Paul M. Jones

The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.

Higher numbers can be obtained when asking about lifetime sexual experiences, rather than identity. The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2 percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity. Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual. Other studies suggest those individuals are, like the bisexuals, mainly women: The same CDC study that found only 1 percent of women identify as lesbian, for example, found that 13 percent of women reported a history of some form of sexual contact with other women.

"Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual," the Williams Institute's Gary J. Gates concluded.

...

Of course, gays aren't the only minority population that has an outsized place in the public imagination. Americans also "vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven," according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported in Public Opinion Quarterly that "The extent to which minority populations are perceived as a kind of threat is ... related to perceived proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined." Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn't been proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term, but that doesn't mean that they might never.

One thing's for sure: it's hard to imagine the fact that so many think the country is more than a quarter gay or lesbian has no impact on our public policy.

via Politics - Garance Franke-Ruta - Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are - The Atlantic.

One of the first things that stands out is anti-foreign bias. When they contemplate economic interaction with foreigners, the general public gets unreasonably negative...

A second major pattern in the public's economic illiteracy is make-work bias...In the long-run, blaming technology for unemployment is just silly. As the mechanization of agriculture beautifully illustrates, when machines replace people in one line of work, they switch to another...

a blanket anti-market bias...In the minds of public, prices apparently go up when businesses suddenly start to feel greedier. Economists, in contrast, expect businesses to be greedy year-in, year-out; but depending on market conditions, greed may call for prices to go up, go down, or stay the same...

A final catch-all category of economic illiteracy may be called pessimistic bias. Conventional wisdom has it that conditions are going from bad to worse. Most Americans think that real income has been falling for decades, most new jobs are low-paying, and doubt whether the next generation will have a higher standard of living. Economists think that this conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

via Economic Illiteracy, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

... if D-Day had failed, Stalin would have ended up occupying almost all of German, which would have significantly changed the balance of power in the Cold War. Had the Allies invaded France in 1943, rather than invading Sicily, they probably would have made faster progress than they did in 1944. VE Day would have come a year earlier, with the Allies capturing most of Germany.

My unending thanks to all the men and women who fought this day, and the entire war, in 1944. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » D-Day thoughts.

Fat Head is a highly entertaining and informative (albeit zero-budget) documentary by a guy named Tom Naughton, who decided to try Spurlock’s experiment for himself. Naughton ate nothing but fast food for 30 days, but with two important caveats:

1. He didn’t eat whatever the clerk suggested, as Spurlock did. In other words, no super-sizing if he didn’t want to.

2. He kept his carbs to under 100 grams a day and his calories to under 2,000, using publicly available nutritional information about all the national fast-food chains.

Why these two important differences? As Naughton puts it, “Because I have a functioning brain.”

via Fat Head: the movie Michael Bloomberg doesn’t want you to see | The Daily Caller.

Earlier today, the PHP Framework Interoperability Group accepted two standards recommendations:

• PSR-1, “Basic Coding Standard”, passed with 17 in favor and none against.

• PSR-2, “Coding Style Guide”, passed with 13 in favor and 4 against, 1 abstaining.

There’s been a lot of commentary about these proposals over the past two weeks, some of it positive and some of it negative. Here’s a taste:

• http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/10784/psr-1-and-psr-2/p1

• http://phpmaster.com/psr-1-and-psr-2-to-be-approved-as-standards

• http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/05/open-standards-better-way.html

• http://brian.moonspot.net/php-coding-standards

• http://fuelphp.com/blog/2012/05/adopting-psr-1-for-2-0

• http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2012/06/the-framework-interoperability-group-fig-openness-accountability-and-community-involvement-in-php-standards

I’d like to address some of the negative commentary here; I don’t expect to change many minds, but I do want to make sure the comments are answered.

(Full disclosure: I’m a voting member in the group, and have been since its beginning. I did not introduce the original measure that led to PSR-1 and PSR-2; that honor belongs to Klaus Silveira, a non-voting member. However, I did shepherd the PSR-1 and PSR-2 recommendations through the voting process to their acceptance by the group.)

Regarding The Group

Q: What the hell is the “PHP Standards” group? I’ve never heard of it before now.

The name isn’t “PHP Standards” any more; it’s the “Framework Interoperability Group” (FIG). We did start off as “PHP Standards” because, well, we all worked in PHP, but realized pretty quickly that the name was too broad, and renamed it the “Framework Interoperability Group.” (That name turns out to be too narrow, as the group now has representatives from library and CMS projects as well.)

The idea behind the group is for project representatives to talk about the commonalities between our projects and find ways we can work together. Our main audience is each other, but we’re very aware that the rest of the PHP community is watching. If other folks want to adopt what we’re doing, that’s cool, but it’s not what we’re focused on.

Q: Then why is the mailing list called “PHP Standards” instead of “FIG Whatever” ?

The Google Groups mailing list does still bear the original name of “PHP Standards.” It’s a legacy issue. To reduce continued misconception, we need to change that to the reflect the new name, but I don’t know when that will happen. (The Github repository for the group does use the new name.)

Q: Why are you guys so secretive and closed?

Just because you haven’t heard of the list, doesn’t mean we’re keeping it a secret. There’s a lot of discussion groups out there. ;-)

We did start out with a closed list years ago, but we opened it up pretty quickly thereafter. Anyone can join in and make their voice heard.

There’s nothing “closed” about the list or the decision-making process. Anyone who wants to drive the group to open even further is free to join the list and make suggestions for doing so. (I’m looking at you Anthony Ferrara. ;-)

Q: So once I join the list, I can vote on PHP-FIG Standards Recommendations? Sweet!

Sorry, no. The only people who can vote on a measure are the voting members. But anyone can discuss the measures on the list.

Voting is reserved for people who represent a member project. If you want to vote, then participate on the list for a while, and submit your project for membership. If enough other existing members vote in favor of your request, then you’re in and can vote on measures thereafter.

Q: I knew it. You’re a bunch of self-appointed elitist jerks.

“Self-appointed” is probably accurate; “elitist jerks” we can discuss. ;-)

Regardless, the group is currently composed of representatives who have volunteered from the following projects:

• Agavi
• CakePHP, CakePHP 2
• Chisimba, C4
• Composer, Packagist
• Doctrine, Doctrine2, et al.
• Drupal
• eZ Publish
• FLOW3
• Joomla
• Lithium
• PEAR, PEAR2
• phpBB
• PPI, PPI2
• Propel, Propel 2
• SabreDAV
• Solar Framework, Aura Project
• Symfony, Symfony2
• Zend Framework, Zend Framework 2
• Zikula

Some of these projects are large, and some are small (for various definitions of “large” and “small”). They’re all very different from each other in lots of ways, and have very different ideas on how to approach various problems.

Q: Whatever. I don’t need you guys telling me what to do. If I don’t want to follow your so-called “standards” then you can’t make me.

We’re not trying to make anyone do anything. Hell, not even all of the member projects subscribe to all of the standards recommendations. What we’re trying to do is find commonalities between the projects so that we (the members) can all eventually share similar practices and techniques.

Regarding PSR-1 and PSR-2

Q: Who the hell are you to define a “standard” for coding style?

It bears repeating: the primary audience for the recommendations is the group itself. If others in the wider PHP community want to adopt the recommendations, I think that’s a positive outcome, but it’s certainly not mandatory in any way.

Q: Coding style is all personal preferences. How can you make a “standard” out of them?

On one hand, you’re right: a style guide is a collection of preferences. On the other hand, it’s not exactly personal when a lot of different projects run by a lot of different people indpendently arrive at a similar set of rules.

Q: How did you come up with this stupid “standard” ?

Somebody on the list mentioned that it would be nice to have a single style guide for member projects, code in different projects would look similar. He included an initial set of guidelines. Several of the voting members agreed that it was a good idea, and we expanded on that initial set of rules.

After some back-and-forth, someone else brought up the idea of doing a survey among the member projects, to see exactly how many projects are following which points of style. We ended up with 22 projects in the survey. The results made it pretty clear what the majority of projects were using for their standards.

Q: Only 22 projects, out of the whole world of PHP code? That’s not a valid sample size!

Recall that our primary audience is the group itself. If you have the time, energy, and inclination to do a survey of defined coding styles across the entire PHP community and analyze the results using a statistically valid methodology, I will be very interested to see your report on it.

Q: Where’s this survey at? I bet you’re hiding it so nobody can see the results.

Here is the original Google spreadsheet. It is also incorporated into the PSR-2 document as an appendix.

Q: Oh my God, you’re saying we MUST use spaces and not tabs? But I hate spaces!

If the majority of surveyed projects had used tabs, the recommendation would have been to use tabs. A super-majority (two to one!) use spaces, so that’s the recommendation.

Neither tabs nor spaces has any moral superiority over the other. If you hate spaces so much that you simply cannot adjust to them, that’s fine. Your project won’t adhere to PSR-2, but then, nobody says you have to.

Q: Why can’t the rule be “use either tabs or spaces, as long as you’re consistent within a project?”

The focus of these recommendations is not “indivudal projects by themselves.” The focus is on “working with/on lots of different projects.” If one project wants to use tabs, cool; if another wants to use spaces, fine; but if you end up working on both, you want the rules to be the same for each one. Thus, we have to pick something to apply identically across lots of projects at the same time.

Q: The standard is inconsistent: braces in one place sometimes, and in another place at other times. Dumb!

I’ll refer you back to the survey; the brace rules are what the majority of member projects have already picked for themselves. (A minority of projects consistently put braces on the same line, and a different minority consistently put braces on the next line, but there was no majority that consistently put them in the same place.)

Q: Wait, you mean the rules are defined by a survey, and there’s no design involved at all? Brain-dead!

The “design” portion happened in the individual member projects. The survey identified common elements of design across those projects. The follow-up discussions refined the broad commonalities, and the proposal codified them.

Q: There are lots of other standards out there. Why not just pick one of those?

In a way, we did, although in a very roundabout way. The survey revealed that the majority of member projects are already adhering to a large subset of the PEAR standard (itself the oldest existing common standard in PHP land.)

Conclusion

If you have other questions or comments, please leave them below. I know this kind of topic inflames passion, so please, follow the example of the FIG members: be civil and constructive. I reserve the right to police comments according to my own whims. ;-)

Police state. Tar and feathers. Lawsuits.

What actions can we lawfully perform *at the time of the incident* to discourage such behavior from police?

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts--the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987--that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

via Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban.

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.

She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer's wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer's bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier's check or a credit card. They said cash."

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she'd be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers' cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills -- and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

"I told them the money had just come from the bank," Beverly Greer says. "We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don't understand how they could do that."

via Under Asset Forfeiture Law, Wisconsin Cops Confiscate Families' Bail Money.

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor.

“Many studies show that people have shorter and more superficial conversations in open offices because they’re self-conscious about being overheard,” said Anne-Laure Fayard, a professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University who has studied open offices. “Everyone is still experimenting with ways to balance the need for collaboration and the need for privacy.”

Take Mr. Udeshi’s office, at the N.Y.U.-Poly business incubator, a SoHo loft with dozens of start-up companies housed in low cubicles. The entrepreneurs there say they sometimes get useful ideas from overheard conversations but also find themselves retreating to a bathroom or a broom closet for private chats. When they have to discuss a delicate matter with someone sitting next to them, they often use e-mail or instant messaging.

“You talk to more people in an open office, but I think you have fewer meaningful conversations,” said Jonathan McClelland, an energy consultant working in the loft. “You end up getting interrupted a lot by people’s random thoughts.”

via From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz - NYTimes.com.

We have entered the age of the invisible bank run and are waiting for the first virtual panic.

An invisible bank run is a hard thing to watch; not only is it less telegenic than the old-fashioned kind, one relies on numbers from official government agencies for statistics. How much money left the banking system today? How many banks need emergency liquidity to meet the tide of withdrawals? In the old days, reporters could and did watch lines form outside the banks and watch the armored trucks arrive with cash. These days it is happening anonymously and you only know what they tell you.

They are very unlikely to tell you the truth. Officials lie like rats in times of financial panic; they do it out of a sense of duty. They will insist that a given country will never leave the euro until the moment that it does; they will say that a deposit freeze is unthinkable until they announce that they’ve done it; they will tell you a bank is rock solid until the moment they padlock its doors. This is all for your own good, of course. They don’t want you to panic -- and they want to make sure that your money is trapped when they take it away or turn it from gold into straw.

Emphasis mine. Via Ratcheting Up The Crisis In Europe | Via Meadia.