Don't step in the Schip

I was perusing Jot's blog and came across an old post that mentioned FactCheck.org, a non-partisan political site that examines the truthfulness of statements/positions made by parties/politicians.

A recent story on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip) debate is interesting. My exposure to the issue comes primarily from conservative sources (Wall Street Journal, National Review). The Journal perspective from early August:

"Congress has left town for August, thank heavens, but not before passing bills that set up some important debates for the autumn. One of the biggest ought to be over the plans to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip), which is a dress rehearsal for the health-care fight in 2008.

Schip was supposed to help children from low-income families, but Democrats are now using the program to expand government control of health care and undermine private insurance. To see this plan in action, look no further than the 465-page Schip revelation that Democrats muscled through the House last week.

Schip was created as a program that needs to be reauthorized every decade; the House plan makes it a permanent entitlement. Schip was supposed to help the uninsured; the House plan is consciously designed to "crowd out" private coverage and replace it with federal welfare. The bill goes so far as to offer increasing "bonus payments" to states as they enroll more people in their Schip programs. To grease the way, the bill re-labels "children" as anyone under 25, and "low income" as up to 400% above the poverty level, or $82,600 for a family of four.

As if this all weren't blunt enough, the House's Schip bill also includes a new tax on private insurance policies. Assessed at $375 million in its first year and increasing thereafter, this so-called "fair-share" tax will fund a new government agency to study the "comparative effectiveness" of certain medical treatments and kinds of insurance. Unremarked is that health insurance is already more expensive than it needs to be because of mandates like this one.

The factcheck.org story rebuts some these points. My initial interest in the topic was about how Schip expansion might function as the encroachment of a government health care system.

I lean towards the side of cradle to grave healthcare is not an absolute responsibility of the government, just as housing or food isn't. Yes, there are government programs to help there, but it's targeted assistance, like health care is now.

WSJ had another piece back in March about the "perverse incentives" in healthcare, ie the insurance structure in place isn't market driven:

When the doctor's time is rationed by waiting (rather than price), the primary care physician's practice is usually fully booked, unless the practice is new or located in a rural area. As a result, there is very little incentive to compete for patients the way other professionals compete for clients... Bottom line: When doctors and hospitals do not compete on the basis of price, they do not compete at all.

The article hints at another approach to costs, and I read recently (AZ Republic I think) about the inefficiency of complete healthcare. Think of other insurance you have (home, vehicle). It is not comprehensive for all costs. You pay for maintenance and upkeep, and the insurance only comes into play when some catastrophic happens.

So what if health insurance moved to that model? I realize deductibles play a role here, but those exist in home/car insurance also. The point is routine checkups (physicals, vision, dental, general office visits) are removed from any coverage, thereby reducing costs of insurance as well as forcing providers to suddenly have to compete on price, a competition that currently doesn't exist.

Appeal to authority

When you start shopping for a major purchase, how often do you (or someone suggest) check out Consumer Reports? How much weight do you put on their rankings?

Something I've noticed is that for goods purchased by hobbyists/enthusiasts (say cars for example), review sites geared toward them tend to pay less attention to CR's rankings, but claim it's a good source for everything else (with the common example being appliances).

I've noticed this phenomenon with consumer electronics, automobiles and now baby stuff.

For consumer electronics (home theater), a limited number of models are tested, often ones out of date, and methodology is questionable. At issue are often large differences of opinion between audiophiles and CR reviews. But on those audiophile sites, those dismissing CR for A/V have no issue with CR in other area.

There's also a lot of criticism of CR's methodology for ranking auto reliability. Problems include sampling technique (CR readers), what constitutes a "problem" and lack of transparency in survey results. An interesting nugget I came across during the Pilot research period was that CR lumped problems together without any accounting for seriousness of the problem. On top of that, the reliability recommendations tend to really split hairs. Yes Vehicle A may be 40% more likely to have a problem (as reported by CR readers), but is there a big difference between 2 "problems" and 2.8 "problems" per 100 vehicles when you have no information on the severity of the reported problem, little idea of the statistical significance (is the reporting so low that it's more anecdotal?), and no information of the reporter? Of course this all didn't stop us from getting two Hondas, but other factors were in play there. But the car enthusiasts don't have issues with CR in other categories.

So now the baby issue. Back in January, CR released a report that of 12 tested infant car seats, only 2 passed their crash tests, frontal at 38 mph and side at 35 mph. The government standard is 30 mph. This was, as you might imagine, very alarming. Two weeks later, CR recalled the report. Why? The methodology was way, way off. The researchers attached car seats to a sled and simulated a crash at the aforementioned speeds. The only problem is that in a car crash at 35 mph, a lot of the force is absorbed by the car before being transferred to the car seat. CR's tests of 35/38 mph were the equivalent of roughly collisions at over 70 mph. That's a fairly hefty difference, and a rather damning indictment of testing methodology. In the aftermath, there's still some support for CR's original testing (kudos to the Graco Snugride and BabyTrend FlexLoc for passing the tougher standard) stating "we go over 70 on the freeway," which overlooks that very view collisions happen at that impact speed, because, you know, people have breaks and there's the relative speed of cars going in the same direction. CR, with less fanfare, updated its report at the end of August.

So this isn't meant to diminish CR, but as a brand name, it's granted a lot authority because of its noble goal, lack of advertisements, etc. But does it always deserve it? Well, maybe when you're looking for a fridge...

We're having a...

girl.

According to the Chinese Gender Chart

The 90% "reliability" is only 50% in the ones I can verify (my brother and me). So this means absolutely nothing. Although it does agree with my intuition. We're still about six weeks or so from knowing.

Educational approach

Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion on teaching approach centered on Direct Instruction, which is generally thought of as script-focused educational approach.

Direct Instruction is more than just following a script. The scripts for DI are engineered using a build/test/fix cycle to have the least ambiguity possible. For instance experiments were performed on how to teach a young child the color red. Do you show them a red object first and say red? or do you show them a non-red object first and say "this is not red?" They created several 10 step scripts using the same 10 steps just in different orders, and the best one would teach a child the concept in 20 instances, the worst in 60 instances. Now magnify this across the thousands of concepts a child must learn to be educated.

The scripts are designed to create many small interactions where the students are tested for comprehension by getting their response. A small chunk of information is presented, and then the students are immediately tested to see if they understood, and correction is given right away. The students stay on topics until mastery. This sometimes requires slowing them down, and other times speeding them up. To do this the students must be placed with other students at the same learning place and learning pace. This is not regarded as a static placement, and students will have to be re-evaluated and moved to different groups on a regular basis.

DI not only tracks the individual student it makes schedules for teachers and tracks them to those schedules. If the teacher falls behind, then they try and figure out what is going wrong. Video's of the teachers teaching are made for review to try and anticipate problems.

The linked discussion is more interesting that anything I'll say here, but here's (more than) a couple of call outs:

• When Meryl Streep shows up to make a movie, they hand her a script. But when a new teacher shows up to teach her first class, in many school districts they ask her to invent her own lesson plan. What gives?
• Isn't DI what the military has used during and since WWII for their instruction?
• This is basically the argument that Atul Gawande makes about Cesarean sections in the relevant chapter of Better ("The Score.") Obstetricians used to have all sorts of clever and fancy forceps techniques for delivering babies in various difficult positions. But those techniques required a lot of reading to learn; even more practice to master; and a natural level of spatial intuition, coordination, and judgment that not every doctor had. Shifting to routine C-sections may have sacrificed the ability of truly outstanding obstetricians to deliver even misaligned babies without surgery, but it gave average obstetricians a single standard script they could follow to make most deliveries a matter of routine.
• The complaint that i hear from teachers is that their teaching is TOO scripted. They say that they have no freedom to teach the way that they would like. Perhaps the problem is that the same script doesn't work with every child. For example some children don't do well, just because of the (imho) crazy demand that little kids sit quietly in desks for hours at a time.
• That's the same crowd who hate NCLB. Hate to actually show their students know how to read, write or add. "Too scripted" or "having to tech the test" sound a bit like accountability to me. We'd hate to have that!
• Where does this leave the uber teachers (and their fortunate students)? If the method brings up the average success, it's good from a utilitarian standpoint; but would there be a way of maintaining those classrooms which are exceptional? I don't think those teachers would care much for the script.
• The problem with a script is that nobody can agree on it. There is already a standard curriculum for public education, which is driven by standardized testing. Not to mention, it's boring and doesn't encourage critical thinking. The learning experience isn't one-way, teacher-to-student. It's a mutual effort that requires desire from all stakeholders (teachers, parents, and the students themselves). The problem among the low-scoring population is that the stakeholders don't feel invested.
• I'm a science teacher at the most diverse high school in our county. Our standardized test scores have been consistently below those of the other county schools, with the difference written off as an inevitable result of teaching a "much more challenging population". Last year, one of our science disciplines went to a more scripted approach, and we soundly beat the other schools."Scripted" in this case means having a clear, common set of objectives, required knowledge, assessments, materials, and activities. The actual instruction method is up to the teacher. When the goals are clear, there is far less opportunity for teachers to drop the ball on covering vital topics. There's much more to it, but the "scripted" nature is a crucial aspect. An additional benefit is that new teachers no longer have to develop their lessons from whole cloth, formerly a cause of "one year and out" teachers.
• Teaching is a kind of performance art and it shouldn't be surprising that working from a good script can really help. Of course it all depends on the quality of the script. There is already a market in textbooks and lesson plans, and a large number of different approaches to teaching. Maybe the question should be why this market isn't more efficient?
  
• The results of a study can be no more accurate than the standardized test used to measure the results, and such test are more accurate when testing rote learning. I have seen DI used to teach reading in early grades and it works well with most students but not all. But reading is a rote learning as is multiplication tables, but many subjects are taught for the reasoning skills they impart not the facts. Since the ability to read is needed to do well on most standardized test one would expect a correlation between a technique that teaches reading effectively any other skill tested.
• Our educational system suffers from one major problem and it's not using the wrong pedagogical techniques. It's that the middle class doesn't want to pay for the education of the lower classes. They enforce this desire by using local property taxes to fund education, thus ensuring that the poorest school districts are also the ones with the least amount of money.
• The description of direct instruction reminded me of the book we used to teach our children to read, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." It worked incredibly well for two of our children, who learned to read at late age 3, and age 4, respectively.
  
• Teaching from a script is not the same as an actor reading from a script. This is because students make errors which need to be corrected, preferably immediately. When a student makes a mistake, the teacher must stop the presentation, evaluate the mistake, determine the required remedy, implement the correction, test the student to see if the remedy was successful, and then resume the presentation. This is one reason why DI is more effective than most other method of teaching. DI approaches education as an engineering problem. The DI "script" is designed to minimize student errors, acquire a high rate of feedback from students to determine if errors are present in the student learning, and to remedy those errors as soon as they are detected. The motto is: the teacher hasn't taught, if the student hasn't learned.

My initial though, based entirely on the the MR post is that it seems to be a great program for process topics (reading, math, some sciences) but perhaps less useful for critical thinking topics, though I could easily be wrong. I do find it disconcerting that new teachers must formulate new lesson plans. I know this isn't the norm everywhere, but how can every school/district not have a base lesson plan in place for all subjects?

The Bundy Hypothesis

A University of Michigan expert explains why super clean living may have its consequences:

While staying germ-free can prevent the spread of disease and infections, leading a cleanlier lifestyle may be responsible for an increase in allergies among children.

“It’s called the hygiene hypothesis,” says Marc McMorris, M.D., a pediatric allergist at the University of Michigan Health System. “We’ve developed a cleanlier lifestyle, and our bodies no longer need to fight germs as much as they did in the past. As a result, the immune system has shifted away from fighting infection to developing more allergic tendencies.”

Actually, I think we all learned this from Married... with Children, the episode in which Peg gets the free inhome trainer. She wins the battle of lifestyle change. When he returns to his show, he displays an adverse reaction to Peg's lifestyle. Al sums it up by stating the trainer was too pure and clean, while they were like cockroaches and could survive anything since they had developed the necessary resistances.

And Joanne & I reflect this as well. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I had a little more exposure to the elements growing up. Take a guess who carries around a pack or two of kleenex?

Surprise!

My professional photographer finally came through with the goods (thanks Megan!), so I finally get to recap Joanne's 30th Birthday surprise party:

1. She was surprised. As I've explained a number of times, Joanne is very observant when she has a reason to be (reading, movies, etc), but when she doesn't... not so much.
2. Mongoloid! And I still choose not to play.
3. The cake. Since it was an ocean theme, the only cake that fit was a Finding Nemo design. The bakery person did look at me oddly when I selected that for a 30th birthday.

Returning to the surprise element, I think it's generally more difficult to do a surprise party at one's own house, but through a serendipitous collection of events, Joanne never had a reason to suspect why I was so adamant that the house be clean, which were:

• Matt & Melissa coming over for a movie after dinner
• Jason being in town and staying the night after the ASU-CU game
• The kicker, Joanne's comment that "at least one of us is doing some work around the house, cause it sure ain't me these days," which made me realize the house wasn't looking all that hot.

There were a couple of moments that could have aroused suspicion, but Joanne didn't pick up on them: my quick refusal of dessert at The Siamese Cat after initially suggesting it; Matt & Melissa walking into the restaurant with a present; Matt indicating some knowledge of Andy's wedding (not really a giveaway, but a surprise to joanne). I'm sure there were others, but, fortunately, it wasn't enough to tip her off.

Spoofed

A couple weeks ago, I posted Joanne's wedding dress on Craig's list. No inquiries, until this morning, when I got this message:

AM INTERESTED IN YOUR ADVERT ON CRAIGSLIST GET BACK TO ME WITH THE PROVE OF OWNERSHIP AND THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE ADVERT.........

Despite the all caps, I want ahead and responded (the sign off name matched the email). So then I got this:

Thanks for the reply .am located in CA and we have a private shipper that will come to pick it up after you must have received cash from your bank.Our mode of payment will be via electronic cashier check. Echeck is simple, secured, legal, fast and it is setup to eliminate the stress of putting check in mail for days. .All you need to do is to get a business check paper for $20. Once you have the business check paper i will send the secured link to print out the electronic check to your email for printing. You can then print and proceed to clear and cash the check at your bank. The cost of procuring the business check paper will be added to the bottom price.
Please visit www.insticheck.com to to get more info on echeck,you can get business check paper from officedepot, officemax, staples or any stationery store around. I will be waiting to read from you soon.
Thanks

So this seems all on the up-and-up. In retrospect, it's not the CAPS that were damning--it was the "advert" language rather than just saying "dress".

After looking at the CL abuse page, the angle here is that the cashiers check is no good. The bank would cash it, but then withdraw the funds when it was shown to be fraudulent. And by that time the goods are gone. This does seem to be kind of small potatoes for this kind of deal.

Memories

There's a post at Parent Dish, bringing up the topic of how parents capture their children's memories. Included is a link to another site, which included this bit from Anna Quidlen:

...but the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Which got me thinking about my memories, our wedding coming to mine first. The immediate moments that I thought about was not the ceremony or "messy", but our first dance and a picture of us alone on the dais.

Re our dance. I got the song I wanted ("Eve" by Dream Theater), but we made the mistake of never practicing dancing to not really danceable song. There are photos, of course, during that 5+ minutes, and my brother captured it on video, but neither really capture that moment Joanne & I shared, completely alone, but surrounded by friends & family. Our most private moment of the day also about the most public. We spent a good amount of the dance (or I did) noting we should have spent more time practicing or preparing in some way.

The second is, again, us by ourselves. I'm rather certain Lindsey (Joanne's roommate the semester we started going out, who was a photography hobbiest) took the photo. It's from a distance, completely unposed. One of those casual photographs that rarely happen if you know a camera is around.
I'll add it to the post if I get around to scanning it (we got married in the pre-digital era!).

So that's a bit of a digression from the quoted passage...

Rising boats

My rough calculation on how much money Joanne & I "made" on the market yesterday is roughly $5000. Pretty good for not doing anything. Of course my projection was that we'd lose roughly $3000 of that today. Not the case so far...

Last night we discussed the effect a single event (drop in interest rates) had. Joanne commented that it was obvious/known that rates would drop (though a bit of a surprise how big of a drop it was), so why wouldn't everyone buy a week ago? Or sell now?

Well, that kind of timing tends not to do a whole lot of good. Pretty much everything went up 2-3% yesterday. To have the money a week ago to invest means you have idle money. To sell now creates the same situation. If you happened to have idle money yesterday, you just missed out on a large chunk of this years gains. And any benefit of selling now, unless its to free up cash for some non-investing purpose, doesn't do much good because everything just got more expensive.

Waste of time

No, no, not all that time you stop by AJU to see if there's anything new. I'm talking about the classic waste of time: meetings!

But do they have benefits? Tyler Cowan of Marginal Revolution makes the case in a column for Forbes:

Face-to-face gatherings serve valuable if hidden functions. For example, meetings publicize information about status... Meetings confer a sense of control. Attendees feel like insiders who have a real voice in decisions. This boosts their motivation to implement ideas discussed as a group... Frequent meetings help a business apply bonuses and yearly evaluations with greater precision...

Claptrap or no?

I do find the meeting I enjoy more are the ones in which i participate, as opposed to (basically) observe. And I can't say I've been in a professional meeting in which there was a high degree of conflict, so no excitement there.

But there are some interesting points in the column related to the "social theater" of meetings and the potential effects outside of the subject of the meeting. I mention above that I often observe meetings--that seems to be the case in most I attend at work, as I'm not so involved/invested in a project to be lead/direct/comment. But that proactivity would likely increase my perceived value to my bosses, whether or not I'm committed to what I'm offering. It's a new approach--maybe I'll give it a shot.

Case of the Blues

I'm very out of rhythm.

Since we got back from our Utah trip, I've struggled to get back into the rather decent routine I was in: regular workouts (only gone once or twice in the last 3 weeks), better diet, less dew, slightly more sleep, more regular postings (i think). Part of it has been caused by actual work at work (that threw me off) and, of course, increased realization of life ending/changing in 7 months.

I asked Joanne if I was getting too far ahead--I purchased the stroller last week (40% off seemed like too much to pass up)--to which she looked at me incredulously and said no. I think she knows how much time I take with all this stuff (along with the second guessing and verification that I did indeed get a decent deal). It took me 6 months to settle on a car, and that was only one decision. Got lots more than that coming up.

This first couple of weeks were all about stroller & car seat, but now I'm branching out: furniture options, disposables or cloth, to wear or not to wear, and so on. The main benefit of doing this now is that we can have a firm idea of what we'd like to do before fall/winter, which then will supposedly/hopefully free me up to focus on the actual house preparations. Surprisingly LBA doesn't actually change what we want done to the house; it simply provides a firm deadline.

I figure it will be about two more weeks before I get back into a normal flow--once Regionals hits, that will reduce not only the time commitment of ultimate, but also end any concern of whether or not I benefit Sprawl. So that will be a load off.

And then maybe I'll get around to the backlog of topics I've thought about doing and actually doing them.

Back of the envelope

This past weekend I had the goal of washing the cars. Easier said than done, what with waking up early on a 3-day weekend. So Sunday night, having not accomplished that task, once I made it to 1 am (joanne was in bed long before that), I figured the best course of action was to just stay up all night to ensure I met my goal as well as meeting loyal reader Justing for a morning throwing session.

So I had some time to kill and caught up on some of our finances, notably getting an estimate of our tax situation, checking our various payroll withholdings, prepping our charitable giving and so on.

Some of the interesting points:

• As (soon-to-be-no-longer) DINKs, we have to have extra money withheld to avoid a large federal tax bill. But because of our 401K withholding (both maxed at $15K), we'll have a lower liability and are able to remove that for the rest of the year. I overestimated because of some extra income Joanne had reported last year because of the Freescale buyout.
  
• Joanne's 401k was looking at maxing out in October, so I reduced the withholding to stretch it out over the rest of the year.
• The net result of the two above: a "raise" approaching $1000/month. For 3+ months, anyway.
  
• With the 401k max out, we'll be low enough in taxable income next year (2008) to pay zero capital gains on any stock sales. LBA will help the cause there as well. So, assuming there is still a gain to be had on Motorola, we plan to finally be rid of it in 2008. (Long-term capital gains for those in the 5% and 15% brackets is 0 in 2008)
  
• In reviewing our charitable giving plan, we had some paper work from St Tim's for the Tuition Assistance Tax Credit. I find this to be terrible tax policy, but it does represent free money, as the money given is a credit on AZ liability and still counts as a deduction for federal. Hmm...
  

If you keep close enough track of your finances, now might be time to do a little realignment/checkup before the end of the year.

Inconsistent logic

In the past, I've liked Tom Sowell's columns, particularly the random thoughts on a passing scene. But as he gets older, there's a little more crankiness. And then there's this week's RToaPS, in which he writes:

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.

and a couple of paragraphs later:

A recent study showed the median income of major corporate CEOs to be about $8 million a year. That's less than a third of what Alex Rodriguez earns and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes. But no one is denouncing them for "greed."

Come on Tom! That's terrible reason and logic, comparing the median CEO to the outliers in their profession. Bah.

The ending of AJU as you know it

Well, not really.

I don't anticipate this turning into a baby blog for at least 7 months, but it might anyway. The premise was to cover to current interests, with my habit of moving on to new things, so, assuming everything goes well, L'il Baby Aspinall (hence forth LBA) will be a current interest for quite a while--if there's one thing to do well and stay focused on, being a parent is at the top of the list.

So actually, maybe it will.

To answer common questions: Nine weeks down, 10th about to commence, projected due date is second week of April. We will find out the sex. Joanne will stop playing ultimate at the end of September. She is not planning on playing league. I think that covers that. Anything else?

We already have preliminary names, but they are subject to change. But they must fit certain rules (apply to first name only):

1. No unisex (Jordan is out)
2. No multiple spellings or not hard to spell (The kid will be spelling "aspinall" for people they're entire life. NO reason to add the first name to that. For example, I like Hayley/haley, hailey, but you see the problem; Joanne likes Catera, but aside from being hard to spell and the name of a Cadillac, I went to high school with a Katerah, so that's out). Corollary is no #@$%ed up spelling just to be different.
   
3. I am not a fan of long names that are commonly shortened (Michael/Mike)
   
4. Nothing in the top 10 of the past year.
5. Not a hard and fast rule, but 2 syllables are very preferable.
6. Not a fan of the "AA" initials, so "A" names are out.

And in my first focused research for the necessary stuff, we have a leader for the initial travel system (infant car seat, 2nd base and stroller designed for the seat): the Graco SafeSeat. So assuming it's OK whenever we actually see it, that's one thing down, with many more to go...

Nielson ratings

Data from Google Analytics:

My ratings took a decided uptick this week; the "swimming boys" being the AJU equivalent of "who shot JR?" Site visits tuesday-friday: 38, 79(!), 30, 17. I think that 17 might be my fourth highest. Now the question: will I maintain audience share? Ok, let's not think about that...

The four-day peak had 68 new visitors (out of 164 visits), which sounds reasonable, but it means returning visitors return often in that window (I estimate what might be considered regular readership in the low teens).

A point of confusion on who visits the site: Columbus and Chicago rank #2 and #3 in site visits (30-day trailing). My only explanation is that regular visitors checking from work have their routings from corporate offices--i wonder if Freescale, for example, is still routed through Chicago/Schaumburg for some reason. Proof to that theory is the single visit from Rochester, MN, which I believe is the home of Mayo, the Original.

The 'burq, Gatorville and the Arch are 4-5-6 in city visits, btw

Slightly surprising to me is that Explorer is the browser of choice for the majority of visitors. It's close though: 53%-47% over Firefox. Safari has negligible use (.3%)

There's other data, but it doesn't make any sense to me. The most non-sensical is the visitor loyalty chart:
Number of visits visits

1 times	91	26.45%
2-3 times	43	12.50%
4-8 times	36	10.46%
9-14 times	36	10.47%
15-25 times	41	11.92%
26-50 times	26	7.56%
51-100 times	28	8.14%
101-200 times	43	12.50%

The only sense I can make of it is that the 344 visits in the past month (second column) is tallied per day as site visits, while the first column is total page visits in that month. SO what's not shown here is unique visitors... oh, never mind.