Interesting Links for 04-06-2014

[andrewducker]

• Bangkok’s anti-coup flash mobs have adopted the 'Hunger Games' salute
  (tags: flashmob politics )
• Watch a crowded bar react to the combat at the end of this week's Game of Thrones...
  (tags: gameofthrones video viaJohnSmith )
• On Patrol with North London's Crime-Fighting Orthodox Jews
  (tags: jews london police crime uk )
• Bodies of 800 babies, long-

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

My mother is a founding member of the We Hate Mother Teresa club.

There were t-shirts and everything.

[andrewducker]

That sounds pretty awesome. T-shirts make everything better.

[danieldwilliam]

My mother was of the view that she was evil. That her interventions actually caused much more harm than would have been caused had she done nothing. For example, she would set up “medical clinics” with little in the way of actual medicine or medical personal. Wards for infectious diseases would be large and general so people not quite dying of one disease could catch a second or third that would kill them. Lots of prayer, not enough antibiotics. People died as a result of her activities who otherwise would have lived.

She went on to suggest that Mother Teresa knew this or ought to have known this and was therefore negligent.

She also questioned whether her centres for poor relief actually provided much in the way of relief for the poor. Again, lots of prayer, not a lot of food and blankets.

Mum would get quite exasperated when, having explained to people what was happening, they still thought Mother Teresa was doing good.

[hano]

Robert Harris used to be a close friend if the Blairs, and was a key New Labour cheerleader. I don't recall why they fell out but I'm thoroughly enjoying the mudslinging.

[joexnz]

I suspect that mass grave is not going to be the only one and its going to be very interesting to see what happens and the language used to discuss something that in a further away country would be considered close to an act of genocide.

(except for the lack of specific racial group targeted)

[bart_calendar]

Once the Republicans in America finally get rid of abortion, contraception and welfare, we'll get to see this happen in the US too!

[threegoldfish]

I personally am hoping for abortion ninjas, but the likelihood is low. :(

[apostle_of_eris]

Jane says, “We did it before. We can do it again.”

[steer]

That 796 babies thing is interesting. It seems that in 1975 two children found a concrete container filled with "tiny bones" at the time it was assumed to be from a 19th century famine (and you'd assume Ireland has plenty of such containers). I don't know about you but I find it actually hard to imagine a group of people piling dead bodies into a container for 35 years just on grounds of practicality (by the time you put 796 in there then you're putting it on top of 795 in different states of decay). Then, people do get used to some strange ways of behaving. I guess it does say a lot about Ireland's history that on finding a container full of children's bones they shrugged and reburied it (or course a more sinister interpretation is that the people involved in those burials would still be around and able to influence that decision

[del_c]

Those two graphs don't help you avoid the ecological fallacy. I can't tell from them if:
1) wealth makes region irrelevant, and it's just there's more wealthy people in the south east;
2) region makes wealth irrelevant, and there's just more south east people in the "wealthy" category
3) region and wealth both count, and, yes, you *should* try to be born to wealthy parents *and* in the south east.

[steer]

Hmm... you are correct... any effect of wealth which appeared could be a disguised effect of region or vice versa. As a statistician I should be more pedantic about these things. (I'd never heard the term ecological fallacy for this so thanks for that

[drdoug]

Without thinking this dataset through properly, isn't this Simpson's Paradox? (Which is awesome, and takes the statistics/causality firepower of someone like Judea Pearl to resolve satisfactorily[PDF].)