Nothing But Words

1966 ad for sugar in Time magazine

About 13 years ago, I photocopied this ad from a 1966 issue of Time magazine. I was in grad school doing some research, I think on the Vietnam war, and couldn’t help but notice it. It’s almost as over the top as the old Saturday Night Live fake ad for speed. I thought I lost the photocopy years ago, but found it in a box in my basement the other day.

The image they’re going for with Mary is interesting – it looks like half her outfit is a school uniform, and then the baggy sweater and beads are hip but still fairly conservative.

If you can’t make out the “Note to Mothers” at the bottom, it says:

Note to Mothers: Exhaustion may be dangerous – especially to children who haven’t learned to avoid it by pacing themselves. Exhaustion opens the door a little wider to the bugs and ailments that are always lying in wait. Sugar puts back energy fast – offsets exhaustion. Synthetic sweeteners put back nothing. Energy is the first requirement of life. Play safe with your young ones – make sure they get sugar every day.

What makes this especially insidious is that it’s the exact opposite of the truth:

Studies have shown that downing 75 to 100 grams of a sugar solution (about 20 teaspoons of sugar, or the amount that is contained in two average 12-ounce sodas) can suppress the body’s immune responses. Simple sugars, including glucose, table sugar, fructose, and honey caused a fifty- percent drop in the ability of white blood cells to engulf bacteria…[and] can reduce the ability of white blood cells to kill germs by 40 percent. The immune-suppressing effect of sugar starts less than thirty minutes after ingestion and may last for five hours.

I finally fixed the pictures in my Drainspotting in Japan post from last year (the plugin I used before Shashin for managing my pictures doesn’t work with recent versions of WordPress, so I’ve been slowly working through my older posts to fix the pictures). Pink Tentacle has a photo collection of some of the more dazzling Japanese manhole covers, as well as pictures of what may be the most manhole infested street in the world – a quiet street in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward, with 85 manholes over a 200 meter stretch of pavement.

It looks like Prague is also a good city for drainspotting. I mention this because we’re planning a trip to Prague next summer. Maria is going to be in charge of a group of Villanova students who will be there to study for a summer semester. Maria will be there for two months with the boys, and I’ll join them for the last few weeks (so I need to save up all my vacation time between now and then).

Don’t worry though, I’ll look up from the ground every now and then to see what else the city has to offer

It was quite an adventure, starting our own candy business. But now that the Presidential campaign is over, Kai’s Candy Company will be closing its doors on December 17th. If you haven’t gotten around to ordering some Obama candies yet, now is the time. All candies are 40% – 65% off their original prices.

I’d like to especially thank all our friends who got our business off the ground this summer by being our first customers. We really appreciate your support. (See this post if you’re wondering why we’re closing the business.)

To followup on my election day post, I’ve been looking for numbers on turnout, but right now they’re all still estimates. At this point it looks like overall turnout, compared to 2004, moved from 55% of the eligible population to 62-66%, roughly matching the post WWII record set in 1960. What about the new voters in key demographic groups that Obama was counting on? They showed up: “About two-thirds of the new voters were under 30, twenty percent were black and another twenty percent were Hispanic. They went overwhelming for Obama.”

Another interesting tidbit is Nebraska 2nd congressional district, where Omaha is located. Everyone has their eyes on Missouri and North Carolina, which are still too close to call. But for the first time ever, split electoral votes may come out of Nebraska:

Nebraska and Maine are the only states that can split their electoral votes, although it’s never happened. Two of Nebraska’s five votes are awarded to the winner of the statewide election and each of the other votes are awarded to the winner in each of the state’s three congressional districts.

Obama targeted the 2nd District’s electoral vote, opening three campaign offices in Omaha and registered thousands of voters.

McCain has already won Nebraska’s four other electoral votes by winning 57 percent of the state’s vote, but in the 2nd District McCain’s led Obama by only 569 votes Wednesday. And a recount is possible in the District once 10,000 provisional and absentee provisional ballots are counted.

The Obama campaign was looking at multiple possible scenarios where they might end up with a 269-269 tie in the electoral college – like winning Kerry’s states plus only Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. So they were looking to Omaha (Obamaha) to put him over the top. Obviously that’s not a concern at this point, but if Obama wins Omaha, it’ll be interesting to see how all the TV networks try to figure out how to adjust the display of their electoral maps to show a mixed result from a single state

A while back I mentioned the town of Obama, Japan. Here they are celebrating Obama’s victory, in a way that only the Japanese can. Presumably the Hawaiian theme is because he was born in Hawaii.

I often get questions from friends about the polls for the Presidential election. Back in January I discussed the routine abuse of the margin of error. Another big issue in polling is how you determine who a likely voter is.

To determine if you’re a likely voter, pollsters will typically ask if you’re registered to vote, if you intend to vote, and if you voted in the last election (in this case, the last Presidential election). They typically give the most weight to your answer about voting in the last election, so they consider past behavior a better indicator than stated intentions. Some will also ask if you know where your polling place is located, as an additional screen. In this election, with enthusiasm sky-high among the African-American community and young voters – both in favor of Obama – pollsters aren’t as sure about how to screen for likely voters. Gallup dealt with this dilemma by simply publishing an additional set of results – one using their traditional likely voter model, and one that counts you as a likely voter strictly by whether you say you plan to vote. What’s interesting in the final Gallup poll yesterday was that the results of the two models converged – both give a roughly 11 point advantage to Obama. (If you’re curious, back in August Nate Silver wrote an astute critique of how Gallup screens likely voters, arguing that it could be substantially underestimating the ultimate impact of unlikely voters).

Silver also wrote back in May that “youth turnout in the primaries increased by 52 percent as a share of the Democratic electorate.” This was part of an analysis of what the electoral map would look like if Obama could substantially increase turnout among young voters and the African American community. Silver went on to say:

The ability to bring new voters to the polls remains Barack Obama’s most significant electoral advantage, both relative to Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Indeed, current polling may already be underestimating Obama’s strength against McCain if it does not account for improved turnout among Democratic-leaning groups like young voters and African-Americans, who have participated in record numbers in this year’s primaries. If Obama can parlay that advantage with a strong ground game, he very much could redraw the electoral map.

Running counter to this argument is Gallup’s results published yesterday, showing no indication of an overall surge in youth interest in the election over 2004 levels. But in terms of the final outcome, they give themselves some wiggle room by saying “[voter mobilization efforts by the campaigns] can convince people with little motivation or interest in the campaign to actually vote on Election Day.” Gallup’s assessment of youth interest contradicts other evidence, but if Gallup is right, this is where Obama’s massive get out of the vote effort may prove decisive. In 2004 the Democrats registered new voters in much greater numbers than the Republicans, just as they have for this election, but in 2004 they didn’t turn out their voters nearly as well as the Republicans.

The actual turnout numbers for young voters and African American voters are what will make the difference between a narrow Obama win and big one.

The other thing to keep an eye on is the significance of the huge number of early voters. The national numbers for early voters are about 10% higher than 2004, with Democrats submitting 1 million more early ballots than Republicans. And the LA Times reports: “In three swing states — North Carolina, New Mexico and Colorado — the number of voters who have already cast their ballots has reached more than 70% of the number who voted there in 2004.” The question is whether the campaigns are simply banking votes early, or if the early votes are presaging even bigger – and equally lopsided – turnout numbers today, Election Day.

Most of the major polls have Obama up between 6-8%, which I think is about right. In 2004 I made predictions for the 13 swing states, and got 10 of them right (and since two of my wrong predictions were Ohio and Florida, I got the outcome wrong too). I’m not going to do a state by state breakdown again, as there are now lots of people already doing it, with skills and resources beyond mine. Instead, I’ll point you to political scientist Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball map, which I think looks just about right. He has the electoral college going to Obama 364-174 (I credit Sabato for coloring every state blue or red, and not wimping out like many of the others making predictions, by leaving the close states as uncounted tossups).

Even if there is a big Obama win, be wary of pundits using the word “landslide.” While there is no hard and fast definition, if you look at the 3 elections since WWII that are generally considered landslides (Johnson v Goldwater, Nixon v McGovern, Reagan v Mondale), the popular vote gap between the winner and the loser was around 20%.

If Obama overperforms his poll numbers in states where he is very closely behind McCain, he could turn some red parts of Sabato’s map blue: North Dakota, Nebraska’s 2nd district (Nebraska divides it’s electoral votes by Congressional districts), Georgia, Indiana, and Montana. If he significantly underperforms, then this is what possible winning electoral maps look like for McCain.