The game theoretic advantage goes to the Republicans

Pundits have asked themselves why it is so difficult for the Democrats to get things done even with 60 votes in the Senate, whereas the Republicans seem to do just fine with 50 votes in the Senate.  I suspect that there are a number of reasons for this.  But one reason that deserves mentioning is that Democrats believe in the importance of the federal government, and Republicans believe in the importance of thwarting Democrats.

Consider the following table, which illustrates the values to Democrats and Republicans when the Democrats are in majorities in Congress.

	When Democrats control congress
	keep government going	gridlock
Republicans	1	9
Democrats	9	1

The numbers are made up.  But the key element is that Republicans would rather see nothing done at all than seriously compromise with the Democrats to pass legislation.

On the other hand, consider the reverse situation in which Republicans are in charge.

	When Republicans control Congress
	keep government going	gridlock
Republicans	7	3
Democrats	7	3

Here the Democrats really don’t want government to shut down, and they are willing to go far more than half way to meet the Republicans.  In this case, even the Republicans are willing to compromise a little.  For example, the Republicans were willing to greatly increase the National debt under Bush rather than having permanent gridlock so long as the wealthiest Americans could get a tax cut and Bush was able to start two wars; however, on other important issues such as having two ultra-conservative judges appointed to the Supreme Court, they stood by their principles and were even willing to get rid of filibusters.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, except perhaps that is sucks to be a Democrat.

Random thoughts on the Massachusetts election

Yesterday, Scott Brown (a Republican) defeated a Martha Coakley (a Democrat) for the Senate seat in Massachusetts.  The Senate seat was generally known as Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat because Kennedy was the Massachusetts Senator since 1962.   I have a number of thoughts on the election.  Here they are, in somewhat random order.

1. The election of Scott Brown will kill the health reform bill because it will give Republicans 41 Senate seats, enough to filibuster any bill.   Most Americans will be grateful, with notable exceptions including those who can’t afford health insurance, those with preexisting medical conditions, and those who are very sick and are being dropped from their coverage by private insurers.
2. The election confirmed the adage that Republicans are much better at getting elected than they are at governing.   My suspicion is that Republicans are so good at campaigning because they are largely unencumbered by shame (think of Mitt Romney), whereas no matter how hard the Democrats in Congress try, they still let shame get in the way of unadulterated hypocrisy.
3. Coakley was up in the polls by 20% a month before the election.  It’s pretty clear that Coakley lost in large part because her campaign was “asleep at the switch,” especially since there were no external events in the last month that made much of a difference.  It didn’t help that Coakley came across as arrogant and unwilling to do what it took to get elected.
4. Scott Brown is a bad choice for Massachusetts.  While I disagree with many of his positions, the most important aspect is the fact that he will support the Republicans in the Senate, who are filibustering almost all Democratic initiatives.   Brown claims to be his own person, and he will vote against the Republican Senate leadership if he disagrees.  Perhaps he is much more independent than all the other Republicans in the Senate, but I doubt it.   I dare him to prove me wrong.  (OK.  If I am wrong, I won’t claim that he accepted my dare.)

The Senate is broken!

US Citizens strongly believe in the United States Constitution and support it wholeheartedly.  This is somewhat paradoxical since most Americans cannot name the three branches of government (on the brighter side, 3/4 can name the three Stooges

I could go on about how little Americans know about the Constitution, but I really want to address a different point.   The U.S. Senate is broken.  Paul Krugman articulated this point well, and I fully agree.  Here are three ways that it is broken:

1. Because of the incredible overuse of “filibusters”, Democrats need 60 senators to get any bill voted on.  This has given enormous power to some Senators who least deserve it, such as Lieberman and Nelson.  It is also undemocratic and unfair, and it is not what the writers of the Constitution intended.
2. The Senate is absurdly slow in confirming appointments for the Executive branch.  Obama is in charge of 519 appointee nominations.  After Obama’s first year in office, the Senate has approved only 58%.   Nominees are rejected for trivial reasons (the media encourages this approach), and the vetting process is so burdensome as to be deemed out of control.  Worse yet, a single Senator (let’s call him Senator D-bag) can prevent a nominee from being considered just because the Senator is a D-bag.  If you prefer, you can call him Senator Vitter.
3. The Congress is largely corrupt, and most of the corruption is fully legal.   The corruption comes from the following huge conflict of interest.  Congress needs to rely on industry for massive campaign contributions, and then votes on issues that strongly effect these industries.  In other countries this is called “bribery.”  In our country, it is called “private funding of election campaigns.”

All three problems are fixable, and they don’t even require amendments to the Constitution.  The US might have a chance of addressing these issues if the US press focused on governance issues rather than on whether the President is using the word “terror” enough or on news about some couple named “Jon and Kate”.   But I understand why the press does not want to focus on governance issues.  After all, most Americans cannot even name the three branches of government.

On the Failed Airplane Bombing Attempt

When geese “attacked” US Air Flight 1549, and Captain Sully Sullenberger landed the plane in the Hudson river, Americans were overjoyed that disaster had been averted.   When Abdul Mudallah ignited an explosive device on Northwest Flight 253, and no one was injured, Americans spent the next week afraid, with countless criticisms of our government (many of which were justified).  In reality, we should all be very thankful.

First of all, we should be thankful that disaster was averted.  This was great news.  We should also be thankful because we have learned a great deal of what went wrong, and security will improve in the future. Al Qaeda is not likely to succeed if they use the same technique again.  And it takes lots of time to develop new techniques.

I understand why people were so upset.  This event revealed that we were not nearly as safe as we hoped we were, and it revealed that the government is still not sharing information about terrorism well enough.  In other words, the event was the messenger of “bad news.”  Since we couldn’t “shoot the messenger”, Americans sought out others to shoot.

But we really have much to be thankful for.  And the Department of Homeland Security has their work cut out for them.  We all hope that this department has learned a lot of how to prevent the next incident.

Side note to Janet Napolitano:  it really is OK to be honest the first time around.  But other than your first statement about how our security system works, you are doing a heck of a job.

Side note to Dick Cheney:  we are getting very tired of seeing the Mr. Hyde part of your personality. (Perhaps Obama likes this side, since you constantly remind Americans of why voting for Obama was a good idea.)  When will we see the Dr. Jekyll side again?  Please let this side out more frequently.  It seems that we only see it when you talk about your daughter.

Side note to Senate Republicans:  Thanks to you, we still don’t have a head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).  ”Advise and consent” should not mean “prevent the President from running the Executive branch.”

Traveling Incognito

Sarah Palin, in a recent vacation trip to Hawaii, wore a “McCain for President” visor, but crossed out the words.  Her explanation was:  ”I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me”.  So, if I understand correctly, she thinks that photographers recognize her by her logo instead of the way she looks.  Or perhaps she thought that crossing out the logo would make her invisible.  In any case, despite all these strenuous efforts at traveling incognito, she was recognized.  Who could have guessed that photographers would see through her clever ploy?  (Perhaps they relied on mathematical modeling approaches.)

How to make mammogram testing cheaper and more effective.

New recommendations concerning mammogram testing have upset a lot of people.   Previously, doctors recommended that women be tested yearly starting at age 40. The new recommendations say that most women should start mammogram testing at age 50, and only do it every other year.  The analysis relied on the following empirical result: one cancer death is prevented for every 1,904 women age 40 to 49 who are screened for 10 years, compared with one death for every 1,339 women age 50 to 59, and one death for every 377 women age 60 to 69.  (These recommendation make sense, as pointed out by Mike Trick.)   However, if the ratio of cancer deaths prevented per mammogram could be improved for women aged 40, then mammograms would be recommended.

What this highlights is the importance of a cheap preliminary test with reliability that is pretty good.   For example, suppose that there was a test for which no women with breast cancer had false negatives, and where 1 out of 10 women with no breast cancer had a false positive.  With such a test, approximately 90% of women would be screened out as negative, with all of them having no cancer.  The remaining 10% would test as positive, with the vast majority of them being false positives.  These women would be given mammograms.  (Women would need to be reassured that the preliminary test is not a test for cancer but a test on who should be screened using mammograms.)    Since only 1/10^th as many women would be given mammograms, this would result in cancer death prevented for every 190 women being tested, a huge improvement over the current system, with huge savings in terms of health outcomes and dollars.

Even if the test had a false negative rate of 10%, the prevention of cancer deaths would be almost as high.  There would be 1 cancer death prevented for approximately 210 mammograms.  Unfortunately, the false negative could lead to 1 cancer death for every 17,000 women not given mammograms (because of a negative test.)   At the same time, it would eliminate the health risks of mammogram testing for 17,000 women who didn’t have cancer.

The conclusion is that a cheap test with pretty good reliability (say around 90%) can dramatically improve the health outcome of mammogram testing,  while dramatically decreasing the cost of health care.   The NIH should dedicate research funding to find such tests.

To the Secret Service: count your blessings.

The Salahis crashed the state dinner in honor of the Indian Prime Minister.  I’m not normally a pollyanna (in fact, I’m rarely a pollyanna), but I view this as good news.  Here is why:  the secret service had a serious flaw in its operations, one that exposed the President to danger.  The Salahis, who were of no danger to the President, exposed the flaw and permitted it to be fixed.

Admittedly, it would be better if there were no flaw to begin with.  But conditioned on there being a flaw, it was very good news that it was revealed and fixed.  Incidentally, no one in the media seems to have observed that the nation owes some gratitude to the Salahis since their actions have improved the protection of the President.

Having said that, I also think that the Salahis should be put in jail for lying to the Secret Service.  They may claim that they think they were invited; however, unless they are totally delusional, they knew better.   And while I feel gratitude that the President will be better protected, I also think it is appropriate to punish those who violate federal crimes, especially ones designed to protect the President.

The advantage of making papers harder to understand

When I was a college student, a professor of logic once asked us to write a brief paper on a specified topic, which I no longer remember.  I do remember that I didn’t understand the question that we were supposed to address and had no clue what to write.  So I carried out an experiment.  I wrote something such that each sentence appeared to make sense, but so that the paper did not make any sense when taken as a whole.  (Think “Sarah Palin’s speeches” but with crisper logic.)  My experiment was successful as far as I was concerned.  I got a “B.”  My conjecture is that it would have taken the professor too much time to see through my lack of logic, and it was easier to give it a reasonable grade.  (Warning to current students:  do not try this approach with me.)

In today’s Boston Globe, there is a brief article entitled  “You’d sound smarter if you wrote less clearly.” It’s about David Hakes, an economics professor, who simplified a complex argument in mathematical economics.  Hakes explained, ”We managed to reduce the equations in the paper to six. At this stage the paper was perfectly clear and was written at a level so that it could reach a broad audience.”   When the paper was rejected for being “self evident”, Hakes and his co-author decided to make his work less readable and much more complex mathematically, with no added value.  Hakes later wrote ”I personally could no longer understand the paper.”  It was now acceptable to the referees and published.

Hakes’ point extends to Operations Research and other fields that rely on mathematics.    Referees often do not like simplicity because it may make a paper sound “obvious”, and no referee wants to accept a paper that is obvious.  Mathematical complexity usually seems unobvious, and makes the paper more palatable.

As a referee, I have sometimes asked for a substantive revision of a complex paper if I came up with a much simpler version.  For example, I once asked  an 80 page paper to be shortened to around 15 pages, with no loss of content.   But simplifying a paper is, in general, very difficult and is not the task of a referee.  The unfortunate truth is that authors really can increase their odds of publication by making their papers unnecessarily complex.

Congressman Joe Wilson is a liar

Joe Wilson managed to go from obscurity to fame by violating the decorum of the Congress.  He was also able to raise a $1 million for his bad behavior.  (So did his opponent in the upcoming primary.)  He is also a liar.

The lie was not his calling Barack Obama a liar.  Wilson apparently believed that Obama was lying when Obama said that his plan would not cover illegal immigrants.  Rather, Wilson was just being stupid and ignorant given that Obama’s statement was largely true, as reported by factcheck.org.  (One can quibble with Obama’s statement, but that hardly makes Obama a liar.)

Wilson’s lie was when he claimed “[I] let my emotions get the best of me on the critical issue of health care.”  To be honest, I can’t prove that Wilson was lying.  I just believe it to be true.  Conceivably, Joe Wilson has the impulse-control of a 4 year old, and shouted out his insult to the President in one of the most inappropriate venues imaginable just because he could not control himself. I doubt that this is the case.  More likely, Wilson planned to shout out that Obama was a liar, and was just waiting for a moment to do so.  What Wilson did not know was (1) his behavior was uncivil, boorish, and totally unacceptable, and (2) his behavior would be rewarded anyway.   It’s a very sad commentary on our politics that so many are quick to defend such bad behavior.

Japan’s prominent O.R. Ph.D.

As reported in the INFORMS news, the current prime minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama,  completed his Ph.D. in Operations Research at Stanford in 1976.   He worked under the supervision of Gerald Lieberman on markov repair models.   His 1977 paper

“Markov maintenance models with control of queue”, Journal of Operations Research Society in Japan 20, 164-181

is available online.

He also co-authored a 1984 book entitled “Stochastic models in reliability theory”.

We all hope that the prime minister is successful in repairing the Japanese economy in a reliable manner.

By the way, I started my Ph.D. at Stanford in the semester after Dr. Hatoyama left the department.  So, I never met him, but wish that I had.