Good morning.
For Whitewater, it’s a day of gradual clearing with a high of twenty-six. For Washington, awaiting Pres. Obama’s State of the Union address at 8 PM CT, it’s a mostly sunny day with a high of fifty-five. The White House website will stream an enhanced broadcast of the address, with charts and supporting documentation.
In Whitewater, the Urban Forestry commission meets at 4:15 PM, and the Community Development Authority at 5 PM.
The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this day in 1960, rural residents confronted a
Crisis of Morals in Green County
On this date representatives of civic and service organizations, schools and churches met in Monroe to discuss the “crisis of morals” in Green County, where the number of unwed mothers increased to 40 in 1959. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
After a quick look a map, I can see that Green County’s still shown, so my best guess would be that residents came through all this well enough.
Just in time for elections in America, scientists abroad have a model for detecting election fraud. Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News reports that
The researchers examined voter turnout and votes received by the winning party for recent parliamentary elections in Russia, Austria, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and for presidential elections in Uganda and the United States. Graphing the relationship between turnout and votes for the winner revealed unusual peaks in the data for the elections in Russia and Uganda — a signature of funny business, the scientists contend.
Ballot stuffing best explains the data, says study coauthor Peter Klimek, a complex systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna.
“Of course, this is a statistical detection technique, not conclusive proof,” says Klimek, who, along with Stefan Thurner and other University of Vienna colleagues, reported the analysis online January 15 at arXiv.org. But the numbers need explaining, “and nothing explains them as cleanly as the fraud hypothesis,” Klimek says.
Thousands of precincts in Russia and districts in Uganda reported 100 percent voter turnout with 100 percent of those votes for the winning party, the researchers found. Graph these data various ways and the fraud signature pops out, notes Klimek. Plotting votes for the winner against voter turnout, for example, reveals a line that slopes off into a plateau for most countries, but for Russia and Uganda those lines keep climbing right off the graph.
Google’s puzzle for today is an historical one: “If you were being served terrapin stew at a historic presidential inaugural ball, in what government building would you be?”
For your own dish, consider a recipe for Chesapeake Terrapin Stew from reciperascal.com.