JustOneMinute

The Orlando Sentinel has an interesting article about the evolution of witness testimony in the Zimmerman case. Their key insight is on 'John', who saw Martin on top beating Zimmerman, who was calling for help and later waffled on who was screaming. However, I cannot replicate their scorecard:

Glenn links to this bit of health news from Theodore Dalrymple at PJ Media.

It is meant to be funny, and is, but it has still summoned forth my Inner Pedant, always lurking beneath the surface of this seemingly fun-loving exterior. And not far beneath the surface, either.

The question is, how much exercise provides a health benefit? The theme is set here:

Between 1996 and 2008, the Taiwanese researchers divided 416,175 people into five categories, according to the amount of exercise, on self-report, that they did: from none to a lot. They discovered that those who did a little exercise, on average 92 minutes per week, had a reduction of 14 percent in their all-cause rate of mortality. They also found that “every additional 15 minutes of daily exercise beyond the minimum of 15 minute per day further reduced all-cause mortality by 4 percent.”

The subsequent letter to the Lancet pointed out that this cannot be correct: for if it were correct, and on the assumption that the relation between exercise and longevity were a causative one, Man would be immortal if only he did sufficient daily exercise, something in the region of six hours. In these circumstances, at least in my opinion, life would not actually go on forever; it would merely seem as if it did, in the sense of being boring and pointless.

I remember reading about life extension by calorie restriction and had a similar reaction - these people may live to age 120 by eating ground shirt cardboard and walking around at 6'2", 120 lbs, but it will seem a lot longer. But then again:

''For every calorie you save, there's about a 30-second increase in your life span,'' he said. ''It's worth more to me to have an extra two to three minutes of life than an extra slice of pizza.''

Worth keeping in mind.

But let's not keep the Inner Pedant waiting! The obvious problem with the 'exercising to immortality' hypothesis is that it represents an extrapoloation beyond the experimental range, and we know how problematic that can be.

In fact, the paper itself makes that very point:

After the minimum recommended 15 min a day of exercise, every additional 15 min of daily exercise (up to 100 min a day, after which additional exercise gave no additional health benefi t) is expected to generate an additional reduction of 4% (95% CI 2·5–7·0) all-cause and 1% (0·3–4·5) allcancer mortality.

This gives me an excuse to clip in their cool graph and use the word "asymptotic":

ExerciseBenefit[i-ExerciseBenefit]

At a more basic level, this paper does not seem to distinguish cause and effect. Rather than randomly assigning large groups of people to the different exercise intensity groups (as if that could be done over a long period), they rely on self-selection and self-reporting. Consequently, as is so often the case with this type of study, we are left wondering whether exercise makes people healthier, or healthier people simply enjoy exercise more.

Well. Make the mock if you will, but those diligent exercisers are lookin' good and feelin' better. Unless they are laid up with some ghastly injury, natch.

Judicial Watch discovers that Obama 2012 is leaking secrets to Hollywood in order to faciltate the movie about Obama's execution of Osama.

In a bit of a cross-marketing fail the movie's release date has been moved back to December 2012, possibly after Hollywood finally realized it was a Navy SEAL and not Obama himself who killed Bin Laden.

The Hill describes the wave of Federal lawsuits filed by Catholic organizations against the ObamaCare "free" contraceptive coverage.

Dem-backed law may be downfall of Obama birth control mandate

The biggest legal threat to the White House’s birth control mandate could come from a decades-old law that was championed by liberal Democrats, according to legal experts.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has been mentioned in nearly all of the more than 30 lawsuits pending against President Obama’s administration over the mandate. One, filed by the University of Notre Dame on Monday, cited RFRA’s protections in the first paragraph.

The RFRA was kicked around by Ed Whelan and David Rivkin, writing in the WSJ, and Ms. Greenhouse of the NY Times last February. Ms. Greenhouse presented an abbreviated version of the law,so her analysis is a bit more lib-friendly. Let's cut back to The Hill:

Because of the law, courts now have to apply certain standards to federal actions that might inadvertently infringe on religious liberty. In one sense, laws under scrutiny must aim to achieve a “compelling” government interest. In another sense, they must be designed in a way that burdens religion as little as possible. 

The second claim might be hard for the administration to meet when regulators could have taken many other steps — like expanding Medicaid — to provide better access to birth control, DeGirolami said. 

“Even if one concedes that the state has a ‘compelling interest’ in ensuring that all women have free access to contraception,” he said, “there are many, many less restrictive means of achieving that interest.”

Ms. Greenhouse overlooked the "least restrictive" requirement.

SHAKE DOWN THE THUNDER: Here is the Notre Dame filing.

If a tree falls in the forest but no one from the liberal media is there to blame Bush, then how did the Yankees do last night?

Sorry. The WaPo has a laugh-out-loud attempt to evaluate the Zimmerman 911 'Scream' tape which includes this headscratcher:

If you can’t hear the 45 seconds, how do you hear the 45 seconds?

Nobody can really hear anything on that tape, it's too loud.  But you can observe a lot just by watching, so maybe Yogi Berra can take over the prosecution.

OK, seriously.

Legal experts say the recording could be enormously important or disastrous for either side, depending on what a jury determines it can hear.

But what happens when a potentially crucial piece of evidence in one of the most explosive court cases in recent memory is a poor-quality recording of overlapping voices and unintelligible yells, essentially a wilderness of sound?

I think that expert testimony will confirm a juror's common sense - if the background screaming on the tape is unintelligible (my experience) and we don't have samples of Zimmerman, Martin and the 13 year old dogwalker screaming (we don't) then any attempt to draw a conclusion from that tape is unreasonable speculation and should not be admissible. The FBI experts brought in by the state prosecutors couldn't draw any conclusions, and plenty of voice experts explain why at their websites.

The WaPo finds one expert who hears Martin begging for his life. No scenario leading up to that is suggested; given Zimmerman's injuries I guess the theory would be that Zimmerman let Martin beat him for a while, then drew his gun, taunted him for nearly a minute, and executed him. I don't think that timing works with what witness 'John' saw (Zimmerman on bottom getting beaten ad screaming for help, and a gunshot very shortly thereafter), but who knows?

The WaPo also talks with the former head of the FBI audio lab:

Ryan is the retired head of the FBI forensic audio, video and image analysis unit. He said even the best audio forensic expert in the world using the most sophisticated equipment available would have a difficult time determining much at all from a recording of such degraded quality.

“I think it’s hard to scientifically say anything definitive with audio like this,” Ryan said. “. . . One person will come up with one scenario, one speech, one sentence, and some other well-meaning person, trying hard, unbiased in a controlled environment with headphones, will come up with another one.”

...

Ryan also questioned the basic idea that the age of the person or persons screaming during the 45 seconds — and thus whether it was 17-year-old Martin or 28-year-old Zimmerman or both — can be determined by measuring frequency, or pitch.

“To my knowledge, there are no scientific studies of pitch as an indicator or anything else in a scream that would give someone confidence to say how old somebody was,” Ryan said.

When it comes to emotionally charged situations, especially a life-or death situation, the range of the human voice is simply too wide and varied to correlate it accurately to age, Ryan said.

A 28-year-old might scream like a 17-year old. A 17-year old might yell like a 28-year-old.

“The science doesn’t help with a recording like this,” Ryan said. “There isn’t anything to hang your hat on.”

The WaPo concludes with a bit of broadly applicable wisdom:

Ultimately, the only answer to that question that will really matter, if the case goes to trial, is the jury’s. How it hears the 45 seconds, said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University, will depend partly on the machinations and strategies deployed during the trial.

...

“Most trial lawyers believe, and most psychologists who study the way that people process information believe, that once people interpret something in a certain way, once they begin to believe something, they become committed to that,” he said. “And if they become committed, it’s hard to change their minds.”

That certainly explains the media coverage.

The NY Times reports, for the umpty-bumpth time, about alarming statistics on national obesity.

Nearly one in four American adolescents may be on the verge of developing Type 2 diabetes or could already be diabetic, representing a sharp increase in the disease’s prevalence among children ages 12 to 19 since a decade ago, when it was estimated that fewer than one in 10 were at risk for or had diabetes, according to a new study.

That time seris has jumed around a bit since 1999 and I am not able to pin down whether the definition change of pre-diabetes in 2003 has been incorporated into this study (one would hope so.)

But my real cause for concern is the vast division in the comment section.  The vegetarian faction insists that our national obesity epidemic is caused by excessive meat consumption. The Paleo/Primal/Atkins/Taubes crowd insist the problem is refined grains and sugar. And of course, there is always an omega3/omega6 faction making valid points about grain fed chickens and cows versus grass fed animals.

These are people who are intrigued enough by the topic to read the Times and leave a comment, but among that group there is no clear consensus as to the solution. That bodes poorly for any sort of regulatory or public education approach.

Well - when I am king for a day, sugar producers will learn the meaning of fear! OK, as king I will learn the meaning of "public backlash", but still...

In a story titled "George Zimmerman Case: Should Charges Be Dropped?" Matt Gutman of ABC News contemplates the implosion of the case against George Zimmerman, but he has us puzzling over this:

"There is no second-degree murder evidence in this case," Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said. "It's a very close case."

I see those quotation marks, but when did Dershowitz say "It's a very close case"? Last Friday he wrote this in the Daily News:

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

There is, of course, no assurance that the special prosecutor handling the case, State Attorney Angela Corey, will do the right thing. Because until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful and professional.

Believe it or not, I did not find the words "close case" in that article.

Back in April, before the recent evidence dump, Dershowitz was scathing about the arrest affidavit:

“Most affidavits of probable cause are very thin. This is so thin that it won’t make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge,” Dershowitz said. “There’s simply nothing in there that would justify second degree murder.”

Dershowitz said that the elements that would constitute that crime are non-existent in the affidavit. “It’s not only thin, it’s irresponsible,” said Dershowitz.

...“This affidavit does not even make it to probable cause,” Dershowitz concluded. “everything in the affidavit is completely consistent with a defense of self-defense. Everything.”

If there was a segue to "close case" I missed it.

Now, it may be that somewhere Prof. Dershowitz has opined that a manslaughter charge could lead to a close case. And I can believe that the motion to dismiss based on Florida's self-defense immunity might be close. But that is hardly the context being presented by ABC News.

I think ABC News ought to present a bit of context for that "close case" quote, which seems way out of line with everything else Dershowitz has said.

Free the quote! No context, no peace!

Dylan Byers of Politico turns his misapprehension of statistics into an attention-grabbing blog post about Rush Limbaugh:

Rush Limbaugh took a significant ratings hit in some key radio markets last month in the wake of the Sandra Fluke controversy.

The conservative radio host's ratings fell 27 percent in the key 25-54 demo in New York City, 31 percent in Houston-Galveston, 40 percent in Seattle-Tacoma, and 35 percent in Jacksonville, according to a selection of the March 29-April 25 Arbitron ratings provided by an industry source.

This is making something out of nothing. The story notes that the Fluke controversy, which generated huge attention for Rush, was in early March, so this may be a return to normal.

Secondly, the statistics are noisy city by city:

Radio uses what's known as the Portable People Meter, or PPM, an electronic measurement created by the marketing research firm Arbitron that tracks the activity of a limited number of listeners and uses that data to make estimates about the entire market. This means that when a few listeners change listening habits, it can account for a significant shift in the monthly numbers. As a result, data can swing significantly month to month while actually looking relatively stable over an extended period of time.

As evidence of those drastic swings, Limbaugh's numbers were actually up significantly in some markets -- by as much as 79 percent in both San Francisco and Las Vegas -- even as he took losses in Dalls-Ft. Worth, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Kansas City, and the cities mentioned above.

So there's your headline - Vegas and Frisco love their slut-bashers. Whatever.

What's fun, in an entirely predictable way, is the loss of nuance at Media Matters, which only notes the lead.

David Sanger of the Times describes Obama's evolution on Afghanistan. From an early belief in remaking their society, Obama quickly shifted his focus to the US political calendar and the pursuit of victory there.

Mr. Sanger needs to flatter his sources and is broadly sympathetic to Team Obama (certainly relative to Bush). Nevertheless, his picture of a President who tuned out his generals is clear:

Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan

By DAVID E. SANGER

It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House.

Not long before, after a highly contentious debate within a war cabinet that was riddled with leaks, Mr. Obama had reluctantly decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops. The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it.

“Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”

A year later, when the president and a half-dozen White House aides began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely. There was no debate, and there were no leaks.

So facts were not going to matter, and didn't? I believe that, but I am still surprised to see it reported. The timing is clear:

The tight group of presidential aides charged with answering questions like that — of redefining the mission — began meeting on weekends at the end of 2010. The group’s informal name said it all: “Afghan Good Enough.”

“We spent the time asking questions like: How much corruption can we live with?” one participant recalled. “Is there another way — a way the Pentagon might not be telling us about — to speed the withdrawal? What’s the least we can spend on training Afghan troops and still get a credible result?”

By early 2011, Mr. Obama had seen enough. He told his staff to arrange a speedy, orderly exit from Afghanistan. This time there would be no announced national security meetings, no debates with the generals. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were left out until the final six weeks.

So immediately after the Republican wave in 2010 Team Obama cut out the generals (as well as their civilian masters) and charted a new course.

The key decisions had essentially been made already when Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his last months as commander in Afghanistan, arrived in Washington with a set of options for the president that called for a slow withdrawal of surge troops. He wanted to keep as many troops as possible in Afghanistan through the next fighting season, with a steep drop to follow. Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban. He said he “believed that we had a more limited set of objectives that could be accomplished by bringing the military out at a faster clip,” an aide reported.

After a short internal debate, Mr. Gates and Mrs. Clinton came up with a different option: end the surge by September 2012 — after the summer fighting season, but before the election. Mr. Obama concurred. But he was placing an enormous bet: his goals now focus largely on finishing off Al Qaeda and keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from going astray. Left unclear is how America will respond if a Taliban resurgence takes over wide swathes of the country America invaded in 2001 and plans to largely depart 13 years later.

It is revealing is that Mr. Sanger feels no need to explain that September 2012, "before the election", is not before any important election in Afghanistan.

Mr. Sanger provides a snippet of Early Obama, when he still believed in his Hope and Change:

So in the first days of his presidency, Mr. Obama asked Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer with deep knowledge of the region, to lead a rapid review. At the time, the president was still speaking in campaign mode. He talked about remaking “an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs” in Afghanistan and a “civilian surge” to match the military effort. But he said little about the Riedel team’s central insight: that Pakistan posed a far greater threat.

He really needed an expert to tell him that?

And a bit more on Obama's commitment to victory. Ooops, that's ambiguous - victory in Afghanistan:

But he also began to reassess whether emerging victorious in Afghanistan was as necessary as he had once proclaimed. Ultimately, Mr. Obama agreed to double the size of the American force while training the Afghan armed forces, but famously insisted that, whether America was winning or losing, the drawdown would begin in just 18 months.

“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”

Obama's lack of commitment has been noted here for years. Oddly, the killing of Osama (by Obama!) is not highlighted as an excuse for leaving.

NONE DARE CALL IT NATION BUILDING: Both of the following passages are from young Obama's March 2009 announcement of his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan:

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal:  to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.  That's the goal that must be achieved.  That is a cause that could not be more just.  And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same:  We will defeat you.

Per the White House press office the President's team ageed this was not a Bush-era nation-building effort. But later in the same speech:

Clear and focused. Not nation building.

Here is TNR on the December 2009 surge and withdrawal:

I wonder how many Americans who may be paying only cursory attention appreciate the thinness of Obama's pledge to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. Subsequent commentary from administration officials has made this point clearer than Obama did last night.

Administration officials were earnestly insisting the withdrawal would be "conditions-based".  I guess they had not internalized Obama's commitment to victory - November 2012.

Here is one for the "Nuke the whales" files.

I would kill Bambi to cut down on Lyme disease and traffic accidents, but that is my petty humano-centrism showing.

To be fair, the author does mention ticks in his concluding sentence.

Alan Dershowitz thinks State Prosecutor Corey is a long way from clearing the reasonable doubt threshold in the Zimmerman case.

But here is a bit of a minor point for the Mixed Martial Arts fans - if (IF!) Martin was on top of Zimmerman in a high straddle, how did Zimmerman's gun (holstered in his waistband) become visible (which was how Zimmerman's father described the showdown)? Martin should have been kneeling over his hips or abdomen.

Obviously, scuffles can get confusing very quicky. And this would be a lot more important if Zimmerman had the burden of proving his self-defense story beyond a reasonable doubt.

But it seems to me that Zimmerman mnust have been making a bit of progress in freeing himself if his hips had become visible (and accessible to himself).

THE TIMES ON DEE-DEE: The NY Times describes Trayvon Martin's call with his girlfriend and includes this bit of amusement as to how she was discovered:

Several weeks after Mr. Martin’s death, his father, Tracy, discovered that his son had been talking to the girl just before he was shot. He learned this by reviewing Mr. Martin’s phone bills. She was subsequently interviewed by the Martin family’s lawyer, Benjamin L. Crump, but not by the Sanford police.

Uh huh. Several days after the shooting (I recall March 5 from the evidence file but can't look it up just now) the Sanford PD contacted Mr. Martin and asked for their wireless plan PIN so they could access Martin's phone records. Mr. Martin said he would take their request up with his lawyers, and that is where the Sanford PD drop out of the story, as weeks weeks went by with no apparent action on the cell phone front.

But by happy coincidence, the girlfriend was discovered a day or two after the 911 phone calls were made public. Did the information in those calls aid her recollection? We will never know.

Looking for change in the state with Hope.

The WaPo pretends to examine the newly released Zimmerman evidence. They get off to a promising start on the gunshot wound but deliver some dreadfullly incomplete information on other topics.

They lead well with the wound:

Neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin from a very close range, according to documents a Florida prosecutor released Thursday that indicate a hand-to-hand struggle occurred before the teenager was killed.

A lab report, based on an examination of the two sweatshirts Martin was wearing, found holes and gunshot residue consistent with a “contact shot,” meaning the gun was pressed against Martin’s chest. An autopsy report said that the gunshot wound indicated he was shot from an “intermediate range,” which experts say is between one and 18 inches away.

MSNBC saw a contradiction between contact with the sweatshirt and intermediate range with the skin, so I am glad that some members of the media can sort this out.

However, their attempt to create drama and a sense that Zimmerman was brandishing his weapon and threatening Martin is abysmal journalism:

The documents include new details about what witnesses said they heard and saw that dark, rainy night outside their townhouse windows. One witness told police that he heard someone saying, “I’ve got a gun. I’ve got a gun.”

That is what the witness said and we will accept that is reflecting what the witness heard. However, that was *after* Zimmerman fired the fatal shot, when he had his hands up and was identifying himself to the approaching police officer. In fact (p. 41) the full quote is "I've got a gun, I've got a gun. Take my gun from me".  How did the WaPo miss that?

My understanding is that any concealed carry permit holder would endorse this approach - as a general rule, police don't like to be surprised to find a gun on someone. (Zimmerman still got cuffed, but he had to expect that.)

Comparably shameful is the mystery the WaPo creates around the question of who was heard screaming on the recorded 911 call:

Witness accounts indicate that in some cases, officers seemed to have rushed to judgment about one of the most critical questions in the case: who was screaming in the last seconds before the gunshot rang out.

One distraught witness, said she who regretted not helping the person yelling outside her window, said in her handwritten statement that an investigator tried to comfort her by saying that the cries for help “were not the person who died.”

A police report also concluded that the voice screaming in the background of a recorded 911 call placed by a resident was Zimmerman, “who was apparently yelling for help as he was being battered by Trayvon Martin.”

But an FBI audio analysis of that crucial call could not determine whether it was Martin or Zimmerman who was screaming, because of the poor quality of the recording and the “extreme emotional state” of the person screaming, an FBI report said.

Also included in the reports is an account of a meeting between an investigator and Tracy Martin two days after his son was shot. The investigator played the 911 call to Martin and asked him whether the voice calling for help was his son’s.

“Mr. Martin, clearly emotionally impacted by the recording, quietly responded no,” the report said.

But in the days and weeks after the shooting, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, the teenager’s mother, said they had no doubt that the screams were those of their son. In an interview with an investigator, Zimmerman’s father said, “That is absolutely, positively George Zimmerman yelling for help.”

What the WaPo fails to report is that the Sanford PD had a witness who was thirty feet from the action and was crystal clear that the white or Hispanic guy in red was on bottom, getting beaten by a black guy, and screaming for help (p. 38). This is "John", who spoke to the local Fox station the day after the shooting and told a similar story to the police.

Ye, witnesses get confused, but the police hardly leapt to the conclusion that Zimmerman was screaming for help.

And from another perspective, Zimmerman has the injuries of a guy in trouble who might well need help. What would have prompted Martin to be screaming?

That is misleading and incomplete reporting by the WaPo.