Some say that Ph.D. stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. Here’s how a Ph.D. says “I don’t know.”
Piled Higher and Deeper
Sunday, August 20th, 2006The Puzzle of New War
Saturday, August 19th, 2006Dr. Michael Vlahos examines The Puzzle of New War — irregular war, asymmetrical war, unconventional war, guerilla war, 4th generation war, anti-terrorism, counter-insurgency — by looking at how the ancient Romans handled war against unrecognized, armed communities:
What the Romans always tried to do was simple and straightforward, and well within the accepted standards of Greco-Roman civilization. They would try to negotiate with these groups, but if they became a problem, a Roman army would march off to wipe them out.The track record for this approach spanned at least five centuries. For example, in 102 BC a big Germanic community entered Italy — the Ambrones and the Teutones — and was essentially wiped off the face of the earth by the legions of the Consul Marius. In 405 AD, an equally large nation of Germans under Radagaisus entered Italy and was similarly exterminated by the Magister Militum, Aetius.
This was a no-prisoners approach. If the victory was complete, then presumably thousands would be slaughtered. Those remaining fighters would be taken prisoner, and ritualistically crucified — also often, in the thousands. Women and children would be profitably sold into slavery.
The community that survived these events would have them literally seared into their collective memory. So Aetius dealt with the Burgundians in 436 AD, bringing savage Hunnic cohorts into Southern France to flay the offending nation. From the horror of that experience, where two-third of their people were slaughtered, comes the Nibelungenlied. Yet forever after, as long as there were Romans, the Burgundians remained good Roman allies. There are plenty of voices today — just look around the Internet — who would celebrate this as a model win by the good guys against the terrorists.
But sometimes things did not go as planned for the Romans. The Goths, desperate for sanctuary from savage Huns, were accepted into the Empire almost as despised refugees, treated like indentured guest workers-to-be, a new Roman underclass. But soon they rebelled and actually destroyed the legionary army sent against them: slaying even the emperor himself.
Likewise the Romans barely contained fractious Jewish communities. In 79 AD Jewish insurgents triggered a strategic crisis of empire, which was concluded only by the punitive sack of Jerusalem itself. Yet even here a Roman scorched-earth policy only led, three generations later, to an even greater Jewish revolt: whose outcome was the utter destruction of the Jewish Nation.
We should remember these long-ago events because unrecognized armed communities — “non-state actors” — are not easy military propositions. Quite to the contrary, a great nation state that has for generations focused its military efforts against brother nation states is sure to be less prepared for military operations against non-state threats.
Neither the Americans nor the Israelis are Roman enough to wipe out a threatening community. Not yet.
A Preference for Ignorance
Saturday, August 19th, 2006Arnold Kling notes that we display A Preference for Ignorance:
In the fields of health care, education, and assistance to poor countries, we rarely measure value properly. It seems as though we prefer to be ignorant about what succeeds and what fails. We know shockingly little about the cost-effectiveness of very expensive programs.
MIT’s Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee points out an example:
The cheapest strategy for getting children to spend more time in school, by some distance, turns out to be giving them deworming medicine so that they are sick less often. The cost, by this method, of getting one more child to attend primary school for a year is $3.25. The most expensive strategy among those that are frequently recommended (for example by the World Bank, which also recommends deworming) is a conditional cash-transfer program, such as Progresa in Mexico, where the mother gets extra welfare payments if her children go to school. This costs about $6,000 per additional child per year, mainly because most of the mothers who benefit from it would have sent their children to school even if there were no such incentive. This is a difference of more than 1,800 times.
We’re similarly ignorant about schooling our own children (and young adults):
We seem to be most determined to remain ignorant in the field of education. The testing in No Child Left Behind is based on observational studies, rather than experiments. That is, we look at school quality solely in terms of outcomes. We label a school as good or bad without having any idea whether the school actually adds value.Imagine what might happen if one were to run a controlled experiment, pooling a group of students and randomly assigning them to different schools. Would the “good” suburban school really do better than the “failing” urban school, once the population of students is similar?
I suspect that controlled experiments in education would show shockingly little value added. That is, if you were to randomly assign students to schools, the children of good parents would do well regardless of where you send them, and conversely.
I suspect that controlled experiments in higher education would also show little value added. Everyone can cite the differences in earnings between college graduates and non-graduates, but those differences do not come from controlled experiments. What if you were to undertake a randomized trial, in which a cross section of high-school graduates is sent to college and then compared with a similar cross-section that is not sent to college? My guess is that the earnings differences will not be so large.
Of the Gorgon
Friday, August 18th, 2006
You have to love pre-modern bestiaries. From Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607) comes this description Of the Gorgon, or strange Lybian Beast:
Among the manifold and divers sorts of Beasts which are bred in Affricke, it is thought that the Gorgon is brought foorth in that countrey. It is a feareful and terrible beast to beholdd, it hath high and thicke eie lids, eies not very great, but much like an Oxe or Bugils, but all fiery-bloudy, which neyther looke directly forwarde, nor yet upwards, but continuallye downe to the earth, and therefore are called in Greeke Catobleponta, From the crowne of their head downe to their nose they have a long hanging mane, which maketh them to looke fearefully. It eateth deadly and poysonfull hearbs, and if at any time he see a Bull or other creature whereof he is afraid, he presently causeth his mane to stand upright, and being so lifted up, opening his lips, and gaping wide, sendeth forth of his throat a certaine sharpe and horrible breath, which infecteth and poysoneth the air above his head, so that all living creatures which draw in the breath of that aire are greevously afflicted thereby, loosing both voyce and sight, they fall into leathall and deadly convulsions. It is bred in Hesperia and Lybia.The Poets have a fiction that the Gorgones were the Daughters of Medusa and Phocynis, and are called Steingo, and by Hesiodus Stheno, and Euryale inhabiting the Gorgonic Ilands in the Aethiopick Ocean, over against the gardens of Hesperia. Medusa is said to have the haires of his heid to be living Serpents, against whom Perseus fought and cut off his head, for which cause he was placed in heaven on the North side of the Zodiacke above the Waggon, and on the left hand holding the Gorgons head.1 The truth is that there were certaine Amazonian women in Affricke divers from the Scithians, against whom Perseus made Warre, and the captaine of those women was called Medusa, whom Perseus overthrew and cut off her head, and from thence came the Poets fiction discribing it with Snakes growing out of it as is aforesaid. These Gorgons are bred in that countrey, and have such haire about their heads as not onely exceedeth all other beastes, but also poysoneth when he standeth upright. Pliny called this beast Catablepon, because it continually looketh downeward, and saith that all the parts of it are but smal excepting the head which is very heavy, and exceedeth the proportion of his body which is never lifted up, but all living creatures die that see hie eies.
By which there ariseth a question whether the poison which he sendeth foorth, proceede from his breath or from his eyes. Whereupon it is more probable, that like the Cockatrice he killeth by seeing, then by the breath of his mouth which is not competible to any other beasts in the world. Besides when the Souldiors of Marius followed Iugurtha, they sawe one of these Gorgons, and supposing it was some sheepe, bending the head continually to the earth, and moving slowly, they set upon him with their swordes, whereat the Beast disdaining suddenly discovered his eies, setting his haire upright at the sight whereof the Souldiors fel downe dead.
Superficial Friends
Friday, August 18th, 2006
I’m not sure what to think of the Superficial Friends. (“That’s hot!”)
Helper Monkey Pitching
Friday, August 18th, 2006
Today’s dose of cute comes from this Helper Monkey “throwing” out the first pitch at Fenway:
Ayla, a service monkey for the disabled, throws out the first pitch prior to a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers at Fenway Park in Boston, Wednesday evening, Aug. 16, 2006.
If you’re not familiar with helper monkeys, don’t worry; I wasn’t either.
The Usual Suspects
Friday, August 18th, 2006Wretchard looks at Thomas Schelling’s game theory and its implications for modern policy, using an illustrative example from The Usual Suspects:
First described is the basic notion of commitment, which communicates to the enemy that you will do what you undertake. Commitment makes deterrence credible and credibility is the essential problem. “The most difficult part is communicating your intentions to your enemies. They must believe that you are committed to fighting them in order to defend” what you say you will defend for them to take you seriously. As Verbal Kint put it “to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.” To accomplish it no matter what. Schelling taught that threats are more credible if you “burn your bridges or ships” thereby making it clear that you have only one option: fight. When the Hungarian mob invaded Soze’s home to intimidate him into submitting, he simply killed his family first, illustrating Schelling’s point that to truly be believed “you must get yourself into a position where you cannot fail to react as you said you would”. Such is this power that when the fictional Kaiser Soze demonstrated absolute commitment he ceased to be simply a man and became a force of nature.
Tom Schelling’s key contribution was to establish on a sound mathematical basis the role of will — expressed as commitment — in war. Deterrence was not simply a matter of possessing advanced weapons. That was only half the equation. The other half was to establish that you were absolutely ready to use those weapons to your purpose. And given a choice between superiority in weapons and ascendance in will, weapons always came in second. Die Welt relates the experience of an Israeli officer who fought Hezbollah during the early 1980s. Israel had artillery, tanks, airplanes to Hezbollahs guns and knives. But Israel was a liberal democracy and Hezbollah a ruthless criminal organization. The overmatch in will made knives were more powerful than tanks because Hezbollah was willing to use them unhesitatingly. “Hezbollah’s barbarism is legendary. Gen. Effe Eytam, an Israeli veteran of that first Lebanon war, tells of how — after Israel had helped bring “Doctors without Borders” into a village in the 1980s to treat children — local villagers lined up 50 kids the next day to show Eytam the price they pay for cooperating with the West. Each of the children had had their pinky finger cut off.”
None of the weapons in the IDF arsenal could level this disparity in will.
Wretchard then goes on to cite Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who made this comment in his speech to the Harvard class of 1978:
No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.
Dependency as Independence?
Thursday, August 17th, 2006From Theodore Dalrymple’s Dependency as Independence?
It has long been an official pretense in Britain that we have so many teenage pregnancies — the most by far in Europe — because British girls don’t know where babies come from. The answer to the problem, therefore, is yet more sex education: ever more children putting ever more condoms onto ever more bananas at ever-earlier ages.A report from the charity, the Joseph Rowntree Trust, throws doubt on the official line. Its researchers interviewed 41 teenage mothers within a year of giving birth, some as young as 13, who reported wanting to have a baby. [...] Rather than face up to the disapproval of their parents (or, more likely, parent), and that of the rest of society, teenage mothers prefer to claim that their pregnancies were accidental.
As the report makes clear, and as I have found from clinical experience, the girls regarded pregnancy and the resultant baby as an answer to existential problems. The young women came from broken, violent, chaotic, and loveless homes; they hated school because it seemed pointless; their only employment prospects were in the lowest-paid and most monotonous jobs.
A baby, then, answered all their prayers. It was a constant focus of interest and an object upon which they could lavish their hitherto thwarted desire to love and be loved. They also found that, thanks to welfare, their financial position actually improved after having given birth, provided only that the child’s father did not live with the mother or work to earn his living — whereupon, of course, all state benefits stopped, casting the young family into poverty.
The young mothers also reported that having babies fulfilled a desire for “independence,” a word used without irony in the report. This language is evidence that the British character has changed utterly in the last 60 years. Where once even the poorest people would have thought it a disgrace and humiliation to depend on public welfare, such handouts of taxpayer money by the state now constitute the very conception of independence for a considerable proportion of the population. Indeed, welfare recipients almost all call the day on which they receive their dole “the day when I get paid.”
In not a single case — at least, as far as one can deduce from the report — did a mother wonder whether she was reproducing the conditions from which she was, for understandable reasons, fleeing.
Ballistic Deflection Transistor
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Researchers Martin Margala, Yonathan Shapir, Paul Ampadu, and Marc Feldman are developing the Ballistic Deflection Transistor:
The Ballistic Deflection Transistor (BDT) should produce far less heat and run far faster than standard transistors because it does not start and stop the flow of its electrons the way conventional designs do. It resembles a roadway intersection, except in the middle of the intersection sits a triangular block. From the “south” an electron is fired, as it approaches the crossroads, it passes through an electrical field that pushes the electron slightly east or west. When the electron reaches the middle of the intersection, it bounces off one side of the triangle block and is deflected straight along either the east or west roads. In this way, if the electron current travels along the east road, it may be counted as a zero, and as a one if it travels down the west road.A traditional transistor registers a “one” as a collection of electrons on a capacitor, and a “zero” when those electrons are removed. Moving electrons on and off the capacitor is akin to filling and emptying a bucket of water. The drawback to this method is that it takes time to fill and empty that bucket. That refill time limits the speed of the transistor—the transistors in today’s laptops run at perhaps two gigahertz, meaning two billion refills every second. A second drawback is that these transistors produce immense amounts of heat when that energy is emptied.
The BDT design should also be able to resist much of the electrical noise present in all electronic devices because the noise would only be present in the electrical “steering” field, and calculations show the variations of the noise would cancel themselves out as the electron passes through.
College Customers vs. Suppliers
Thursday, August 17th, 2006Economist Arnold Kling looks at College Customers vs. Suppliers:
I recall seeing a quote somewhere else to the effect that higher education is the only product where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible.This conflict between what the consumers want — easy A’s — and what the suppliers would like to offer — meaningful learning — ought to be examined further. What is the reason for the disconnect? Some possibilities:
- The consumers are basically right. Most courses are not really worth taking for most students, so the easy A is the best choice.
- The course that offers the easy A still gives the student the option to learn something, but the course that requires learning does not give the student the option to earn an easy A. So the option value is always with the coures that offers the easy A.
- Consumers are myopic, and their preference for an easy A is irrational. (This is the view that many professors hold implicitly.)
- Grades are measurable, and real learning is not. Consumers think grades are more important than they really are, because what is measured and reported is more salient than what is unmeasured.
I should note that one potential solution to a competitive race-to-the-bottom in terms of rigor would be to have external examinations. When I was a student at Swarthmore in the Honors program, our exams were written and graded by professors from outside the college.
If students are motivated by grades, then separating the examining function from the teaching function changes the consumers’ incentive. With the exam exogenous, my grade-motivated students would want my course to be rigorous rather than easy.
A Little Social Experiment
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006Theodore Dalrymple describes A Little Social Experiment:
An interesting experiment took place on the London street where I have an apartment. A few years ago, the borough council permitted a developer to build six apartment complexes across from my building, on the condition that he reserve three of them for “social” — what Americans would call public — housing.The architecture of the buildings, while deeply undistinguished, is far from the worst of the genre and certainly does not suffer from the gigantism that was once the vogue. The street remains leafy, and edges on a fashionable area. A two-bedroom apartment in the private complexes now sells for $900,000. To all appearances, the apartments are identical in the private and public housing complexes.
In front of these apartments is a tiny garden, not more than 15 feet wide. As you walk along the street, you can tell from these gardens exactly at what point the private property ends and the “social” housing begins, in exactly the same way as, overflying the island of Hispaniola, you can tell where the Dominican Republic ends and Haiti begins.
The little gardens in front of the publicly owned apartments are overgrown and jungle-like; they look as if no one really cared for them since the construction of the housing. Litter and household detritus — from diapers to the packaging of fast-food meals — covers them, some of it festooned on the overgrown bushes. At a certain point, private property takes over. The little gardens are cared for and neat; not a single piece of litter clutters them. If one were to appear, a property owner would soon remove it. My apartment, I am glad to say, is opposite a privately owned building.
World now has more fat people than hungry ones
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006The world now has more fat people than hungry ones — one billion overweight people versus 800 million undernourished.
Martial Artists’ Moves Revealed in "Fight Science" Lab
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006From Martial Artists’ Moves Revealed in “Fight Science” Lab:
In one experiment, experts in karate, boxing, kung fu, and tae kwon do all took turns striking the dummy in the face.The researchers were surprised to find that boxing is the fighting style capable of delivering the most force in a single punch.
Boxer Steve Petramale delivered about 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of impact force, the equivalent of swinging a sledgehammer into someone’s face.
His punch, the sensors revealed, starts in the feet and travels up the legs through the hips to the chest and shoulders, multiplying in force as it travels up the body.
How utterly counterintuitive that an art dedicated to punching would develop the hardest punchers…
Anyway, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that full-contact fighters hit hard:
The tae kwon do spinning back kick delivered more than 1,500 pounds (680.4 kilograms) of force, while the kung fu flying double kick produced about 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of force.But the undisputed winner practices a discipline known for its ability to deliver a knockout: Muay Thai, also known as Thai boxing.
Melchor Menor, a former two-time Muay Thai world champion, uses a simple technique to incapacitate his opponents: a knee to the chest at close quarters.
Menor himself was surprised at how powerful this move can be.
“I wasn’t expecting to have the highest force. When he said the power of the knee [kick] was equal to the power of a 35-mile-an-hour [56.3-kilometer-an-hour] car crash, it was humbling.”
The displacement sensor in the dummy’s chest measured nearly two inches (five centimeters) of chest compression from Menor’s knee strike.
A Liberal, Radical and Progressive Manifesto
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006Tim Worstall reviews Deepak Lal’s new book, Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century, and declares it A Liberal, Radical and Progressive Manifesto:
Lal effectively points out that just about every goal held dear by those who call themselves radicals and progressives is best reached by exactly the opposite policy prescriptions that they put forward. Indeed, we can go further and point out that the best methods of reaching those goals are in fact the truly liberal ones, those laid out all those decades ago by Adam Smith, David Hume and David Ricardo.Another way of putting this is that this book can and should be a rallying point for those of us who are indeed liberal, radical and progressive. Liberal in that we believe in the maximum amount of freedom consistent with the avoidance of anarchy (it was, after all, a British Liberal Prime Minister who campaigned on the idea that ‘The man who is governed best is the man who is governed least’); progressive in that we can make the world a better place; and radical in that this is not going to be achieved by tinkering at the margins.
The point:
The opposition to globalization seems to be driven by two things: one contemptible, the other merely mistaken. The contemptible one is the reaction of the various pressure groups in our own countries, bewailing the way in which “the market” will crush all cultures. This seems, in Lal’s view, to be driven by nothing more than hatred of people or Contemptus Mundi. The mistaken one is where there is a conflation between resisting the market itself (with the associated capitalism) and resisting American or European culture. It is possible to accept and benefit from one without importing the other — something that has not yet quite occurred to all? Organizing an economy along free market lines does not mean that Islamic states will have to allow topless sunbathing, alcohol or to abandon their cultural practices: Lal rightly points out that Japan is very much a capitalist society, but is still distinctively Japanese. All can become rich through trade without that having to mean that all become the same.
For example:
By the second half of the nineteenth century India had turned the tables on the Lancashire textiles industry. In the 1850s it had established a modern textile industry based on Indian entrepreneurship and capital and foreign technology. It began exporting cotton manufactures to Britain. The Lancashire cotton interests lobbied the British-Indian government to “apply British factory legislation en bloc to India so as to neutralize the ‘unfair’ advantages which the Indian mill-industry was enjoying because of the large scale employment of child labor and long hours of work”.
Worstall’s reaction:
That worked well, did it not? — making India so, so much richer. Remember this next time you hear the AFL or CIO calling for international labor standards: it’s pure protectionism.