Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

A student found this site and showed it to me the other day:

http://www.breathingearth.net/

Spend a few minutes perusing it.  Disturbing.

I caught this story a couple of days ago about a wealthy chiropractor trying to change Florida legislation on childhood vaccines.  I was so annoyed by it that I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times. They called yesterday to let me know they were going to publish it. Found it today:

Thank you for bringing this piece of disturbing legislation to my attention. I wrote my state senator, Arthenia L. Joyner, and my state representative, Michael Scionti, to encourage them to vote against this piece of legislation. I would not have known about it if not for you story. So, thank you.

But I’m also writing with a bit of criticism. In that story, Gary Kompothecras’ claims were basically left unchallenged. A recent study in the journal Pediatrics found no link between thimerosal and autism. By not mentioning this you are doing your readers a huge disservice. To date, there is no scientific evidence to suggest vaccines cause autism.

If people like Kompothecras get their way, the result won’t be a reduction in autism (autism rates are going up while thimerosal has been removed from childhood vaccines), but outbreaks of measles, as has already happened in the United States. Please do a good, scientific story on this topic. Educate the public, don’t spread fear.

Dr. Ryan T. Cragun, Tampa

On the agenda for tomorrow – posting footage of Toren.  Stay tuned!

While I absolutely don’t have the time to do this, I decided I’m going to do it anyway, because I miss it.  I’ve put together a monthly gaming night with my brother (Josh) and brother-in-law (Steve). To make things simple for anyone who wants to participate, we’ll be playing Nexuiz, a first-person shooter that is open-source. That means it is free, runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX, and will run on pretty much anyone’s computer. I’ll host the game on one of our computers (probably Debi’s desktop) then play on my other computer. Given that we just received an upgrade to our bandwidth (20mb download/5mb upload), I should have sufficient bandwidth to manage the server.

If you’re interested, the first game is scheduled for May 10th at 9pm Eastern. The server will be called “Darwin’s House.” Not sure what we’ll play – free for all, capture the flag, team deathmatch, etc. – but it should be fun.

I also created a group on Facebook so I can keep everyone informed about the games. If you want an invite to the group on Facebook, let me know.

I’m preparing a lecture for one of my classes in which we are discussing Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone.  In the 2nd chapter on political participation he claims,

“The distinction between intracohort and intercohort change is crucial to understanding what’s been happening to turnout in America over the last thirty years.  Very little of the net decline in voting is attributable to individual change, and virtually all of it is generational.  Throughout their lives and whatever their station in life and their level of political interest, baby boomers and their children have been less likely to vote than their parents and grandparents.  As boomers and their children became a larger and larger fraction of the national electorate, the average turnout rate was inexorably driven downward.” (p. 34)

To illustrate this, I created some cohorts in the GSS (1972-2006 dataset) and ran simple crosstabs, looking at whether or not someone voted in the presidential election by their cohort.  The result is depicted in the figure below:

From what I can gather from the figure, Putnam is wrong.  This isn’t a cohort issue at all – it’s an age issue.  Younger people are less likely to vote.  But by the time they reach retirement, they are just as likely to vote as are their grandparents.  Am I missing something?