The Yin Blog

How we're bad at estimating food portions

Hmm, this may help explain how I've maintained my weight even though my food journal logging says that I run about a 1000+ calorie deficit:

In one study, dietitians were asked to estimate calories in three fast-food meals. The baseline meal consisted of a three-inch ham sandwich, six chips and a 10-ounce cup of soda. The portion size was doubled in the second meal and doubled again in the third meal. Yet even the dietitians failed to see it, guessing 13 percent to 26 percent too low on the calorie counts. Of course, each of these mistakes is small on its own, but over time, our errors in portion perception can add up. For a weekly moviegoer who orders a supersize soda to sip on, the misperception translates to about 8,000 unintended calories a year.

Or it could be that I've overestimated my daily burn rate.

About the Secret Service prostitution scandal . . . par for the course?

I just came across this passage in Gary T. Marx's book, Under Cover: Police Surveillance in America:

Of course, [video/audio surveillance] can be a double-edged sword should agents forget that video or audio tapes are present (in one case, agents were overheard discussing the sexual activities and attributes of an attractive female assistant U.S. attorney, and, in another, the agent asked  an informer to locate a prostitute).

Subsidize my fitness please!

From a forthcoming health study:

Subsidizing exercise and fitness-related lifestyles in middle age could significantly reduce the ballooning cost of health care in later years, a new study of more than 20,000 people suggests.

Running has certainly done wonders for my blood lipid profile and the like. I had not-so-good cholesterol level and blood pressure during my early 30s (hmm, when I was a law firm associate -- coincidence?), but I had better numbers across the board at my check-up last year than at any other time in my life.

I especially like this part of the news report:

Exercise affects "so many chronic conditions leading to major health care costs," said [Dr. Suzanne] Steinbaum, who also is the hospital's director of women and heart disease. "We should have financial support for people to go to gym facilities."

People who are more fit should "get some benefit" from insurers, Steinbaum said. Society should "give them the ability to become fit," and then "give people a reward when they demonstrate" fitness, she added.

Well, I certainly won't complain if my health insurance plan is going to help pay for my running gear, gym membership, race entry fees, and the like! Come to think of it, I'd like a stationary rowing machine for the home, too.

Who are terrorists?

Hmm . . . it seems like not too much time passes before we get another one of these types of stories -- someone is arrested after trying to blow up some public place, only there was no danger because the bomb was a fake, and the co-conspirators were actually undercover FBI agents. Today's story comes from Cleveland:

Five men described by federal authorities as anarchists who were angry with corporate America and the government have been charged with plotting to bomb an Ohio bridge.

The men were arrested Monday night after unknowingly working with an FBI informant for months. They were charged with conspiracy and trying to bomb property used in interstate commerce.

Are these guys alleged terrorists? Well, the closest I could find was a reference in the New York Times story to the fact that the arrest was made by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

I've just posted to SSRN a forthcoming article that looks at how race and religion factor into the perceptions of criminal defendants as terrorist -- or not. Here's the abstract:

This article examines real post-9/11 cases of bombings/attempted bombings and mass shootings, and asks why some of the cases have been deemed acts of terrorism, while others with similar fact patterns have not been. The easy, if cynical, answer is that an act of mass violence is terrorism if it is committed by someone who is Muslim (such as Portland’s alleged Pioneer Square bomber Mohamed Mohamud, or Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan), but it is not terrorism if it is committed by a non-Muslim (such as a father-son duo who planted a bomb near a bank in Oregon, or Arizona gunman Jared Loughner).

Yet, the easy answer glosses over seemingly plausible explanations for the disparity in perception. This article considers 'micro-level' views of the cases, such as the nature of criminal charges available to the prosecuting jurisdiction (state versus federal), that do explain the disparate perceptions. However, the micro-level view also misses the forest for the trees: notwithstanding the plausible explanations for why the cases are seen differently, there are real costs imposed on society when terrorism becomes branded with Islam: cognitive biases against Muslims become more potent; investigators risk losing the trail of non-Muslim perpetrators when they fixate reflexively on Muslims; and worst of all, some government officials, aware of the biases and concerned about appearing anti-Muslim, may overcompensate by deliberately ignoring specific 'red flags' about Muslim individuals, with tragic results, as the Fort Hood shootings demonstrate.

The article does not pretend that there is a panacea to solve the problem of perceiving terrorism through the lens of race and religion. There are, however, steps to be taken to address and minimize the problem, including de-biasing techniques and redefining 'terrorism,' at least in layperson’s terms to focus on the intended result, rather than the perceived motivation (as the latter tends to result in equating Islamic beliefs with terroristic motivation).

UPDATE: No mention in the Wall Street Journal about terrorism either. . . .

The ACA "Under Siege"

While reading various reactions to last week's arguments in the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, in particular, criticisms of the performance by Solicitor General Verilli (and compliments toward Paul Clement), I was strangely reminded of the best Steven Seagal movie, which is Under Siege (aka "Die Hard on a Battleship"). In it, Seagal played Casey Ryback, ex-SEAL and current head cook on a soon to be decommissioned U.S. battleship that gets taken over by a bunch of terrorists led by Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey. Jones and Busey and their henchmen have managed to capture and lock up just about every sailor on the ship, except for Seagal and a few others who hid. Seagal then wages an insurgency to take back control of the ship.

At one point, seeing the latest mayhem that Seagal has inflicted (dead terrorists, etc.), Jones turns to a henchman played by Colm Meaney (aka Chief O'Brien on ST:TNG) and says, "Daumer, Daumer, Daumer, why didn't you hire this person? I don't know what his price would have been, but it would have been worth it!"

(start at 0:22 in the video clip)

You have to wonder if team Obama felt the same way after the oral arguments. . . . I say this not as a critic of Verilli; although it's certainly possible to get a plum federal appointment without much actual qualifications as political payback, I highly doubt that's true about the SG. This is more of a reflection of how brilliant Clement is universally acknowledged to be as a Supreme Court advocate.

Anyway, you have to wonder if team Obama was thinking, if only we had Clement on our side! 

Of course, one suspects that Clement personally believes himself to have the better argument on the Commerce Clause issue. But when we had Clement here at Lewis & Clark as our Kennedy Speaker last fall, he did a lunch time presentation for our students, and one of the (many) interesting things he said was that there have been occasions when he wanted to argue one side of a case, but it was the other side that approached him for his services. He's the ultimate lawyers' lawyer in that sense -- he argues the client's cause.

So what if the Obama Administration had looked ahead to this day of reckoning before the Supreme Court, and thought, that's who we want arguing our case? Would the President have ever been willing to consider appointing Clement as the Solicitor General?

Well, for most lawyers who are Supreme Court wonks, it would be incredibly hard to turn down an offer of being the primary advocate for the United States, the so-called Tenth Justice. But since Clement has already had that experience, having served as President Bush's SG from 2004 to 2008, it would probably hold less appeal for him than for most others. And the prospect of contacting an opposition party member with such a plum prospect, only to be turned down, would no doubt be embarrassing for any administration, so I don't really think that Obama would have been willing to try even if he would've wanted Clement on his team.

Still, can you imagine, after last week's arguments, President Obama saying, "David [Axelrod], David, David, why didn't you hire Clement before the oral argument? I don't know what his price would've been, but it would've been worth it!"

Joe Biden . . . exaggerates (no kidding!)

VP Biden says about the raid to get Osama bin Laden:

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.

As others have noted, the Navy SEAL team was pretty awesome, and no doubt, the plan carried some substantial risks, not just to the soldiers, but also to the Administration.

But the most audacious plan in 500 years???

I know Operation Eagle Claw (aka the Iran hostage rescue mission) ended in a fiasco, but if you read the account in Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah, you can't help but appreciate the scope and scale of that mission. The goal was even more complicated -- not killing a determined foe, but rescuing alive nearly 50 hostages held in different locations in a foreign metropolis teeming with enemies. I'm sure there are other missions that rate as audacious, or maybe more, but Eagle Claw is way up there. And the risks from Eagle Claw weren't just to the participating soldiers, or to the Carter Administration (which did pay the price), but potentially also to the hostages. . . .

I mean, Eagle Claw was so audacious, the Delta Force had to be created for the mission!

Gallup polled me yesterday!

Like probably most of you, I do not like getting calls from telemarketers at any time, especially near the end of dinner. However, there are two random callers that I do like to get called by -- political pollsters, and the Nielsen rating agency.

(I've never been one of the Nielsen raters with the device that automatically measures what you watch, but I have twice been asked to keep a written journal of what I watched for a week. It should be obvious why I'd instantly agree to help Nielsen -- can you imagine what primetime TV would look like if there were more Nielsen viewers like me? There would be lots of reality TV, yes, but none of that Bachelor crap; lots of serialized action-adventure/mystery/thriller/sci-fi; and basically no sit-coms.)

Well, Nielsen did not call me yesterday, but Gallup did. Often you can figure out what the pollster is getting at from the questions, but this one was interesting. There were quite a few questions about how satisfied I was in my job, my health, etc. More questions about how many days in the past week that I ate 5 or more servings of fruits and vegetables, and how many days that I exercised at least 30 minutes (ha!). One question kind of stumped me -- whether health problems had kept me from doing what I wanted to do at any time in the past six months. There was the calf that I pulled during a 5K . . . and the bout of metatarsalgia in my right foot that I finally seem over . . . but both of those are running-related, so not seemingly within the spirit of the questions.

Then, there was a shift to questions about the direction of the economy, which you can imagine I had a field day answering. And finally, demographic questions. It was easy to answer that I belonged to neither party, but then when the pollster followed up with, do you lean toward one party or the other, I suggested that he could record it as lean Democrat on social issues, lean Republican on fiscal issues, but apparently the survey database wouldn't accept that, so I went with no leanings, which I suppose is true in a way, if you consider that my leanings cancel each other out.

Anyway, there you have it. I feel like my responses to a poll like this matter far more than my actual vote does, since the statistical sampling means that I am speaking for a larger number of people within the demographic category (ha ha, independent moderate -- the deciding group). I am a moderate, hear me roar!

A small clue about our health care costs?

I took my older son to a dental check-up today, and it was a very efficient process. We checked in, didn't wait long to be called, and the attention was good.

Then I took a look at the full billing statement, which showed what services were provided, what they cost (rack rate), what amount the HMO covered, and what amount we owed/paid. The only amount in the last category was the $15 co-pay, which was certainly reasonable.

$77 for about 10 minutes of the dentist's time . . . probably inflated a bit to make it seem like the insurance coverage was a good deal, but I wouldn't call it unreasonable.

X-rays, fluoride treatment, etc. Fine, fine fine.

$60 for instructions on brushing teeth?!?

I know this doesn't really matter, since it's just an arbitrary amount that the HMO has decided it's going to claim that its services are worth (except that there is a cap on annual benefits), but is there any relation between that amount and reality? I was there, and it was about 2-3 minutes of a list of rules. $60???

Should I support a novel that hypes vaccine conspiracy theories?

Today's Kindle Daily Deal at Amazon is a thriller about a documentary film maker who uncovers a conspiracy to conceal the dangers/risks of vaccines. I love conspiracy novels, but I find myself loathe to support a novel -- even realizing that it's just a work of fiction -- that seems to provide fuel to the ridiculous anti-vaccination movement. I think I'll pass.

Rachel Maddow mocks Mitt Romney for . . . having worked hard and invested well???

Tonight on "The Rachel Maddow Show," the hostess -- in her once charming but now smug snarky tone -- said that Mitt Romney's tax returns showed some interesting things, like the fact that he makes "$57,ooo a day for . . . not working."

Now, I get the theme that Romney is a 0.0001%er, that he can't understand the problems of the average person, etc. I also get the desire to paint him as a destroyer of jobs from his time at Bain.

But now Maddow is mocking Romney for, what? That he made a lot of money (not inherited, but earned himself) before, and invested it well, and now that he's 64 and able to live very well off his past hard work and wise investments? Under this approach of mocking people for making money while not working, should we also mock the elderly who draw Social Security, on the theory that they get (admittedly, much less) money for doing nothing???

To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't lines of criticism to be leveled against Romney's wealth. But this line of snark just seems pretty lame to me.