every year, politicians on both sides engage in a process of reverse Robin Hood in which they steal $30 billion from low- and middle-income Americans and provide handouts to the rich and famous.

Families are struggling to make ends meet and are making painful economic choices as politicians in Washington borrow billions to provide welfare to the wealthy. Politicians on both sides refuse to fix big problems and defend stupid policies because changing those policies would involve upending a comfortable political status quo.

End welfare for the wealthy

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Sins of the Parents

Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law.

TAGS:

FLORIDA, IMMIGRATION,SUPREME COURT

In the current race to the bottom to see which state can provide the most degraded and dehumanizing environment for undocumented immigrants, Arizona and Alabama have grabbed the headlines. But largely unnoticed, it is Florida, home to nearly one million Cuban refugees and their descendants, that has come up with perhaps the most bizarre and pointless anti-immigrant policy of all.

Beginning last year, the state’s higher education authorities have been treating American citizens born in the United States, including graduates of Florida high schools who have spent their entire lives in the state, as non-residents for tuition purposes if they can’t demonstrate that their parents are in the country legally.

Yes, you read that correctly – although when I first came upon a description of the policy a few weeks ago, I was sure that I had misunderstood something. It’s a basic tenet of equal protection law that the government can’t single out citizens for disfavored treatment without a good reason. The Supreme Court is serious about this, even ruling unanimously a decade ago that an Illinois village violated an individual homeowner’s 14th Amendment right to equal protection by demanding from her a bigger easement than it required of her neighbors as the price of connecting her home to the municipal water supply.

A few feet of land more or less may not have made a life-changing difference to the plaintiff in that case. But consider the difference between in-state and non-resident tuition at the University of Florida: $5,700 a year versus $27,936. The disparity is similar at the state’s community colleges, although the price tags are lower. It is the difference between a college education and none.

It seems grossly unfair, as the Supreme Court acknowledged 30 years ago in Plyler v. Doe when it held that Texas could not deprive undocumented children of a free public K-through-12 education, to blame children for the wrongdoing of their parents. Unfair and, as Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. observed in his concurring opinion, socially self-destructive, in creating a permanent underclass of uneducated people. (Alabama has observed the formalities of the Plyler opinionby simply trying to frighten undocumented parents into keeping their children out of school; if the decision were not on the books, that state would undoubtedly have shut the schoolhouse doors by now.)

The Supreme Court has never extended the Plyler opinion to give undocumented children rights to higher education. Alabama bars them entirely from its public universities and colleges, as does South Carolina. Other states permit them to enroll while denying the in-state tuition break, while a dozen states, including – famously—Texas, treat them as residents, entitled to in-state tuition rates.

That policy debate is ongoing, but the Florida situation is something deeper and uglier. Its victims are, after all, American citizens, as fully American as Rick Scott, Florida’s scary governor, who said last month that the state’s universities should focus on practical subjects that create jobs rather than on the study of such subjects as political science, psychology, or anthropology. (“We don’t need them here,” Governor Scott said of anthropologists. University students in Florida are circulating petitions to have the governor’s name kept off their diplomas.)

The students who filed a lawsuit last month challenging the policy are as American as Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is leading a campaign to amend the Constitution. He and his allies would repeal, for the children of undocumented immigrants, the 14th Amendment’s grant of “birthright citizenship” (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”). The Florida policy – it’s not even a statute, but simply an interpretive rule adopted by the state’s Board of Education and its University System, taking many college administrators and enrolled students by surprise – amounts to repeal of birthright citizenship by regulation.

“Corruption of blood” was a familiar feature of the common law in England. A person found guilty of treason and certain other crimes would be barred from passing his estate on to his children, who would thus inherit nothing but the corrupted blood line. The framers of the United States Constitution considered and forcefully rejected the concept. Article III, the judiciary article, contains this sentence: “The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attained.” As James Madison expressed the thought more directly at the time, the purpose was to prevent Congress “from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.”

Nor were the founding fathers content to leave the matter there. Going beyond treason, Congress enacted a law in 1790 to provide that “no conviction or judgment . . .  shall work corruption of blood or any forfeiture of estate.” Although not in so many words, the principle that guilt is not inheritable lay behind the modern Supreme Court’s gradual recognition of rights for children born out of wedlock, deemed by society to be “illegitimate.”

The lawsuit filed last month in Federal District Court in Miami by the Southern Poverty Law Center asks the court to do the obvious: to rule that Florida’s “policy and practice of classifying dependent United States citizen students who reside in Florida as ‘non-residents’ based on their parents’ federal immigration status denies these United States citizens equal protection of the laws in violation of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status on behalf of “all past, present, and future United States citizens” affected by the policy, names five individual plaintiffs. Two were forced for financial reasons to withdraw from Miami Dade College when the policy took effect. Two others can’t afford to take all the credits necessary to complete their degrees on time, and one, who would have received a full scholarship as a resident, couldn’t afford to enroll at all. Four were born in Miami and one in Los Angeles. All are eligible to be president of the United States.

The complaint hasn’t yet been formally served on the state, so it’s not clear what defense Florida will come up with. Bills to overturn the policy were filed within the last few weeks in both houses of the Florida Legislature. If the state is lucky, one will pass and take it off the hook. The State Senate sponsor, Rene Garcia of Hialeah, is a Republican and chairman of the Florida Hispanic Caucus. “When you’re an American citizen, you’re an American citizen,” he said.

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I always enjoy reading “Top 10” type lists even when they piss me off with their choices. This list of top political pundits is no different. I like that it includes Allahpundit and Jim Pethokoukis, but am stupefied by the inclusion of Andrew “Sarah Palin’s uterus is hiding something” Sullivan or Glenn “I’ve never written anything not at least 20 thousand words long including my grocery list” Greenwald. Morning Joe’s also a strange choice.

I also admit to a bit of Schadenboner over Greg Sargent not being included. I guess “AquaBudda” just wasn’t the scoop we thought it would be.

Who got left out or shouldn’t have been included in your opinion?

–Troll

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I’m really not up on the legal situation involving medicinal marijuana in DC. My interest in the War on Drugs is more from the civil liberties/police abuse standpoint than any desire (none whatsoever) to actually use drugs.

Check out point four in the police affidavit that was covered by DCist in a recent raid on a local hemp shop that was selling Flex Your Rights, a DVD that addresses your rights during encounters with police:

“Affiant notes that while this DVD is informative for any citizen, when introduced into a store that promotes the use of controlled substances, the DVD becomes a tool for deceiving law enforcement to keep from being arrested. The typical citizen would not need to know detailed information as to US Supreme Court case law regarding search and seizure because they are not transporting illegal substances in fear of being caught.”

It’s the “if you’re innocent, you have nothing to hide” defense. So here’s an officer that consider the Bill of Rights to be a device used to deceive law enforcement. How reassuring for the good citizens of DC.

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Vital Statistics:

Markets are pausing after yesterday’s furious rally. There was a sense of unreality to melt-up, and perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that yesterday happened to be 11/30, the end of the month. Fund managers don’t do window-dressing at the end of the month, do they? Especially at the end of a month as lousy as November 2011. Yesterday’s coordinated action by the central banks provided the perfect cover to play some mark-up games – the S&P 500 rallied 12 handles (1%) in the last hour of trading yesterday.

Euro sovereign debt continues to rally, and both Spain and France sold 8 billion euros worth of bonds today. Initial Jobless Claims came in at 400k, vs. expectations of 390k for the holiday shortened Thanksgiving Day week. While we are seeing signs of life in some of the economic indicators, employment continues to be a drag. Wall Street has had a lousy year, and the big banks continue to let people go. Construction spending increased .8% month on month for October, and Napalm (the National Association of Purchasing Managers) Purchasing Managers Index came in at 52.7 – better than expectations but still lower than earlier this year.

This is the first Thursday of the month, and that means retailers are releasing same-store sales for March. Overall, same store sales look solid, but the Street may have bumped up expectations a little too much. Costco, Limited Brands, Macy’s, Nordstrom reported better than expected SSS. Kohls, Target, JC Penney, The Gap missed. Promotional activity appears to have driven the divergences.

S&P Case-Schiller was released on Tuesday, with the index coming in at 142, a 57bp drop month on month, and a 3.6% drop year on year. The chart of the index is not a picture of strength, to say the least:

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