Free Republic

The answer is yes - negatively. In this case, negative is good. The more negative it is, the better. We know that because of a lot of hard work and number crunching by Linoge at Walls of the City blog. He has just put out his Graphics Matter, Year the Third. He has examined the available data from the last 28 years and has thoroughly debunked the gun prohibitionists' theory that more guns equals more deaths. His analysis leads him to conclude: 1. The hypothesis of "more guns = more deaths" is demonstrably false over the past 28 years of...

Nate Silver of the New York Times, had an interesting post the other day about the falling approval rating of President Obama which included this handy/dandy chart.You’ll notice that all 27 groups listed have lowered their approval of the President since the beginning of the year.  I suppose that’s the Tea Party’s fault too?The media is selling the decline as if liberal democrats are angry that Obama isn’t being liberal enough.  But, the numbers don’t seem to back that up.  Among the biggest declines–pure independents:As well as CONSERVATIVE democrats: Also, the poor and retirees also are among the biggest drops....

What’s also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama’s major expenses were temporary — the stimulus is over now — while Bush’s were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn’t just lower revenue for 10 years. It’s clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them. To relate this specifically to the debt-ceiling...

Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen IN 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a...

(SALT LAKE CITY)-A new study implies some of the happiest states in the union also have the highest suicide rates and Utah is no exception. According to the study, Utah is the number one state in terms of residents’ well-being although it scored ninth in overall suicide rate as three other states also had top 10 rankings in both categories, including Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming. Researchers for this study, suggesting that living around people who are satisfied with their lives can result in misery for their neighbors, are cautioning against the assertion that misery really loves company. According to the...

Addressing misconceptions about the Consumer Price Index A number of longstanding myths regarding the Consumer Price Index and its methods of construction continue to circulate; this article attempts to address some of the misconceptions, with an eye toward increasing public understanding of this key economic indicator. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), has generated controversy throughout its history. A soon-to-be-published article by Marshall Reinsdorf and Jack Triplett discusses the many past reviews of the methods and data used in the CPI’s construction.1 Beginning with an advisory committee appointed by the American Statistical Association...

....all he needed to do was connect the stated facts from Medved to Fox News, and wallah! the facts as well as myself are wrong. So I found the following to back the stats mentioned by Medved. The first comes from Wikipedia — I highly recommend the researcher at heart following the many links involved in this article — and it deals with the total expenditure as % of GDP by country spent on their military: [....] This next section deals with the total expenditure as % of GDP by country spent on education: [....] And this final section deals...

Pretty much precisely what noted earlier today: "A couple of behind-the-scene facts: from October to February, an epic 700k people have left the work force. If you actually adjust for the fact that the labour force participation rate has plunged this cycle to a 27-year low the unemployment would be sitting at 12% today. Moreover the employment-to-population ratio — the so-called “employment rate” — stagnated in February at 58.4% and is actually lower now than it was last fall when “double dip” was the flavour du jour."PAYROLL REVIEW – NICE JOB, SHAME ABOUT THE PAYCHEQUE, from Gluskin Sheff The widespread...

At www.freerepublic.com, we find the question Who reads FR? to be answered in the following way:Over 300,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic since inception in 1996 and our forum is read daily by over one hundred thousand freedom loving citizens and patriots from all around the country, and all around the world. We're currently delivering over thirty million pageviews per month to over one million visitors. This number of 300,000 users is sometimes quoted (i.e., "On one conservative Web site, Freerepublic.com, some of the site's 300,000 registered users have recently used discussion threads to encourage votes...

They should have seen it coming. In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception. The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts. Yet the episode has inflamed one...

Whoever said “Numbers never lie” was not a religion reporter. Beware of confidently using specific numbers about religious identification or belief. Here’s why. The U.S. Census, the usual standard for counting people and their characteristics, does not ask people their religious affiliation. There is no single religion survey that is considered to be the most reliable (see Page 27). The results differ depending on what options are offered, how people are contacted, how many people are surveyed and other factors. Numbers can vary widely, and many faith groups are so small that they rarely show up on surveys in proportion...

Violence Policy Center executive director Josh Sugarmann is gleefully shouting from the rooftops that concealed carry licensees in Michigan are statistically more likely to commit suicide than is the general population. The Huffington Post presents Sugarmann's latest triumph: According to information from the Michigan State Police, for the period July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008, 29 of Michigan's 164,793 concealed handgun license holders took their own lives for a concealed handgun license holder suicide rate of 17.6 per 100,000 license holders. For the period July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009, 28 of Michigan's 182,749 concealed handgun license holders...

Precipitating a Moment of Truth Is there validity to the alleged phenomenon of Bible codes, or not? In the last two months, BCD again submitted this question to extensive testing. The results: Without a doubt, the phenomenon is real. How can we be so certain? After all, there are some highly intelligent and respected scientists who have vehemently asserted that the entire thing is a hoax. Yet, if you carefully examine their arguments, they do not address the real question at hand. What they say, in effect, is that people can find such codes in any text. Yes, that is...

The article profiles the work of John Ioannidis, who has spent a career trying to show the world that the majority of peer-reviewed medical research is wrong, misleading, or of little use. Ioannidis “charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed…he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.” “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult...

In only the last several years, you have no doubt heard more about the unemployment rate than you want to for the rest of your life. The talking heads and pundits tell you that it peaked out at 10.2 percent back in October of 2009. They attempt to convince you that this followed from the low rate at the beginning of the Great Recession of 4.4% in March of 2007. The official statistics tell you that it rose to 6.2% in August of 2008, 8.1% by February of 2009, 9.4% only three months afterward, and then reaching the previously mentioned...

In terms of gay marriage, Arizona's conservative image is about to take a hit -- that's according to a statistician who claims the trend in public opinion is shifting in favor of allowing gays to wed at a more rapid pace than ever. According to a study conducted by Hank Pellissier, a statistician at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, majority public support for gay marriage will be achieved in Arizona by 2015. In his report, Pellissier shows growing support for gay marriage by about 1 percent of the electorate per year in most states, including Arizona.... States like...

For the month of July, Site Analytics shows Free Republic as having 6,187,862 visits (1,320,954 unique visitors).MSNBC.com had 5,224,538, down 16.9% (2,002,914 unique visitors).

The Democrats now have an approximately 20 percent chance of losing 10 or more seats in the Senate. The forecasts are based on a program designed to evaluate current polling and demographic data, and to compare these present-day conditions to outcomes in United States Senate races over the past six election cycles. In recent cycles, a Senate candidate with a 7-point lead in the polls 10 weeks before the election won about 80 percent of the time, and a candidate with a 12-point lead won about 95 percent of the time. The last time the Democratic nominee in Ohio, Lee...

Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest -- and most immature -- in their kindergarten class. These children are significantly more likely than their older classmates to be prescribed behavior-modifying stimulants such as Ritalin. Such inappropriate treatment is particularly worrisome because of the unknown impacts of long-term stimulant use on children's health, Elder said. It also wastes an estimated $320 million-$500 million a year on unnecessary medication. Elder said the "smoking gun" of the study is that ADHD diagnoses depend on a child's age relative...

Editor: The Traditionalists never left the Catholic Church, and it's Bishop Williamson who hasn't denied the Holocaust in Germany where it's a crime to speak one's mind. In any event, these figures for the Church are promising and show that the German people can, as many of them always have, think for themselves. This should also put a bit of a stopper on those Austrian Statistics indicating 100,000 departures. You look at this, after lifting of excommunications, the German Church was still growing. The numbers in departures are climbing only lightly despite the conflict concerning the SSPX: According to the...