The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons was originally published in Look magazine.

The Ph.D. Glut Revisited

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

From Gary North’s The Ph.D. Glut Revisited:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Also, if ego were marketable, all Ph.D. graduates would get tenure.

Why does any Ph.D. student at any but the top graduate schools believe that he will get tenure at any university? The odds are so far against him, and have been for a generation, than he ought to realize that he is about to waste his most precious resource – time – on a long-shot. Investing five or more years beyond the B.A. degree, except in a field where industry hires people with advanced degrees, is economic stupidity that boggles the imagination. Yet at least 200,000 graduate students are doing this at any time. Of the 46,000 who earned a Ph.D. in 2003, at least 50% got to ABD status and quit. Probably more than half of the others quit before they got to ABD status.

At $20,000 or more per year in tuition and living expenses, plus the $35,000 not earned in the job market, trying to earn a Ph.D. is a losing proposition.

The Global Id

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

John Lanchester describes Google as “wired straight into The Global Id,” because it “in effect has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes.” That direct line is worth a lot of money — more than IBM:

Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world — with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

About Google’s founders:

Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely academic environment in which both Page and Brin were raised. Page was born in Michigan, Brin in Russia, but apart from that their backgrounds were eerily alike: ethnically but not religiously Jewish, educated in Montessori schools, their fathers both university professors of science (computer science at Michigan and maths at Maryland, respectively), their mothers both also super-numerate (database consultancy and Nasa — it must be fun to say ‘my mum works at Nasa’). Brin was 16 when he began taking classes at the University of Maryland, and 19 when he graduated. He went to Stanford to begin work on his PhD. Page, who had done his first degree at the University of Michigan, came there a year later to have a look at the computer science PhD programme. On a Stanford orientation day in 1995, looking round San Francisco, Page began arguing with the tour guide, a second-year comp. sci. PhD student whose opinionated obnoxiousness so closely resembled his own. You have seen enough buddy movies to know what happened next.

The Passion of C.S. Lewis

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

As The Passion of C.S. Lewis points out, The Chronicles of Narnia aren’t allegory — at least not by a strict definition:

C.S. Lewis, however, always claimed that The Chronicles of Narnia were not allegorical. ‘You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in the world,’ he wrote to a group of schoolchildren. ‘Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing that way.’

David’s Friend Goliath

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

In David’s Friend Goliath, Michael Mandelbaum explains that most of the world realizes that America is a benevolent hegemon:

Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain once observed, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true of America’s role in the world. The United States is the subject of endless commentary, most of it negative, some of it poisonously hostile. Statements by foreign leaders, street demonstrations in national capitals, and much-publicized opinion polls all seem to bespeak a worldwide conviction that the United States misuses its enormous power in ways that threaten the stability of the international system. That is hardly surprising. No one loves Goliath. What is surprising is the world’s failure to respond to the United States as it did to the Goliaths of the past.

Sovereign states as powerful as the United States, and as dangerous as its critics declare it to be, were historically subject to a check on their power. Other countries banded together to block them. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany during the two world wars, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War all inspired countervailing coalitions that ultimately defeated them. Yet no such anti-American alignment has formed or shows any sign of forming today. Widespread complaints about the United States’ international role are met with an absence of concrete, effective measures to challenge, change, or restrict it.

The gap between what the world says about American power and what it fails to do about it is the single most striking feature of 21st-century international relations. The explanation for this gap is twofold. First, the charges most frequently leveled at America are false. The United States does not endanger other countries, nor does it invariably act without regard to the interests and wishes of others. Second, far from menacing the rest of the world, the United States plays a uniquely positive global role. The governments of most other countries understand that, although they have powerful reasons not to say so explicitly.

‘Way Forward’ Requires Culture Shift at Ford

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

A harsh lesson in leadership from ‘Way Forward’ Requires Culture Shift at Ford:

At a meeting in early October at Ford Motor Co.’s big design-center showroom here, an employee asked Mark Fields, then fresh in his job as head of the company’s North and South American auto operations, if workers should be worried about their pensions.

‘Yes, yes, you should,’ Mr. Fields says he replied. ‘That’s a great motivator.’

For Ford workers, the idea that the family-controlled company, still commonly called ‘Ford’s’ by longtime employees, might not pay promised pensions is a shocking concept. ‘I decided this was a chance to get people moving; to get away from the ‘this too shall pass’ mindset we’ve had,’ Mr. Fields says.

Executive Envy

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

Executive Envy explains what happened last time Congress reacted to “exorbitant, outrageous, immoral, offensive” CEO compensation — it made things worse:

That’s exactly what happened the last time Congress waded into this thicket of envy, capping the tax deductibility of salaries at $1 million in 1993. Corporate boards — which hire and set the pay of CEOs — naturally reacted by finding other ways to compensate their most important employees.

A favorite route was with stock options, which during the dot-com and stock-market bubble of the late 1990s rewarded even many lousy CEOs as if they were Jack Welch. But instead of giving Congress its share of the blame for this unintended consequence of populist opportunism, the financial press finds it easier to keep shouting ‘greed.’

A recommendation:

No doubt some executives earn more than their performance deserves, but that ought to be an issue for shareholders. And the best way to give shareholders influence over managers and their pay is to restore the market for corporate control — that is, remove the legal and other impediments to takeovers.

The CEOs and boards most likely to pad their own pay despite lousy performance are those who know their jobs aren’t at risk. Yet the poison pills, staggered boards and other anti-takeover tools that have proliferated in recent decades don’t receive the same political outrage. If certain media moralists want to oust bad CEOs, they should call for a repeal of the Williams Act, which requires that investors disclose any large share accumulation to the broader public. This has the effect of preventing quiet accumulations and making takeovers less profitable and more difficult.

The Socratic Method

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Rick Garlikov provides “a transcript of a teaching experiment, using The Socratic Method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school”:

There were 22 students in the class. I was told ahead of time by two different teachers (not the classroom teacher) that only a couple of students would be able to understand and follow what I would be presenting. When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The three other students’ eyes were glazed over from the very beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at all.

What was he trying to teach?

The experiment was to see whether I could teach these students binary arithmetic (arithmetic using only two numbers, 0 and 1) only by asking them questions.

Read the transcript.

Capital Offense

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

John Rutledge feels that letting the 2003 tax cuts expire would be a Capital Offense:

America is not competing for jobs with China. We are competing for capital. Double taxing dividend and capital gains income drives capital to China, where it earns higher after-tax returns. When that happens, American workers are left behind with falling productivity and uncompetitive companies.

Screening the Latest Bestseller

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Screening the Latest Bestseller describes the new Sony e-book reader:

The screen uses E Ink technology developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It consists of 480,000 tiny ‘microcapsules,’ each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When current is applied to electrodes underneath these capsules, they turn black or white, depending on the polarity of the current.

The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There’s no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be ‘refreshed’ 60 times per second or more).

The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color — between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony.

Sony will sell e-books through its own iTunes-like store, but it has also said that its Reader “will be able to display content from RSS feeds and from PDF files.”

Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV?

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV? points to one of the few examples of a do-it-yourself digital movie making it:

Roger Ingraham, the film’s director, dropped out of high school, wrote a script and, at age 19, shot Moonshine using several dozen volunteer actors and crew. Total price: $9,200, including the cost of a Panasonic camera, a PowerBook G4 and website hosting.

An agent from the William Morris Agency saw a trailer for Moonshine while surfing the net, and helped usher the film into Sundance.

Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Wow. Mood-altering cat parasites make women friendly and men into jerks:

A parasite that causes rats to sacrifice themselves to cats may also change human behavior, making women more outgoing and warmhearted, and men more jealous and suspicious. The Toxoplasma bacteria is shed in cat feces, which are eaten by rats; infected rats become fearless in the presence of cats, which makes them easier to catch, which, in turn spreads the disease to new cats.

Carl Zimmer has a few more examples that ended up in his Parasite Rex:

The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s in the fluke’s interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it complete its life cycle. Another fluke, Euhaplorchis californiensis, causes infected fish to shimmy and jump, greatly increasing the chance that wading birds will grab them.

Disney’s Expedition Everest

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Disney is one-upping its own Matterhorn ride with a new Expedition Everest ride at their Animal Kingdom — which celebrates animals, both real and imagined, like the Yeti. Boing Boing links to some amazing photos of the Nepalese theming.

Collegecuteness.com findings correlate with shirt slogan

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Two University of Chicago students — male students — decided “in true U of C fashion,” to “get statistics” supporting the famous U of C t-shirt slogan that “the squirrels are cuter than the girls.”

From Collegecuteness.com findings correlate with shirt slogan:

To evaluate the claim that Chicago girls are less attractive than others, he and Scimeca turned to the internet. They chose 10 colleges located across the country, from small, liberal arts schools to massive Big 10 universities. Capitalizing on the popularity of TheFacebook.com, they randomly selected 35 female students from each school’s freshmen class and took the picture from their profile.

With these pictures in hand, they used another popular website to measure the girls’ looks. Each photo was posted on HotOrNot.com, where leering strangers can rank subjects on a scale ranging from 10 (hot) to 1 (not). After receiving 300 votes, each of the 350 total pictures was removed and the average score for each girl calculated.

James Bond car sells for $1.9 million

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

James Bond car sells for $1.9 million:

A Swiss businessman won the keys to James Bond’s silver 1965 Aston Martin DB5 coupe on Friday with a $1.9 million bid at an annual classic car auction in Arizona.