Tuesday, September 30, 2003

by Scott Blaha
Gazette Reporter

Dr. John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute gave a lecture entitled
“Guns: Crime & Deterrence” at a Math Colloquium this Monday. The
three main points he addressed during the talk were the imbalance of information
in the media, the impact of gun laws, and the economic methods of analyzing
such laws. He spent most of the talk advancing right-to-carry laws, rather than
the advertised statistical methods discussion. He stated, “I’m trying to
give you an idea of how one organizes data,” but this aspect comprised
a minimum of his lecture.

Lott is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias
Against Guns.” His talk focused on the statistical methods he employs in
his research. The audience was polite, but seemed detached at times. About 40
students and faculty showed up for the colloquium. At a few points, audience
members asked some clarifying questions of Lott. Most attendants stayed for
the question and answer session following the lecture. Maarten Bar ’07 expressed
his doubts about the mathematical value of the talk, commenting, “It might
have been more interesting if he spent more time talking about the statistics,
but that was about 10% of the lecture.”

Regarding the media, Lott said, “The question isn’t so much what information,
but the balance of information.” He claimed that this is because the gory
results of gun violence are more newsworthy than stories about people protecting
themselves with guns. Lott also talked about the media’s focus on accidental
firearm deaths involving children. He countered them, saying, “It’s pretty
hard to think of any other common item so dangerous with so few accidental deaths.”
He noted that “‘Man Bites Dog’ is a much more interesting story than ‘Dog
Bites Man’.”

Lott said that it was hard to judge the impact of gun laws, since federal
reports on guns only collect information regarding the costs of guns, not their
benefits. He noted, “I could not find one survey that allowed participants
to answer questions about guns positively.” He brought forth two hypothetical
households, one of law-abiding citizens and one of criminals. He asserted that
since only law-abiding households are very likely to follow gun laws, they have
a detrimental effect. He argued that loosening regulations on guns would decrease
crime, since “if crime became costly, people would do less of it.”

Finally, Lott got to the heart of his talk by comparing different methods
of analyzing data on crime rates before and after the passage of right-to-carry
laws. He accused newspapers of providing misleading statistics by only comparing
jurisdictions, not the change within them. He emphasized that different statistical
methods can provide radically different results.

*****

by Pei Pei Liu
Managing Editor

Where can you get Linux installed on your computer, watch a film, and find
out about the latest attempts by technology corporations to control your life?
Try Science Center 199 today at 7:00 p.m., where the new campus group Swarthmore
Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) will be holding its inaugural information
session.

Founded by sophomores Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, SCDC seeks to increase
consumer and media awareness about increasing efforts by large technology corporations
to regulate and monitor consumer’s usage of software and hardware. Said Pavlosky,
“We are at a turning point between a open, participatory culture, modeled
on the structure of the internet…where users are anonymous and essentially
unrestricted…and a closed, top-down, passive culture, where consumers do not
really own the products they buy, but only license certain uses of them for
short periods of time…and privacy and consumer rights are non-existent.”

One example Pavlosky cited is a Microsoft project originally named “Palladium”
but now called the “Trusted Computing” initiative, in which Microsoft
will have control over any new computer hardware configured with the next version
of Windows. “Whenever a user clicks on a file,” explained Pavlosky,
“the computer goes over the internet to Microsoft and asks,’does this person
have permission to open this file?’ If the answer comes back ‘No,’ you don’t
get to open your file.”

“The implications are simply mindboggling,” he added, “but
you don’t have to think about all of them to know that this is probably not
something you want on your computer.”

If you haven’t heard of the Palladium/Trusted Computing project, that’s exactly
SCDC’s point. Their biggest goal for now is to break the media silence about
the issue and spread awareness to the general populace. Whereas Intel’s plan
to place serial numbers on Pentium III chips was quickly shut down by the attention
from the media and civil liberties groups, nothing has been done so far with
Microsoft, said Pavlosky. Thus, SCDC was born, for students willing to tackle
the big name in computer technology.

* The White House denied on Monday that Karl Rove had leaked the identity
of a CIA agent in order to retaliate against an opponent of the administration’s
policies in Iraq. The agent’s identity had been leaked after her husband, former
ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, undermined Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to
buy uranium in Africa, a claim that the president eventually had to retract.
Though leaking an agent’s name is in violation of the law, the Justice Department
is still considering whether or not to launch a full-scale investigation of
the issue.

*The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) promised on Monday to enforce
the do-not-call list, and said that it would charge $120,000 to any telemarketers
found guilty of contacting people on the registry. Also on Monday, President
Bush signed into law a Congressional measure giving the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) the right to enforcement. The FTC had originally been blocked from doing
so by a federal judge, and so the FCC had sought to override that ruling by
declaring its own intentions on enforcement.

*The Pentagon announced on Monday that it would pull three warships out of
Liberia as the US winds down its peacekeeping mission in that country. The three
ships carry a total of 3,750 sailors and Marines. But there are an additional
100 troops still stationed on the ground in Liberia.

*****

SCDC Movie Showing/Meeting
Science Center 199, 6:00 p.m.

JP Morgan Info Session
Bond, 7:00 p.m.

College Democrats Meeting
Parrish Parlors, 7:00 p.m.

WRC Open Hours
WRC, 7:00 p.m.
(Sex and the City screening starts at 8:00pm)

SAM Test-taking Workshop
Kohlberg 226, 8:00 p.m.

Good Schools PA Meeting
Parrish Parlors, 9:00 p.m.

*****

SPORTS UPDATE

The third-seeded team of Anjani Reddy ’04 and Sonya Reynolds ’07 were defeated
by the second-seeded tandem of Lindsay Hagerman and Lisa Mabry of Washington
& Lee, 8-4 in the doubles final of the 2003 ITA Southeast Regional at Mary
Washington College.

Reddy and Reynolds had defeated the top seeds from Washington College in the
semi-finals.

*****

Today:
Field Hockey hosts Bryn Mawr, 4:00
Women’s Soccer at Muhlenberg, 5:00

Tomorrow
Men’s Soccer host Washington, 5:00
Volleyball at Widener, 7:00

*****

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.”
–Edgar Bergen

*****

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