We'll take a pause after this, swear off the NY Times and its excesses for awhile. As Larned Jetmore noted in the earlier post, the Times conferred its aura of intellectual respectability on columnist Charles Blow, holding him out as someone who can help ordinary people "get the picture" through graphic representation of quantitative matters.
He's won awards for graphic design, and, per the paper's bio, "...graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications." Great for graphics; apparently not so great for behavioral statistics and their representation.
Below, a point I thought worth making about police interactions across racial lines: a white cop / black stop is many times more likely, just based on the numbers in the population and random chance, as the reverse black cop / white stop. The NY Times apparently did not take this into consideration when designing their poll. Their results may reflect little more than the fact that there are six times as many opportunities for the complaint to occur in one direction as in the reverse direction. Yet, both the original poll and Charles Blow's piece on the Henry Louis Gates incident cite this as evidence of overwhelming police racism.
Geronimo
'Coyote plays the blues' is a group of friends, speaking one at a time. Its name doesn’t tell you what the blog is about, any more than the names Yahoo or Apple or Bo Diddley tell you what they’re about. It’s a whimsical hook, and we hang explorations on it. All posts are individual works of the byline author, except for the authors' autobiographies, which are collaborations. (What?)
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