On democracy, elections and why there is no differnce between Pepsi and Coke

February 15th, 2009

Last week me and another 3,416,586 Israelis voted for the national elections. These elections I roughly followed the following simple heuristic – I filled in an online questionnaire and chose the closest big party matching my views. Why limit myself to the prominent parties – read on…

Every election I hear more and more people say they feel that there is no big difference between the big parties. Voters feel that it doesn’t really matter what they vote for – it’s all the same. The US politics has two major parties – Republicans and Democrats, United Kingdom has Conservatives vs. Labour and so on. The parties will always try to convince you that there are substantial differences between them and the rival party but in fact the differences are usually minor if any.  So why is that.

Well, I stumbled upon the answer in a book I coincidentally happened to be reading: “Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life.” The shift to center is a general phenomena in game theory first noted in a 1929 Journal paper. To demonstrate it, let’s assume we have a two-party system with the parties positioning themselves on a left right axes of 0-100 with voters distributed normally along the left-right scale.  If one party positions itself just right of center, say at 51, then the the best option is for the second (“left winged”) party to position itself at 50 (a tiny bit rightwards from its historical position left of center) and thus gaining the voters who are left of the so called “right winged” party. So what happens is that the two parties end up positioning themselves around the center (or rather the median to be precise). This is also the reason why elections are usually neck-to-neck, and why for similar reasons there is no difference (at least in blind tasting tests) between Coke and Pepsi. And can anyone explain to me what is the difference between the Presbyterian and Methodist churches?

Rather then finding this  disturbing, I find this a beautiful way to ensure that the center meeting point of voters makes its way to the government. Brilliant Democracy in action. However, there is one problem I see with this type of “democratic” system – the more blurred the the political compass is, the more anemic the voters will become and, correct me if I’m wrong, voting percentages keep dropping over time. People are indifferent and care less (more about the drop in voting rates also in the great book “Bowling Alone“). This causes the ‘median’ of voters to possibly differ from the median of eligible voters.

Israel has a multi-party system with, until recently, two big parties (Likud and Labor) and many smaller parties scattered along the political spectrum. Over the years there was a clear shift to center causing the distinctions between the two major parties to blur. However, in 2005 Ariel Sharon spon-off from the Likud grabbing additional people from the Labor party and formed Kadima which positioned itself smack in the middle.  Rather than diminishing after the last elections (like other center party attempts in the past), Kadima was able to establish itself as the largest party in last week’s elections pushing the Likud to the right and Labor to the left. Note that Likud was ‘blocked’ on right byYisrael Beitenu and other right winged parties and same goes for Labor on the left. I find this quite amazing and expect an eventual shift back to a two-party system (see also Duverger’s Law).

But why bother with the hassle of voting? Is there really a need to pay the cost of an Elections Day and shlep yourself to the ballot you are registered in (which could be miles away!)? Well, for one, I found out that you don’t actually need to make your way to the distant ballot – all you need to do is go to any local ballot and claim you are  Accesability Challenged. Basically no-one is aware of this but I am not joking- it’s for real. It’s amazing how many people traqvel many miles on the election day just to vote when is is avoidable via a legal loophole.

But seriously, why do we all need to vote?! In the “Thinking Strategically” book I mentioned, they actually point out that this is not essential and we can minimize the economical and bothering nuisance of voting. Statistically we can do with a sample. We could for example, sample a random set of voters and have them vote. A sample of only 10,000 voters (or 0.02% of Israeli eligible voters) should be enough to decide on the winning party in a two-party system (in the case of an extremely close race, one will need to sample an extra set of voters until results are clear). I know it’s hard to swallow, but mathematically you get the same outcome. I believe the main problem of this idea is that the individual sampled voters will each have a true power of changing the outcome of the elections and thus will be highly susceptible to blackmail and other forms of threats or pressure.

Anyhow, we in Israel are still dreaming of an Obama to come and bring hope, raise voting rates, and casue us to feel that there is a defference. But chances are that in a couple of years (only one of the last 8 Knesset assemblies completed its full 4-year term!) we will once again enjoy a day off from work and I will once again need to go to the ballot and chose between 2 (or possibly 3) of the same thing.  Hasta Luego.

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Microwave Electrosmog Detector

October 6th, 2008

A close friend of mine has recently started a side business of selling radiation detectors for home use. This is a small appliance which detects the presence of microwave radiation that you are being exposed to. You can easily detect radiation hazards in your house. In particular you can check your home appliances.

There are two different machine. The electrosmog meter (RF sensor) will react to all microwave sources, including cordless phones, Wi-Fi networks, bluetooth, cellular phones etc. The EMF field tester will react to electromagnetic fields such as in older computer screens (before the flat panel ones). I will post on this gauge separately.

So I started out with our microwave oven.

as you can see, the microwave emits strong microwaves (well, duh!). It’s well in the red zone of the meter. The radiation was still strong even when moving a foot or so (half a meter) away from the machine. I am not sure what the health hazard (if any) is, but hey – I would try to avoid standing near the microwave when it’s working if I were you.

The next appliace I tested was our cordless phone. Note that it only emits radiation when it talks to the receiver. And here are the results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoONyxqwzRs

As you can see – not that scary. It does make it to the yellow zone, but definitally not as strong as the microwave.

The next appliance is our beloved cellphone. I’ll show you the results in my next post, but I am warning you – you might not like the results; they are pretty damn scary.

In the meantime, please drop a note (e.g. comment, email) if you want me to add a certain appliance. Also, drop a note if interested in buying renting one of these gauges and I’ll post the appropriate deatils.

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It’s a ??

September 14th, 2008

I once heard that in China due to the One-Child-Policy the words for uncle, nephew or other sibling related words are slowly vanishing from day-to-day language. I don’t know about China, but I have noticed that in the my society the phrases “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” are slowly parting from our vocabulary.

Given nowadays ultrasound and Amniocentesis technologies, one can know the gender of the child during pregnancy. Within our social circles just about everyone knows (and discloses) the gender of the child early on in the pregnancy. I personally wanted to keep this surprise and suspense and had the pleasure of hearing the midwife announcing the soon to be gone statement — ““.

So, once everyone knows the gender of the child before hand, one still needs to supply some informative statement when announcing the happy event. I noticed that the child’s weight is slowly becoming the standard bit of information common in post-birth emails. Pretty lame I must say.

However, at least in our case, we actually knew the child’s estimated weight before she saw the light of day. Surprisingly enough, the fetal weight estimation was accurately precise. So, as technology advances, we’ll all know the weight of the child before hand. If then, what novel information will we have left? Can anyone think of something that we’ll not be able to predict (at least not in the foreseeable future) so that there will still be some element of suspense and so that our announcement emails will contain something more than just the date and time. (Oh, ya, with the increase in popularity of c-sections, we’ll know that as well…).

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RH blood incompatibility and extra marital affairs

September 14th, 2008

You couldn’t care less, but my blood type is O+ (pretty standard), Gali’s is A- (pretty damn rare!).

Since one is a plus and one is a minus, we have what’s called a RH blood type incompatibility. This issue comes up in pregnancy since there are some risks involved and measures that need to be taken. For example, it is a common practice today to give pregnant rh- women an Anti-D shots during pregnancy to prevent mother from producing antibodies that will attack the baby’s blood cells. This is done regardless of the father’s rh polarity since we never really know who the father really is. Also, babies born withe incompatible blood type to mother (which is what happens in cases like ours), are at higher risk of developing severe Neonatal Jaundice. This was indeed the case with Aviv, and we had to spend a few extra days in the hospital after his birth to treat it.

However, putting aside the drawbacks of rh incompatibility, I recently realized that there is also an upside (well, at least to the father!). You see, children of a rh- mother and a rh+ father will necessarily have a rh+ blood type, while children of an rh- mother and a rh- father will necessarily be rh-. So, if for some reason or another (well, there is no real other here!), our child would have had a rh- blood type Gali would have had a lot of explaining to do!  Luckily to all, this is not the case :-)

So, can one put up a “cheat sheet“, pun intended!, for fathers so that they have something better than just to affirm their fatherhood.  Anyone know of other such traits that in certain circumstances the child must (or can not) have?

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Newborn parental resemblance

September 12th, 2008

Do babies look like their daddies?
Well, I am willing to bet that the will show that indeed resembles her father more than her mother. I’ll elaborate on why I am so confident.

A popular recent sociobiology theory posits that babies resemble their father more than their mother. The evolutionary rational goes like this: while a mother can be quite sure that the baby is hers, no matter what it looks like, the father cannot. It could then be to a baby’s advantage to look like the father, to encourage paternal investment (Gaulin and Schegel, 1980).

One of the first empirical studies supporting this theory appeared in 1995, in a short Nature article by Christenfeld and Hill titled “Whose baby are you?“, received considerable attention, both in the scientific as well as the popular press. The authors reported greater facial resemblance between one-year-old children and their fathers than between one-year-old children and their mothers.

However, following this study later work showed no significant difference between the level of correct identification of mothers and the level of correct identification of fathers from children’s faces. They further argue that evolution would not have favored the result reported by Christenfeld and Hill. They contemplate that if babies had unambiguously resembled their fathers, a highly monogamous society would likely have emerged because few females would have risked the possibility of fathering another male’s child which could result in maltreatment and, quite possibly, death. Moreover, they continue, if relatively high father-child resemblance were the norm, evolution would tend to produce progressively greater degrees of father-child resemblance.

So who’s right? Taking the UberChuchem role, I would say that, just like the , they are both right! – as in any game theoretical setting, things converge to some stable state which makes sense evolutionary. It might just happen to be that the common degree of father child resemblance and the actual percentage of extra-pair copulation in society is exactly what makes sense evolutionary – allowing for both parental engagement and the advantages of having affairs.

I must say that since I first heard about the paternal resemblance theory I tried to keep track of people resemblance remarks when visiting new born babies. My experience is that the father wins by far – in the vast majority of cases, the friends and family claimed that the newborn resembles the father.  Interestingly enough, my intuition was that this effect rapidly decayed within the first few weeks after which the resemblance claims were more evenly distributed.

So, let’s take a deeper dive here to try to make some sense out of all of this. I got the Eureka after reading the following great post  on the evolutionary aspects of infant paternal resemblance. In his post, the author points out the difference between the actual resemblance and what people claim. You see, there is also a evolutionary benefit to have people assert paternal resemblance regardless to whom the baby actually look like! Are we all socially or genetically tuned to convince the father that his generic-looking baby belongs to him. A study of 160 couples with newborns tried to answer this by asking 60 couples together and 100 mothers alone which parent the baby resembled. When asked which parent their infant resembled, mothers with the father present replied 87.5% of the time that the baby looked like the father–but when the father was not in the room the paternal resemblance frequency suddenly dropped to 60.0%! Fathers reported self-resemblance only slightly more than half the time (51.4%). More than 1/3 of the time they gave no response since the mother apparently stepped in to answer first (the mother did not answer in only four cases). Unrelated judges matched the babies with their parents with success greater than chance, but were much more likely to match infants with their mothers, even when the father was the supposed best match.

So if we try to conclude here – the answer to the question I started out with – “Do babies look like their daddies?” – might be no. However, this doesn’t stop people from claiming that they do (and hence my confidence in my the poll results).

Now being an UberChuchem once more, I’d like to raise a point – I don’t know what the figure is, but I think I recall that, in our society, for ~10% of cases the social father is not the genetic father (see also ).  Taking this into account, the resemblance test results showed be biased to the mother. If results show no significant difference in resemblance tests then possibly that means that babies do have a slight tendency to resemble their (genetic) father after all. Some food for thought.

By the way, I would be curious to know who did little baby Jesus resemble? what sis the wise men say when they saw him that night in the manger?

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Who’s right?

September 12th, 2008

In the small villages of eastern Europe, the rabbi was the undisputed leader of the Jewish people of his village. Not only was he the master of religious wisdom and law, but he often served as the arbiter of civil disputes as well. There is told the tale of 2 individuals who had a major dispute and agreed to go to the rabbi for resolution. The first party to the dispute came to the rabbi and carefully outlined his side of the argument. The rabbi listened intently and finally said, “My friend, you are right.” The man went away satisfied. Later in the day, the other party to the dispute arrived and told the rabbi his side of the issue. The rabbi again listened carefully, was impressed with the arguments, and replied after some thought, “You are right.” Later, the rabbi’s wife, who had overheard the rabbi’s conversations with both men, said to him, “Rabbi, you told both the first party and the second party that they were right. How can this be?” To which the rabbi replied, “And you are right too!”

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It’s a girl!

September 2nd, 2008

Adva Glickman was born on 27 August, 2008. With no special or dramatic events this round.
Weight at birth 2900 grams (see post on this).
I’ll let you judge from the photo below who she resembles more (father or mother). Please first vote on the sidebar widget on your right and then proceed to my post on . The bottom line is that’s she’s terribly beautiful.

For those of you who are not Hebrew speakers, Adva in Hebrew means a ripple, or a wavelet (little wave).

Aviv is being a great brother and keeps hugging, kissing and caressing his new little sister.

Adva at home

Adva at home

For those interested in the little anecdotes, there were actually two interesting peculiarities during delivery.

First one is that Adva came in what’s termed in the medical jargon as ‘Compound Presentation.’ This is the case when the baby decides to pave its way with the hand alongside the head.

We (including the midwife) were surprised to see a knot in the umbilical cord.  It’s quite rare (~1%). I still have a hard time understanding how on earth the fetus is able to do an up the hole around the tree and back in again in the limited space it has during pregnancy.

In any case, though both abnormalities have fairly risky, in retrospect everything went smoothly and both mother and baby are perfectly healthy.

You can find more photos here: http://www.wix.com/galifr/adva.

בשעה טובה נולדה אדוה בלידה רגילה וזריזה ביום רביעי כו אב לפנות בוקר. יש הטוענים שנשים שוכחות מהר את הכאבים בלידה, במקרה של גלי עם אדוה – התאריך העברי דאג לתעד את אותם צירים לבל נשכח

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