But whether you'll observe consistent responses to stimuli will depend on whether you're (a) measuring the right responses and (b) using the right stimuli. In this case, the stimuli were video images. Other researchers have found personality differences when using real stimuli. Maybe there is something about video stimuli that overwhelms individual differences?

Where is this "scientific fact" that you speak of? The only "emotionally unstable" teens that I've read about...

If you search Google or Google Scholar for "teen brain development" you will find some relevant information. Like this or this or if you've got access, stuff like this.

A lot of scientific attention has focused on charting the ongoing physical maturation of the frontal lobes through adolescence and even into early adulthood. The frontal lobes are involved in executive functioning, which includes things like self-regulation and impulse control. The frontal lobes are also involved in self-monitoring, which interestingly ties back to the grandparent poster's statement:

I'm sure you didn't think you were emotionally unstable, teens generally don't, doesn't mean you weren't.

Do we really want to saddle ourselves with more debt?

The counterintuitive but economically sound answer is yes.

An economic downturn is precisely the wrong time to be balancing the federal budget. On a personal level, yes, right now individuals should absolutely be preparing for difficult times to come. But as a matter of government policy, the government should spend during bad times, to buffer the effects of a sluggish economy. The time to save (pay down the debt) is when things are going well in the private sector. (And if recession-era spending is done wisely -- for example, investing in infrastructure -- then the benefits will carry into later boom times without new money being spent.)

It would be a little easier to stomach spending now if our current president had been following this advice and running surpluses during the boom (like his predecessor did). But that doesn't change the fact that balancing the federal budget right now will make things worse.

Let's not even start about false positives....

Actually, let's do...

What many people don't realize is that detection procedures with very impressive-sounding statistical properties generally do horribly at catching rare events.

Imagine some very impressive numbers. Suppose that this procedure has 99.999% sensitivity -- it catches nearly every wannabe terrorist who tries to board a plane intending to do harm. And suppose it also has 99.999% specificity -- out of 100,000 innocent passengers, 99,999 will be correctly identified as innocent, and only 1 will be a false alarm. Sounds good, right?

Not really. In a given year, only a very small number of passengers are wannabe terrorists -- say, 10 per year. (That's probably high.) On the other hand, there are 1.6 billion air passengers per year (that may be a low estimate, since it's a 2000 number). So if this were implemented worldwide, then in a given year, we can assume that this profiling procedure will flag 160,010 people as terrorists. Only 6 x 10^-5 of those will be actual terrorists.

Of course, those hypothetical sensitivity and specificity numbers are unrealistically, ridiculously good. With more realistic numbers, the problem gets much worse. Even if the detection procedure is very sensitive and very specific -- and I doubt that it is -- the low base-rate of terrorism means that an enormous number of people will be falsely accused of being terrorists.

So let's say someone just intercepted a bunch of ballots and burned them before they got back to the elections office. What now? Not only are you denied the vote, but you don't know you've been denied the vote. Therefore, you can't complain about disenfranchisement.

Well, first of all, in Oregon the fact of whether your vote was received is public record, and it's updated daily while voting is in progress. So if a voter wants to know whether their ballot was counted, they can find out. This information is heavily used by organizations that run get-out-the-vote efforts in order to pinpoint their efforts -- because once somebody has voted they don't have to waste their time calling or canvassing. If an organization noticed that lots of their supporters were saying they voted but the records were not showing that the votes had arrived, you can bet there'd be an investigation.

But let's ignore that for a moment. How are you going to "just intercept a bunch of ballots?" Easier said than done. Ballots in Oregon are either dropped off directly at the voting office or mailed. So to tamper with ballots you'd have to tamper with the postal system. And that's not easy to do. Make all the jokes you want about postal workers, but many of them take their job very seriously.

And even if you could get physical access to ballots in transit, you have to make your tampering systematic. In order to know who people voted for, you have to open the ballots -- at which point you have destroyed the signed envelope, without which the vote won't be counted. It doesn't really help you to destroy a random sample of ballots, because there is no net gain for any candidate. So if you wanted to sway the election, you'd have to try to forge signatures and reinject the ballots you favor. Alternatively, maybe you could forget the forgery and just try to target postal routes in districts that favor the guy you oppose. But then it becomes a big numbers game, because you need to destroy 5 or 10 ballots to produce a net gain of 1 for your candidate.

And the killer is that none of this scales well. For voter fraud to be effective, you need to do it in large enough numbers to sway an outcome. Stealing mail, forging signatures, or playing the odds -- how are you going to pull this off in a big enough way to be worth the effort and risk?