Thursday, February 18, 2010

Can You Quantitate Your Doubts about Jersey City's Officials?

Reform-minded City Councilman Steven Fulop was arguing that a prospective appointee should not be given health benefits because the appointee's job would involve only 12 hours of work a year. This led Ward D Councilman Bill Gaughan to sputter, “You never quantitate anything you say,” he exclaimed, waving his arm angrily towards Fulop. “You make this stuff up." Shane Smith, "Council (Mini)Report: Incinerator Authority Appointment Gets Heated and More," The Jersey City Independent (Feb. 18, 2010).

Now I think I know why Jersey City's expenditures wildly exceed Jersey City' ordinary revenues. It's not because Jersey city officials can't do higher mathematics such as arithmetic. It's because Council members such as Gaughan don't yet have a handle on the concept of counting. They don't know how to quantitate!

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

New Book with Bearing on the Debate about Repressed Memory

This recently-published book may have a bearing on the debates over claims of repressed memory due to sexual molestation: Susan A. Clancy, The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children--and its Aftermath (Basic Books, Jan. 5, 2010). Susan Clancy is an experimental psychologist who works or worked at Harvard University. See this Wikipedia squib.

I just caught the very tail end of her interview on WNYC's Leonard Lopate show. There are already -- at 1:10 p.m., less than an hour after the interview --, there are already 41 comments about the Clancy interview at the WNYC web site.

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The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.