A Partisan Divide? Oh, Yeah

If ever there was any doubt of a partisan divide in the U.S., Thursday's Supreme Court decision on health care answers all doubts.  According to a new Gallup Poll:
              
                Dems    GOP   Ind    All
Agree          79       83      45    46
Disagree      16       13      42    46

Talk about your partisan split, with Independents edging in favor of Obamacare.

Civility in News

Fox News is the most uncivil source of news, PBS the most civil, at least according to a survey released today (read a brief report here, download the actual PDF here, which is part of a larger "civility in America" study).

First off, let's be clear -- this is not an analysis of actual content.  Rather, this is a survey of people and their perceptions of civility.  Actual content studies do exist, one of my favorites being how often in a minute Bill O'Reilly manages to insult someone (answer, every seven seconds, see my post about that study).

What's making things less civil?  Survey says:

1. Politicians
2. Government officials
3. The economy
4. America's Youth
5. Media
6. Celebrities
7. Corporate America
8. Internet/Social Media
9. Sports Figures
10. Cellphones
11. Twitter
12. None of the above

We can feast on the above list for days, but let's move on to the fun stuff:

• Republicans in Congress are seen as more uncivil than Democrats
• The Occupy movement is more uncivil than the Tea Party
•  Schools are a cause of incivility more than pro sports
• Urbanites are the least civil
• Pepsi is more uncivil than Coke (I made this one up)

I'd go on (and on and on), but summer hours are a precious beer-drinking time, so check out the report yourself.

Column on the Public's Knowledge

It's summer.  And I'm lazy.  So today I merely point to this interesting column about the public's knowledge and whether it makes sense to always be attentive to politics.

The Brainiest Cities in the U.S.

We love lists.  They're catchy, they give us something to argue over, and they make for fun stories.  Here's one I just came across thanks to the magic of Twitter: America's Brainiest Cities.

Oh dear, you're thinking, this is gonna be bad.

To save time, here's the list of America's 25 brainiest, according to the metrics a company created (read the story for a discussion):

1. Charlottesville, Virginia
2. Lafayette, Indiana
3. Anchorage Alaska
4. Madison, Wisconsin
5. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose 
6. Cedar Rapids-Waterloo-Iowa City & Dubuque, Iowa
7. Honolulu
8. Johnstown-Altoona, Pennsylvania
9. Champaign & Springfield-Decatur, Illinois
10. Minneapolis-St. Paul
11. Boston-Manchester (Massachusetts/New Hampshire)
12. Austin
13. Rochester, New York
14. Gainesville, Florida 
15. Fargo-Valley City North Dakota
16. Lansing, Michigan 
17. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-San Luis Obispo
18. Burlington-Plattsburgh (Vermont/New York) 
19. Pittsburgh
20. Syracuse, New York
21. Baton Rouge, Louisiana
22. Columbia-Jefferson City, Missouri
23. La Crosse-Eau Claire, Wisconsin
24. Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York Pennsylvania
25. Springfield-Holyoke, Massachusetts

Many make sense. College towns, noted cities.  But Baton Rouge?  Sorry, I've spent a lot of time in Baton Rouge, La., and brainy is not one of the first words that comes to mind, otherwise I can't really quibble without delving deeply into their methodology, which I'm not going to do because it's the first day of summer class and probably I need to actually prepare for the semester in the next hour or so.

No Change = News?

Nearly half of Americans believe God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years.

Yes, I know ... scientifically implausible given the massive fossil record.  As a practicing Catholic, I have no problem believing God played a role in creation but that man (and all the other critters) evolved over a huge amount of time, but 46 percent of Americans think we magically appeared in the last 10,000 years.  Probably along with the dinosaurs.

My headline above, though, says No Change = News? because, frankly, even the news story tells us the public really hasn't changed all that much:

That number has remained unchanged for the past 30 years, since 1982, when Gallup first asked the question on creationism versus evolution. Thirty years ago, 44% of the people who responded said they believed that God created humans as we know them today - only a 2-point difference from 2012.

So is it news that people remain unchanged in this belief?  Yes, if for no other reason than to demonstrate we're not getting any smarter, at least when it comes to what people know about science.

Sigh.

Comparing College Students with the Brain Damaged

There was a The Onion headline once that went something like this:

Study Finds
College Students
Linked to Humans

That hed above, that's satire.  Maybe.  But here's a new study that compares college students to people with brain damage, at least in what they know about politics.  The link doesn't tell you a lot other than the title, so lemme start there:

Assessing Voting Competence and Political Knowledge: Comparing Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries and “Average” College Students 

How's that for fun?  You're probably asking, what the hell, why study this?  Isn't it obvious that there's no difference?

As a professor and father of a college student, I'm right there with ya.  But let's get to the study itself.  As you can tell from the link above, all we have access to is the title, so I used a different database to scare up an abstract, but not full paper, to get a sense of what's going on here.  

It's not as dumb a study as the title suggests.

First, the authors note that many states bar people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) from voting.  This I did now know.  So the authors found 14 people with TBI and compared them with with 22 "average" college students on, according to them, "measures of voting capacity and election-specific political knowledge." 

Okay, you see the problem right off.  We're comparing 14 people with 22 people.  How do you decide, from an N of 22, who is "average?"  I've got no idea either.  And the tests they used to measure competency and knowledge are new to me.  Let's turn to the abstract itself for some guidance:

We compared their responses to healthy controls (HC) (students at a large public university in North Carolina; n = 22) on voting competency and political knowledge using the Competency Assessment Tool for Voting (designed by Appelbaum, Bonnie, and Karlawish), as well as measures of 2008 election information and questions drawn from the United States Citizen and Immigration Services citizenship exam. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare election-specific knowledge of persons with TBI and HCs. We find that those with TB! scored similarly to the healthy controls on competence to vote and election-specific knowledge. We conclude suffrage laws should not be based on overly broad, general assumptions regarding the cognitive capacity of citizens, but on whether or not they express a desire to vote.

So as I said above, there's a good finding here depending on how much quality you place on the voting knowledge and competence of "average" college students in the first place.  The data strongly suggest that states that ban people with severe brain trauma from voting need to rethink these laws.

For me -- and I can't resist -- the idea that "average" college students and people with brain damage score about the same on political knowledge tests, that says a lot about college students themselves.

Bilingual and Brains

There's an old joke:

What do you call someone who speaks three or more languages?  

Multilingual.  

How about two languages?  

Bilingual.  

How about just one language?  

American.

Okay, so it's not that funny, but it's the best I could come up with to lead into this story about a study that finds speaking two or more languages "may benefit our brains."  See the brief press release linked in this graf for more details.