Isegoria - From the ancient Greek, equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts on Policy, War, Economics, Business, Technology, Science, Fitness, Martial Arts, and more
“How tall your parents are compared to the average height explains 80 to 90 percent of how tall you are compared to the average person,” Dr. Vaupel said. But “only 3 percent of how long you live compared to the average person can be explained by how long your parents lived.”
“You really learn very little about your own life span from your parents’ life spans,” Dr. Vaupel said. “That’s what the evidence shows. Even twins, identical twins, die at different times.” On average, he said, more than 10 years apart.
Labels: Economics
But Al Jazeera International (AJI) has grander ambitions than to be simply the enfant terrible of the Middle East. For starters, it will broadcast in English, giving it a much broader reach; its staffers are imports from upmarket operations such as the BBC, CNN, and Associated Press Television News (APTN); and it professes a rigorous code of ethics and the loftiest news-gathering goals. "The mission of Al Jazeera International is to provide accurate and impartial news with a global, international perspective," says Will Stebbins, formerly an APTN regional editor and now AJI's Washington bureau chief. "News in the U.S. clearly comes from a very culturally specific viewpoint that eclipses many important stories and issues. We want to provide different points of view from around the world."
The format for the channel, which is currently scheduled to launch in late spring, is itself innovative. Instead of being run out of a central command post, AJI's news day — and news management — will follow the sun: Programming will begin in Doha, Qatar, which will likely host a 12-hour chunk of the day, then shift to London for a four-hour segment, then to Washington, DC, for a 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. (local-time) slot, and finally to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The top of each hour will be hard news; the back half, analysis, chat shows, and documentaries, some of it generated by viewers. There will be only one feed, so viewers worldwide will all see the same broadcast at the same time.
More intriguing, each news desk will be run independently, with the mandate to report international news through its own lens. Imagine, says Stebbins, by way of illustration, the follow-up to Bush's recent State of the Union speech: In Doha, broadcasters might have lined up reaction to the president's warning to Hamas to disarm; in Kuala Lumpur, analysis might have dialed in on Bush's comments on protectionism; and in London, on his admonishment of Iran. And in the States, Stebbins says, instead of the usual pundits, he might have rung up Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's fiery president, or polled Mexicans on Bush's remarks on immigration enforcement.
Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles — from well-known classics to obscure gems.
Crosby believes that the period between 1275 and 1325 (and shortly thereafter) in northern Italy saw the radical realignment of social attitudes toward the nature and management of time and space. This dramatic change in perspective (literal and figurative) was in turn to influence navigation, mapmaking, timekeeping, mathematics, art, writing, music, optics, mechanical devices, and financial management. This wasn’t the Renaissance; it was the Renaissance’s foundation. Before this critical 50 years, the world was still as Aristotle and Plato conceived it. And as most of the world’s civilizations perceived it. Afterward, the view that humans could both predict the world and re-create it as they wished gained irreversible credibility. Crosby further believes that the dramatic changes in attitude toward the natural world were still insufficient to explain the explosive leap ahead which European cultures made in the late medieval period.
The final “striking of the match,” according to the professor, was the linking of quantification techniques (n.b., echoes of Nisbett’s cognitive research) with the aggressive development of visualization methods: maps, perspective drawing, clock faces, plotted cannonball trajectories, musical notation, algebraic notation, alphabetization, book indexing and tables of contents, etc. etc. At every turn, the properties of objects were being measured, recorded, and evaluated from the perspective of literally a new vision of “reality” … simpler, universal, and graspable by ordinary people.
Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 'person-years' in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq. The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 — 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.
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Marines are paying the highest toll in Iraq. Their death rate is more than double that of the Army, 10 times higher than that of the Navy and 20 times higher than for the Air Force. In fact, those in the Navy and Air Force have substantially lower death rates than civilian men ages 20 to 34. ... Lieutenants have the highest mortality of any rank in the Army, 19 percent higher than all Army troops combined. Marine Corps lieutenants have 11 percent higher mortality than all Marines. But the single highest-mortality group in any service consists of lance corporals in the Marines, whose death risk is 3.3 times that of all troops in Iraq.
Labels: War
When I want to know what the people of a region are thinking, I look at two things: short-term capital flows and long-term migration. The two most important votes that a man can cast against his rulers are when he votes with his feet or when he votes with his nest-egg. Usually, he does it in the reverse chronological order.
The results were shocking. Shocking, that is, if everything that you know about the conflict comes from talk radio and cable TV.
When Hezbollah was taking the initiative, Arab companies fell. When Israel hit back, they rose. The harder Israel hit, the faster they rose. You'd expect the Israeli markets to act this way (which they did), but the Arab ones too? You see, Hamas and Hezbollah are not just threats to the Jews; they're threats to the Arabs. In fact, they do more damage to the latter than to the former. They represent the political and social chaos that keeps the money of the first world from flowing into the third world. The natural conflict is not between Arab and Jew, it's between civilization and chaos. By this measure, Israel didn't destabilize the region; it re-stabilized it.
Since long-run migration patterns after the crisis will not be available until, well, the long-run, we should look at what capital markets are saying.
I've taken a cross section of large, publicly traded blue chip companies that do business in Arab countries. This group, dubbed, "The Arab Titans Index," is composed mostly of banks and utilities. Then I synced it with a time-line of the major attacks and counter-attacks of the conflict.
But the markets have a surprise for the hawks, too: They liked the cease-fire. The incredibly complex web of information that constitutes the decisions of the customers, managers, and shareholders of the Arab Titans concluded that Hezbollah's actions were bad for business. Likewise, they concluded that Israel's counter-attack was good for business. Finally they came to the conclusion that it once Israel achieved on the battle-ground as much as could be expected it was time for the war to come to a conclusion, too.
Labels: War
It Has Motors In Its Wheels: A British engineering firm has put together a high-performance hybrid version of BMW's Mini Cooper. The PML Mini QED has a top speed of 150 mph, a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds. The car uses a small gasoline engine with four 160 horsepower electric motors — one on each wheel. The car has been designed to run for four hours of combined urban/extra urban driving, powered only by a battery and bank of ultra capacitors. The QED supports an all-electric range of 200-250 miles and has a total range of about 932 miles (1,500 km). For longer journeys at higher speeds, a small conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) is used to re-charge the battery. In this hybrid mode, fuel economies of up to 80mpg can be achieved.The unanswered question: How much does such a hybrid Mini cost?
The late 1950s were an optimistic era. Witness The Atomic Automobile, Ford's Nucleon concept car from 1957: Ford's engineers imagined a world in which full-service recharging stations would one day supplant petroleum fuel stations, where depleted reactors could be swapped out for fresh ones lickety-split. The car's reactor setup was essentially the same as a nuclear submarine's, but miniaturized for automobile use. It was designed to use uranium fission to heat a steam generator, rapidly converting stored water into high-pressure steam which could then be used to drive a set of turbines. One steam turbine would provide the torque to propel the car while another would drive an electrical generator. Steam would then be condensed back into water in a cooling loop, and sent back to the steam generator to be reused. Such a closed system would allow the reactor to produce power as long as fissile material remained.
Using this system, designers anticipated that a typical Nucleon would travel about 5,000 miles per charge. Because the powerplant was an interchangeable component, owners would have the freedom to select a reactor configuration based on their personal needs, ranging anywhere from a souped-up uranium guzzler to a low-torque, high-mileage version. William Ford alongside a 3/8 scale Nucleon modelWilliam Ford alongside a 3/8 scale Nucleon modelAnd without the noisy internal combustion and exhaust of conventional cars, the Nucleon would be relatively quiet, emitting little more than a turbine whine.
The vehicle's aerodynamic styling, one-piece windshield, and dual tail fins (which are absent in some photographs) are reminiscent of spacecraft from 1950s-era science fiction, but some aspects of the Nucleon's unique design were more utilitarian. For instance, its passenger area was situated quite close to the front of the chassis, extending beyond the front axle. This arrangement was meant to distance the passengers from the atomic pile in the rear, and to provide maximum axle support to the heavy equipment and its attendant shielding. Another practical design aspect was the addition of air intakes at the leading edge of the roof and at the base of the roof supports, apparently to be used as part of the reactor's cooling system.
Ford's nuclear automobile embodied the naive optimism of the era.
Labels: Science
“Movies with stars are successful not because of the star, but because the star chooses projects that people tend to like,” said Arthur S. De Vany, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Irvine, who has written extensively about the economics of moviemaking. “It’s a movie that makes a star.”(Shouldn't a professor emeritus be referred to as Dr. or Professor de Vany?)
[...]
Mr. De Vany and other economists point out that many factors contribute to the success of a movie — like a big budget, having a G or PG rating, opening on a large number of screens and whether it is a sequel, among others.
In one study, Mr. De Vany and W. David Walls, an economist at the University of Calgary, took those factors into account. Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.
In the same study, two directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone also pushed up a movie’s revenue. But Winona Ryder, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer were associated with a smaller box-office revenue. No other star had any statistically significant impact at all. So what are stars for? By helping a movie open — attracting lots of people in to see a movie in the first few days before the buzz about whether it’s good or bad is widely known — stars can set a floor for revenues, said Mr. De Vany.
“Stars help to launch a film. They are meant as signals to create a big opening,” he said. “But they can’t make a film have legs.”
When analysts talk about how to turn G.M. around, most start with the need to slim down the company and get rid of less popular brands. (Buick and Pontiac are perennial nominees.) It’s an eminently sensible approach, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, because it would challenge the interests of some of the most powerful players in today’s auto industry — car dealers.
Car dealers, with their low-production-value TV commercials and glad-handing tactics, seem like the archetypal small businessmen, and it’s hard to believe that they could sway the decisions of global corporations like G.M. and Ford. But, collectively, they have enormous leverage. Dealers are not employees of the car companies — they own local franchises, which, in every state, are protected by so-called “franchise laws.” These laws do things like restrict G.M.’s freedom to open a new Cadillac dealership a few miles away from an old one. More important, they also make it nearly impossible for an auto manufacturer to simply shut down a dealership. If G.M. decided to get rid of Pontiac and Buick, it couldn’t just go to those dealers and say, “Nice doing business with you.” It would have to get them to agree to close up shop, which in practice would mean buying them out. When, a few years ago, G.M. actually did eliminate one of its brands, Oldsmobile, it had to shell out around a billion dollars to pay dealers off — and it still ended up defending itself in court against myriad lawsuits. As a result, dropping a brand may very well cost more than it saves, since it’s the dealers who end up with a hefty chunk of the intended savings.
Labels: Business
Ten years ago, Vandebroek's husband, Bart, died suddenly, leaving her alone with three small children and no other relatives in the United States. Vandebroek responded not just by sticking to her career but by taking on a series of increasingly challenging, high-profile jobs. In January, she became Xerox's chief technology officer, responsible for harnessing the creations of five global laboratories to drive growth at the $15.7 billion document company.
Her colleagues have watched this ascent with some awe: I don't know how she does it, they whispered. And for years, Vandebroek, 44, fed the mystery, reluctant to discuss her husband's death. But lately, she has begun talking openly about how her family's tragedy helped her understand what's really important. She's passionate about the strategies she has used to balance home and work as a single parent, including strict rules for travel, refusing relocations, even capping the number of friends she keeps up with. Her mantra: "Delegate, simplify, and leverage IT."
Industrial war can be summed up this way: God fights on the side which has the biggest pile of ammunition and the fastest rate of replacement of expended ammunition. Like any general principle it's not absolutely unconditionally true, but that's the norm.
In response, two new strategic doctrines of war were developed to make it possible for small logistically-poor forces to contend against large logistically-rich forces without getting instantly crushed: guerrilla warfare and terrorist warfare. Both of them seek to nullify the logistical advantage of their richer opponents by maintaining initiative, so as to control the tempo of the war at a level low enough to not exhaust the logistics of the poorer side.
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IMHO Israel botched this war, but that's not the question I wanted to address in this discussion. The question I began with was, why did so many people demand "proportionate" responses from Israel, and condemn Israel's bombing campaign as being "disproportionate"?
It's because Israel refused to play the game. Israel opened up an offensive which ran at a logistically unsustainable rate for Hezbollah, which Hezbollah could not avoid fighting. The code word "proportionate" really meant, "Israel, you have to limit yourself to fighting at a level that Hezbollah can sustain. Otherwise it's just not fair!"
Of course that's idiocy; war isn't about fairness. But that's what they were really saying. Hezbollah did make a major mistake in that attack, because they had developed to the point where they actually presented a target Israel could fight against at a tempo Israel could sustain but Hezbollah could not. Israel had the opportunity to crush Hezbollah, but Olmert lost his nerve.
Labels: War
"Lassie" comes home to another generation of U.S. children this week in a new film that hews closely to the original, dark tale of the loyal collie and her boy in wartime England, instead of the sunny California of the long-running television series.
The sable-and-white collie, Lassie, and her young owner, Joe, first appeared in a 1938 short story in the Saturday Evening Post by Eric Knight, a British-American journalist and writer who spun the story into a 1940 book, "Lassie Come-Home."
[...]
Like many fans, Sturridge had never read Knight's book or seen the 1943 film it spawned, and initially assumed from watching the TV show that Knight had created Lassie as an American dog living on a ranch in California with her owner, Timmy.
In fact, the story grew out of a trip Knight took during the Great Depression to England, where he saw people selling belongings to survive, according to "Lassie" historian Ace Collins.
"The prized possession of these people were their collie dogs," Collins said. "A lot of people were having to sell those dogs to put food on the table."
"Lassie Come-Home" became the story of a Yorkshire boy whose coal miner father sells the family's unusually beautiful collie to a nobleman when he loses his job. The duke takes the dog to Scotland, where she escapes and returns to the boy.
Labels: Media
Some leading English soccer players are storing stem cells from their newborn babies as a potential future treatment for their own career-threatening sports injuries, according to a report in the UK Sunday Times newspaper.
Players are freezing the cells taken from the umbilical cord blood of their babies as a possible future cure for cartilage and ligament problems. Stem cells can be used to regenerate damaged organs and tissue because they are the earliest form of cells.
The paper quoted one unnamed Premier League player from a north west club as saying: 'We decided to store our new baby's stem cells for possible future therapeutic reasons, both for our children and possibly for myself.
'As a footballer, if you're prone to injury it can mean the end of your career, so having your stem cells — a repair kit if you like — on hand makes sense.'
The player is one of five who have frozen their children's stem cells with Liverpool-based CryoGenesis International (CGI), a commercial stem cell bank.
The Times said that in the past five years more than 11,000 British parents have paid up to 1,500 pounds ($2,837) to store their babies' stem cells in order to grow tissue, should their children become ill.
Thousands of successful umbilical cord blood stem cell transplants have already been carried out to treat children with severe blood conditions or immune disorders.
If one wants a great historical bridge between the writings of Victor David Hanson and Robert Kaplan, few titles can beat The Fall of Rome. Throw in Alfred Crosby's The Measure of Reality for some early Renaissance insight, and you've got a solid train of interesting historical reading stretching from ancient Athens to yesterday's Baghdad.
In a few weeks, The Fall of Rome will be out in affordable paperback from Oxford University Press. Let's hope this "if you only read one book" title makes it into the hands of new generation of young historians, and onto the holiday gift list of anyone who's wondered what "the end of a civilization" really looks like. This compact summary of the fall of Rome will amaze you, maintain your interest, and cause the odd shiver.
Five years ago, the American Indian Charter High School in Oakland, Calif. was about to be closed down because of poor attendance and rock-bottom academic scores.The on-line blurb doesn't spell out Chavis's controversial philosophy, but the interview brings out some evocative soundbites.
But then Ben Chavis joined the school as principal — bringing his controversial political philosophy and unconventional curriculum with him — and now the school has the highest academic scores in the city and a nearly 100 percent attendance rate.
Labels: Education
Some of the largest agricultural biotech companies in the world, including Monsanto and DuPont, are turning to marker-assisted selection, or MAS, as a way to circumvent the controversy surrounding genetically modified foods.
Scientists say it's an efficient and relatively noncontroversial way to create designer fruit and vegetable crops with superior disease and pest resistance, as well as enhanced flavor, texture, skin color or shelf life.
MAS involves analyzing plants for genetic markers associated with desirable traits, then using conventional breeding methods to introduce the genes into a host. The markers are used to quickly identify which seedlings are the superior progeny.
For example, a wild apple variety might have a brilliant red skin. In order to bring that trait to a domesticated apple, researchers first scan the apple's genome for the gene that determines skin color. Then, looking at the wild apple, they search the chromosome containing the skin color gene for a unique and easy-to-identify segment, which becomes the marker. After crossbreeding the two apple trees, scientists look for the genetic marker rather than waiting a few years to see which of the seedlings picked up the red skin trait.
The technique allows researchers to sort new hybrids in the lab long before any fruit is grown. This involves taking a DNA sample from each sapling and using methods such as gel electrophoresis to look for the red skin marker in the genetic code. Companies are compiling databases of MAS genetic markers, and while some are making the data freely available, others are treating marker information as a trade secret.
Most fruit and vegetable species have far more wild varieties than we see in the grocery store, and many contain valuable traits, such as pest resistance or luscious fruit, that could be bred into common varieties.
Scientists at Seminis, a seed company acquired by Monsanto in 2005, found that a wild tomato variety had a natural resistance to tomato yellow leaf curl virus, which causes a disease that can devastate domesticated tomatoes. They identified the gene responsible for the resistance and bred it into a domestic variety.
There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency. In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq. During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of dollars. We are further from our goal than we were when we started.
Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters. A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.
American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.” But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes. The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.
Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one. Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things. Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force. They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology. They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace. The police don’t threaten the governments they work under, because they don’t have the firepower to stage coups.
Labels: War
In the late nineteen-nineties, every bright young entrepreneur with a startup was dying to take his company public. In a time of generous stock options and irrationally optimistic markets, I.P.O.s seemed to offer a reliable road to riches. But lately the opposite approach — taking a company private — has become popular. Since the beginning of 2005, nearly a hundred top-level executives at public companies have participated in management buyouts, or M.B.O.s, joining private-equity investors to buy their companies from shareholders.It gets worse:
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What the executives in these deals don’t say is that such buyouts create huge conflicts of interest. The C.E.O. of a public company is legally obligated to look after shareholders’ interests, which in the case of selling the company means getting the highest price possible. But when that same C.E.O. is trying to buy the company, he wants to pay the lowest price possible. [...] A study of buyouts over the past two years suggests that when management is the buyer it pays, on average, thirty per cent less than an outside bidder.
Even more troubling, management buyouts give executives at public companies an incentive not to maximize the value of their companies before the sale. In 1987, for instance, after the textile giant Burlington Industries was taken private by a buyout group that included top Burlington executives, it quickly sold off the company’s “nonproductive assets,” including ten separate divisions and a host of manufacturing plants, for well over half a billion dollars. The executives could have done those deals while Burlington was a public company. But doing them after the buyout, when they owned more of the firm, meant that they reaped more of the benefits. Similarly, management buyouts are often associated with major restructurings to make companies leaner and more profitable. With few exceptions, these restructurings could be done before buyouts. But they’re not, in part because executives would rather wait until they own a bigger chunk of the company. A study of buyouts in the U.K., for instance, found that C.E.O.s who planned to buy their own companies were less likely to embark on restructuring than C.E.O.s who weren’t.
Also, executives, before making a buyout offer, use accounting gimmicks to make their company’s performance look worse than it really is. In a study of more than sixty companies that went private, Sharon Katz, of the Harvard Business School, found that, in the two years preceding a management buyout, companies recorded lower than expected accounts receivable, which drove profits down. Similarly, a study by two accounting professors found that executives pursuing M.B.O.s tended to accelerate the recognition of expenses and delay the recognition of revenue, making their companies look less profitable than they were. Management buyouts have a reputation for dramatically improving companies’ performance. But these studies suggest that part of the reason is that executives were making them look bad while they were public.
But if management buyouts were really about the virtues of private ownership you’d expect companies that go private to stay private. The reality, though, is that, with high-profile deals, this rarely happens. Instead, after a company has been buffed and shined, it’s generally taken public again.
Labels: Business
New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep in the first year postpartum.
In one study, mother rats were given the opportunity to press a bar and get a squirt of cocaine or press a bar and get a rat pup to suck their nipples.... Those oxytocin squirts in the brain outscored a snort of cocaine every time.
Labels: Economics
As my favorite macroeconomics professor pointed out, it is impossible to tax a corporation because the corporation is just a fictional entity designed to pass profits back to its owners. When you say you're going to "tax a corporation", the corporation doesn't go to the money farm to harvest some more cash to give to the government so we can expand job training for unwed mothers — some real person is going to pay that tax. When you put a tax on wages, such as social security or the unemployment tax, the employer doesn't say, "oh, well, profits dropped 15% this year; better tell Merrill Lynch to issue a 'sell' rating" — they pay their employees less, both to lower the tax burden and to recover the lost profits. They hire fewer employees, because each employee is now more expensive. This costs real people money. When you up the corporate tax, either the employees pay, because the firm can't afford as many of them; the customers pay, because the firms have to raise their prices to cover the taxes; or the shareholders pay because dividends are lower and the company is worth less. And before you liberal types start rubbing your hands in glee at the thought of those pained shareholders, keep in mind that the largest shareholders in companies are insurance companies, which invest in stocks in order to make the money they need to pay off when your house burns down; and pension funds, making the money to take picketing US Steelworkers off the streets and put them into good homes. The other big holders are mutual funds, which is what most of us have our 401(k)'s in. So when you say "I want to tax corporate profits", try silently saying to yourself "so that Mom can sell the condo in Florida and move in with me."If the goal is "to redistribute money from the company's richer owners, customers, and managers to its poorer employees," then we already have a way to do that: "It's a little thing I like to call the progressive income tax."
Welfare reform turned 10 this week, and more remarkable than its near-total success is the near-total amnesia that seems to have gripped its one-time opponents. The results and the history are both worth revisiting today because they offer some useful political and policy lessons for the future.The article notes, "One lesson here is the familiar American one that states can play a useful role as policy laboratories." Many of the new federal welfare policies had been tested at the state level.
When Bill Clinton signed the bill ending a federal entitlement to welfare, a leading liberal newspaper called it "nasty," "atrocious" and "odious" — adding with typical nuance that "the children will suffer the most." Three Clinton Administration officials resigned over the bill. Georgia Congressman John Lewis not too subtly raised the specter of fascism as he literally screamed on the House floor, "They're coming for the children. They're coming for the poor. They're coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled." Even as sensible a social scientist as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lost his head and called it "something approaching an apocalypse."
The real story has been apocalypse not. Welfare reform has worked so well that its success runs the risk of going almost unnoticed. Welfare rolls are down to about two million today from a peak of five million in 1995. The last time welfare caseloads were this low was 1970, when America had 100 million fewer citizens. But what about the children? The rate of black children living in poverty in America was more than 40% in 1996 and stands at 32% today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 25 years prior to welfare reform, that number had only briefly ever dipped below 40% and stood as high as 47% in 1980.
There is a neuroeconomics critique of Big Box Sets. So much of the pleasure of a purchase lies in the anticipation of the buy rather than the having. The anticipatory pleasure of a Big Box Set, no matter how large, is not so much greater than the anticipatory pleasure from a single CD. Yet once you own a large box it sits around. You can't listen to the CDs all at once. They start to feel "stale," and then you go out and want that anticipatory fix again.
Labels: Economics
Dave Sim discusses his fighting aardvark comic, Cerebus, with the CBC in this interview from their archives: It began as a satire of Conan the Barbarian mixed with Howard the Duck. But over the years Cerebus the Aardvark turned into something much more, an intricate socio-political allegory, an epic labour of love for its creator and eventually, the longest running English-language comic book story ever. In this 1983 radio clip, cartoonist Dave Sim along with his wife and publisher Deni Loubert, discuss his then young comic and its unlikely hero.
Labels: Media
Joel Johnson picked up an original paste-up of Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work — "or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!" — and has placed fairly hi-res versions on-line.
Labels: Education
Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and others have described the importance of the "printing revolution" to European developments such the Reformation, Renaissance, and science. According to Eisenstein, printing finally foiled the entropy that had destroyed the vast majority of written works since ancient times. Printing also enlarged the bookshelves of scholars all over Europe: by a factor of fifty or more by the middle of the 16th century.Szabo notes that widespread literacy allowed western organizations to grow beyond the Dunbar number, which was popularized by Gladwell in The Tipping Point as the "rule of 150":
I'd go even farther than Eisenstein. Printing soon brought literacy to vast numbers of people (eventually to the vast majority of us). Printing, especially printing in newly standardized vernaculars, changed the very consciousness of people, and turned a small corner of the world, Western Europe, into a culture that in many ways conquered the world. Widespread decentralized printing and the accompanying book markets, new schools, and rise of literacy gave rise to a new form of consciousness — book consciousness.
Colombus was among the first generation of navigators who had been reading avidly and widely since a child. On his bookshelf was Marco Polo's Travels. On his voyages he carried maps made by geographers who had been literate sincethey were children, and he carried astronomical tables that had been printed widely across Europe. These tables had been made by a Hungarian-Italian mathematician whose bookshelf was full of ancient Greek science and mathematics. Such information had been rather inferior and far less available just a few decades before.
With the easy conquest by tiny Portugal of Asia's vast and ancient sea trade routes, rapidly literizing Western Europeans were by the early 16th century demonstrating a vast superiority in naval affairs. In navigation as in battle officers using accurate charts and astronomical tables were at a premium. (Europeans did not have quite such good luck on land against the Turks). Western Europeans would retain completely uncontested (except among each other) naval superiority on the world's oceans until the Japanese victory over Russia in the early 20th century. The Japanse by then had long since taken up printing and had a very well read population . Even on the ground by the 18th century English merchants, officers, and civil servants, practically all of them literate and widely read since young children, were finding it quite easy to conquer and take over the administration in far larger and otherwise highly advanced civilizations like India.
Soon after the spread of the printing press, the very fundamentals of organization in Western Europe began to change. In the late Middle Ages organizations, even royal and papal bureaucracies and banking "super-companies", rarely engaged more than a few dozen employees. Organizational size came up against the severe limit of the Dunbar number. By the end ofthe 16th century, the colonial companies and bureaucracies of Spain and Portugal were vast, highly literate, and well coordinated. Officer corps had often been raised on military books and thus able to draw lessons from a wide variety of ancient and recent battles. Even a minor salt extractor in Wear, England, was employing 300 men by the mid 16th century. (Large organizations in manufacturing would largely have to wait until the 18th century and the industrial revolution, however).Read the whole article.
In its popularization, the research of Dunbar and others is taken as an upper bound of the number of fellow humans that an individual can view as being "truly human". In this form, the "monkeysphere" functions as a reductionistic and biologistic explanation for why humans can treat some humans with consideration and other humans indifferently or even inhumanely.
Some example explanations using the notion of a monkeysphere are:
- "Whenever you make new close personal friends, you have to drop some old personal friends to make room for them in your monkeysphere."
- "The reason that the people in village X don't mind doing Y to the people in village Z is because the people in village Z are not in the monkeysphere of people in village X."
- "Because the number of people in that department exceeded 150, which is the size of the human monkeysphere, they had to split the department into two."
Labels: Science
For one test, White put a piece of paper in front of [Cardinals slugger Albert] Pujols. Capital letters were strewn about the page. White told Pujols to locate and cross out all of the As.
White realized she'd never seen anyone scan the page "I've never seen anyone scan that way, but it would be important on the baseball field," White said, noting the skill would allow Pujols to scan the field and know where everyone is without missing any action.
In another test, Pujols replicated 133 symbols in a minute — a testament to Pujols' hand-eye coordination. The test makers don't even list a score that high.
In a test of finger-tapping speed, Pujols tapped at 2.4 standard deviations faster than average — placing him in the 99th percentile.
"It just doesn't get any better than that," White said.
In fact, Pujols popped the screw right out of the finger tapper. He was contrite, even fixed the machine, tightening the screw with a fingernail.
White said Pujols' performance on any one test doesn't explain his abilities; it's the whole package that probably counts.
Labels: Science
Is Bigger Safer? It Ain't Necessarily So: Those who think that driving big is driving safe, or that lightweight, fuel-efficient vehicles are inherently more dangerous than their heavyweight counterparts, need to think again. A researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) has teamed with a researcher from the University of Michigan in a unique risk analysis study which shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, vehicle quality is a much more important safety factor than weight for the drivers of vehicles involved in a crash.A large pickup truck, like a Ford F-series, is no safer than a Toyota Corolla — and it's five times as dangerous to other drivers in a crash.
"Most cars are safer than the average sports utility vehicle [SUV], while pickup trucks are much less safe than all other types. Minivans and import luxury cars have the safest records," states the report, "An Analysis of Traffic Deaths by Vehicle Type and Model," which was prepared by Tom Wenzel, an energy analyst with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and Marc Ross, a professor in Michigan's Applied Physics Department.
Labels: Science
The caravan was apparently captured because it was made up mostly of the mulatto, mestizo, Maya Indian and Caribbean men and women given to the Spanish as carriers and cooks when they landed in Mexico in 1519, and so was moving slowly.
The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day at dawn, held them down on a sacrificial slab, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods.
Some may have been given hallucinogenic mushrooms or pulque — an alcoholic milky drink made from fermented cactus juice — to numb them to what was about to happen.
"It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected," Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.
"You can only imagine what it was like for the last ones, who were left six months before being chosen, their anguish."
The priests and town elders, who performed the rituals on the steps of temples cut off by a perimeter wall, sometimes ate their victims' raw and bloody hearts or cooked flesh from their arms and legs once it dropped off the boiling bones.
Knife cuts and even teeth marks on the bones show which ones had meat stripped off to be eaten, Martinez said.
Aztec warriors whitened the bones with lime and carried them as amulets. Some were used as ornaments in homes.
In Aztec times, the site was called Zultepec, a town of white-stucco temples and homes where some 5,000 people grew maize and beans and produced pulque to sell to traders.
Priests had to be brought in for the ritual killings because human sacrifices had never taken place there, Martinez said.
On hearing of the massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque — meaning "where people were eaten" in the indigenous Nahuatl language — and sent an army to wipe out its people.
When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims' possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewelry for the archaeologists.
It's no surprise that circuit workouts — cheap, low-key and easy to understand — are popping up in strip malls coast to coast. About a third of the country's estimated 30,000 health clubs are now express workout facilities, according to IHRSA. While Curves found an audience among middle-aged and older women, the spinoffs are branching out to other groups.
Cuts Fitness for Men, which opened in 2003, now has 90 locations across the country. With a tan-and-blue color scheme and "Cheers"-like camaraderie, founder John Gennaro said members are typically between 30 and 60 and often watch a baseball game together after their workouts.
The Blitz, a boxing-themed circuit gym, has 75 locations nationwide. This fall, president
Scott Smith is planning a foray into the 18 to 35 market with a coed, military-themed version called "Commandos."
Even major chains like 24 Hour Fitness and Gold's Gym have rolled out circuit workouts.
One circuit gym in southern California invites the entire family to work out. At Family Fitness Express in LaCanada, Calif., members are encouraged to bring along the kids, or even grandma and grandpa.
Labels: Fitness
It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and, on average, earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as self esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation: On average, taller people earn more because they are smarter. As early as age 3 — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. The correlation between height in childhood and adulthood is approximately 0.7 for both men and women, so that tall children are much more likely to become tall adults. As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns. Using four data sets from the US and the UK, we find that the height premium in adult earnings can be explained by childhood scores on cognitive tests. Furthermore, we show that taller adults select into occupations that have higher cognitive skill requirements and lower physical skill demands.
Labels: Economics
Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month.[1] With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports),[2] Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.
There are estimates that 70 percent of Wal-Mart's products are made in China.[3] One writer vividly suggests that "One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market." [4] Even without considering the $263 billion in consumer savings that Wal-Mart provides for low-income Americans, or the millions lifted out of poverty by Wal-Mart in other developing nations, it is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people.[5] Moreover, insofar as China's rapid manufacturing growth has been associated with a decline in its status as a global arms dealer, Wal-Mart has also done more than its share in contributing to global peace.[6]
Today's dose of cute comes from these Meerkat Cubs: In this photograph provided by the Smithsonian Institution, two of the National Zoos three meerkat pups peer out of a den at the Small Mammal House at the zoo Sunday, Aug. 20 in Washington. Born nearly two weeks earlier, the cubs are the first surviving litter born at the National Zoo in the past three decades.
There are Animals on the Underground. That is, you can see animals in the lines of London Underground maps: The Animals, made up using tube lines, stations and junctions on the London Underground map, were spotted by Paul Middlewick some 17 years ago.Take a look.
The original Animal, the Elephant, was discoverd while Paul was staring at the tube map during his daily journey to work.
Since then, the Elephant has been joined by many other Animal friends.
Labels: Animals
Economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin shares some photos of Public Works Gone Awry: It is commonly agreed that Keynes came up with the idea that public works are the best way to help the economy during a recession.
As a result, Keynesian economists seem to have developed a blind faith in the government in general, and in the system of public works in particular.
I do not share the same faith in the government.
I do not share the same faith in public works.
And this may help explain why.
Mexican immigration is not a tidal wave. The rate of undocumented migration has not increased in over two decades. Neither is Mexico a demographic time bomb; its fertility rate is only slightly above replacement. Although a variety of trans-border population movements have increased, this is to be expected in a North American economy that is increasingly integrated under the terms of a mutually-ratified trade agreement. Undocumented migration stems from the unwillingness of the United States to include labor within the broader framework governing trade and investment. Rates of migration between Mexico and the United States are entirely normal for two countries so closely integrated economically.
Mexico is not impoverished or disorganized. It is a dynamic, one trillion dollar economy and, along with Canada, our largest trading partner. Its per capita income is $10,000, which puts it at the upper tier of middle income countries, not far behind Russia’s per capita income of $11,000. Compared with Russia, however, Mexico has a much better developed infrastructure of highways, ports, railroads, telecommunications, and social services that give it a poverty rate of 18% rather than 40%, as well as a male life expectancy of 73 years rather than 61 years (U.S. figures are 12% and 75 years, respectively). Unlike Russia, moreover, Mexico is a functioning democracy with open and competitive elections, a separation of powers, and a well-defined party system.
In keeping with these realities, Mexicans are not desperate to settle north of the border. Most migrants are not fleeing poverty so much as seeking social mobility. They typically have a job and income in Mexico and are seeking to finance some economic goal at home — acquiring a home, purchasing land, capitalizing a business, investing in education, smoothing consumption. Left to themselves, the vast majority of migrants will return once they have met their economic goals. From 1965 to 1985, 85% of undocumented entries from Mexico were offset by departures and the net increase in the undocumented population was small. The build-up of enforcement resources at the border has not decreased the entry of migrants so much as discouraged their return home. Since the late 1980s the rate of undocumented out-migration has been halved. Undocumented population growth in the United States stems not from rising in-migration, but from falling out-migration.
Labels: Policy
In the post-9/11 world, everyone worries that increasing government power in order to fight terrorism will lead inexorably to a loss of freedom and ultimately to a collapse of the liberal (in the classic sense) order of Western society. This concern is not a new one. Britons in the 1700s warned of 'insensible loss of liberties' that would occur by the aggregate effects of the accumulation of seemingly trivial individual laws. A vast array of citizens watch with eagle eyes every new power of the state and seek to obstruct most of them. believing that the powers represent a greater threat than the enemy they seek to contain.
History, however, suggest they are looking in the wrong direction.
The history of the 20th Century paints a very clear picture of how liberal orders collapse into authoritarian ones. Contrary to popular belief, liberal orders do not gradually evolve into authoritarian ones by the accumulation of state power. Instead, liberal orders fail suddenly when they cease to provide basic physical and economic security. The functional power of the state decays until conditions reach a degree of disorder that triggers a sudden collapse into an authoritarian order. Ineffectiveness kills the liberal state, not excessive powers.
The major cases of Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan all follow this pattern. In each case, the liberal order lost the ability to provide the basic order and stability required for the economy to function, and simultaneously lost the ability to suppress the violent action of political extremists. A feedback loop arose in which the erosion of state effectiveness created disorder which empowered extremists who further sabotaged the state's ability to function. The feedback loop rather rapidly increased the power of extremists and destroyed the liberal order.
Terrorism as we know it today did not exist prior to the 1960s. Virtually everyone considered the targeting of random civilians by shadowy unaccountable organizations utterly taboo. No one had any trouble recognizing such tactics as war crimes. Any group who adopted such tactics faced political suicide if not outright extermination. Even in the '60s and '70s most major terrorist actions sought to create maximum media exposure with a minimum of civilian casualties. As the liberal West seemed unable to respond effectively to terrorism, more and more groups adopted it as a tactic and their attacks grew more violent and less precisely targeted. Now we face the very real possibility of attacks using nuclear and biological weapons which could kill millions at a stroke.
If we cannot successfully curtail the escalation of terrorism we face the collapse of our liberal order. Today we face Islamist terrorists, but if others view terrorism as successful we will face attacks from other groups as well. Terrorist attacks will undermine social and economic functions and people will increasingly view the liberal order as a failed one. 9/11 illustrates this risk in miniature. During the '90s the West proved unable to restrain Al-Qaeda and its attacks grew increasingly destructive. People worried more about increasing state power than they did about the external threat. Finally, 9/11 caused a counter-reaction and we saw a sudden expansion of state power. Had we treated terrorism more seriously and had we authorized relatively minor expansions of state power in the '90s we would not have the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance today.
Political correctness threatens to cripple the effectiveness of the liberal order. For example, we refuse to use proven techniques such as profiling airline passengers and instead use invasive and ineffective searches for any object that might contain a bomb or weapon. We consider profiling, even accurate profiling, unjust. Neither will we use data mining, keyword searching or other modern tools, preferring instead to rely on invasive techniques such as planting informants. In the end we create the illusion of programs that are both powerful and ineffective. If a future attacks succeeds on a grand scale, many may conclude, just as they did after 9/11, that the state (or worse, a successor state) needs vastly more power.
We may be sliding down a slippery slope towards authoritarianism, but I fear we do so facing up-slope and unawares. We fix our eyes uphill on the minor threat while we slide insensibly down into the maw of the beast.
Labels: War
If you want a lot of hate mail, write pro-immigration articles for conservative publications.A tired argument:
As the argument runs, we all like immigrants just fine, thank you. But what we don't like is illegality. My grandfather, argues embattled Senator Rick Santorum, came here legally, and so should this generation's immigrants. The problems here are legion. First, when our grandfathers came over here legally, it was relatively easy to do. During the late 19th and early 20th century, 37 million immigrants came to American shores. Irish, Italian, and Slovak workers flooded into the country, legally. To compare earlier waves of immigrants with current, largely Latino, immigrants is to leave out a tremendous shift in immigration law.
Second, the argument is basically circular. The debate is about whether we should change our laws. If we liberalize immigration rules, then a number of immigrants will no longer be in violation of the law. They won't be "illegals."
Today's dose of cute comes from Filomena, a two-week-old puma at the National Zoo in Managua, Nicaragua.
Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee.(Hat tip to Freakonomics.)
Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn't spread to college textbooks — partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year.
Now, a small Minnesota startup is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6 billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. Students, or anyone else who fills out a five-minute survey, can download a PDF file of the book, which they can store on their hard drive and print.
Labels: Business