Modern Times

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

So, I finally got around to watching Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 “silent” classic:

Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first “talkie”, and went as far as writing a dialogue script and experimenting with some sound scenes. However, he soon abandoned these attempts and reverted to a silent format with synchronized sound effects. The dialogue experiments confirmed his long-standing conviction that the universal appeal of the Tramp would be lost if the character ever spoke on screen. Indeed, this film marks the Tramp’s last screen appearance, and is arguably the final film of the silent era.

I was not at all surprised by Chaplin’s fantastic physical comedy, but I was surprised by a few other things.

First, the iconic factory scenes do not form a large fraction of the movie. It’s not a movie about life in a factory. More than anything, it’s a movie about the Great Depression, and some people didn’t like that at all:

This was one of the films which, because of its political sentiments, convinced the House Un-American Activities Committee that Charles Chaplin was a Communist, a charge he adamantly denied. He left to live in Switzerland, vowing never to return to America.

The second surprise comes when the Tramp is in prison and a fellow prisoner has smuggled some “nose powder” in. I was not expecting a coked-up Tramp in a 1936 comedy.

While a feature-length silent comedy can seem a bit monotonous to a modern audience — a bit like a feature-length music video, I suppose — I can definitely see why the AFI ranked it as one of the 100 greatest movies of all time.

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Critical Chain

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

As I mentioned earlier, when I read Kevin Fox‘s Blue Light anecdote, it spurred me to go back and read some old Goldratt books I hadn’t read yet, including his third business novel, Critical Chain.

Critical Chain doesn’t look at production or logistics but at project management.

Modern project management goes back to the 1950s, when Booz-Allen & Hamilton developed the Program Evaluation and Review Technique, or PERT, with Lockheed for the Polaris missile submarine program, and DuPont developed the Critical Path Method, or CPM, with Remington Rand for plant maintenance projects.

The basic idea behind these methods is to diagram out the various tasks within the larger project, along with their interdependencies and durations.

Two pseudo-tasks, start and finish, make the analysis clearer but don’t represent real work.



The first step in the formal analysis is to compute the early start and early finish dates for each task — the earliest it could start, given all its dependencies, and the earliest it could then end, given its duration — starting with the start pseudo-task and working to the right.



The second step in the formal analysis is to compute the late start and late finish dates for each task — the latest it could finish, without delaying the larger project, and the latest is could then start, given its duration — starting from the finish pseudo-task and working backward to the left.



Once you’ve done all that — or have made a computer do all that — you can see which tasks are on the critical path, with no slack. Any delays to any task on the critical path will delay the larger project. Any delays to any task not on the critical path will not delay the larger project — until all the slack for that task gets used up.

Posted in Business, Theory of Constraints | No Comments »

25 Skills Every Man Should Know

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Popular Mechanics magazine has cleverly promoted its most recent issue with a list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know — “ready for your debate”:

1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who has capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network

I can’t say I can do too many of those.

Anyway, I thought I’d be clever by citing Heinlein on the subject, but Glenn Reynolds, writing in his new PM column, beat me to the punch:

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Posted in Robert Heinlein, Technology, Weapons | No Comments »

Cuban sees bright future for MMA

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

In case there was any doubt that the UFC had gone mainstream — Cuban sees bright future for MMA:

Now the 49-year-old billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks is ready to step full force into mixed martial arts — both as a promoter of big-budget events and the driving influence behind a fledgling television network he intends to make the premiere destination for MMA-related programming.

Dominated by the wildly popular Ultimate Fighting Championship, which, according to SpikeTV, managed to attract more young men this past Saturday to the tape-delayed broadcast from London, England, than any college football game or NASCAR race could the same day, it’s clear the combat sport has successfully grappled its way into living rooms across America.

“I think the UFC is a unique property that has a unique approach,” Cuban told Sherdog.com during an e-mail interview. “I think Dana White and the Fertittas have done a remarkable job. [But] their model can only support a finite number of athletes, which leaves the door open for us to coexist.

“We certainly won’t be a minor league feeder for them. But I think we would compete minimally for top-end free agents only because UFC locks them up to exclusive deals. I think some fighters would prefer our open approach.”

The initial plan, as Cuban described it, was to pool quality regional MMA organizations such as Las Vegas-based Steele Cage Promotions, which in turn would promote often enough to provide regular programming for HDNet’s “Friday Fight Night” series.

Posted in Business, Martial Arts | No Comments »

Should you buy a house?

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Should you buy a house?, Megan McArdle asks:

For most of history, a house was simply a very long-term durable good, which, like cars and refrigerators, began depreciating the day it was finished. Why do we think differently now?

Shiller’s argument, which I find pretty compelling, is that we’ve been deluded by recent history. Since World War II, a number of developments have conspired to boost the prices of homes, giving a large capital gain to those who were lucky enough to own at the time. This has given us the delusion that house prices rise steadily, when in fact, we have virtually certainly exhausted the pricing gains of those happy developments.

The first boost was the invention of the long-term amortizing mortgage. Mortgages used to be short-term loans of perhaps five years, with a whacking great balloon payment due at the end. This started to change in the 1930′s, when the government housing administration, trying to preserve homeownership during the Depression, invented the 20-year amortizing loan. That trend really took off in the 1950′s, with the invention of the 30-year loan.

People tend to base what they will pay for a house on how big a monthly payment they can afford. Since everyone started getting 30-year loans roughly at once, without a concomitant boost in the supply of housing, the effect was to raise the prices that current homeowners could charge for their properties. This trend is largely played out, however. Though there was a wan attempt at introducing 40-year mortgages at the height of the bubble, the loans were not particularly popular with either lenders or borrowers. It’s conceivable that a couple in their late twenties or early thirties is buying a 30-year house, but a 40 year house stretches the imagination too far, and the income expectations into the social security years.

The second trend is the progressive income tax, which really got going seriously in the 1940′s. This gave another boost to homeowners, by making it possible for buyers to afford much bigger payments. While this may fluctuate somewhat over the next few years, tax rates seem to be fluctuating within a fairly narrow band, which means that this upward pressure on house prices will also be limited.

The third trend is the changes in inflation and interest rates since World War II. Prior to the 1960′s, inflation tended to be fairly stable, meaning that the true cost of your mortgage was fairly predictable. Then inflation started to take off, making existing mortgages very cheap, and new mortgages very expensive. But starting in 1980, the Federal Reserve got tough on inflation. As the Fed’s credibility as an inflation fighter grew, lenders stopped demanding such large premia for long-term lending, meaning that the real interest rates on mortgages fell. Since, as discussed above, potential buyers were more worried about payments than prices, that has given a big boost to house prices over the last quarter-century. But that trend, too, is played out. Inflation is set about where it’s like to be for the foreseeable future, fluctuating right around 2%. Both mortgage lenders and buyers are calculating the interest rate they will pay on those low inflationary expectations; hence, no future bonus.

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Vaccine tied to ‘superbug’ ear infection

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

This should surprise no one — Vaccine tied to ‘superbug’ ear infection:

A vaccine that has dramatically curbed pneumonia and other serious illnesses in children is having an unfortunate effect: promoting new superbugs that cause ear infections.
[...]
Prevnar prevents seven strains responsible for most cases of pneumonia, meningitis and deadly bloodstream infections. But dozens more strep strains exist, and some have flourished and become impervious to antibiotics since the vaccine combats the more common strains.
[...]
But it is a unique vaccine because it covers only seven of the 90-odd strains of the germ. By contrast, measles is caused by one type of virus. Booster shots are needed for chickenpox, mumps and measles because immunity wanes, not because the germ changed.

Prevnar, however, is losing its punch because strains not covered by the vaccine are filling the biological niche that the vaccine strains used to occupy, and they are causing disease.

One strain in particular, called 19A, is big trouble. A new subtype of it caused ear infections in the nine Rochester children, ages 6 months to 18 months, that were resistant to all pediatric medications, said Dr. Michael Pichichero, a microbiologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

The children had been unsuccessfully treated with two or more antibiotics, including high-dose amoxicillin and multiple shots of another drug. Many needed surgery to place ear tubes to drain the infection, and some recovered only after treatment with a newer, powerful antibiotic whose safety in children has not been established.

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Mystery illness strikes after meteorite hits Peruvian village

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Mystery illness strikes after meteorite hits Peruvian village:

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odor,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.

“Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned,” he said.

The Sci-Fi Channel movie practically writes itself…

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Study finds any kind of exercise helps diabetics

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Study finds any kind of exercise helps diabetics — which evidently comes as a surprise to some people:

Dr. Ronald Sigal of University of Calgary and colleagues at the University of Ottawa studied 251 people with type-2 diabetes aged 39 to 70. None exercised regularly.

They assigned them to one of four groups — one that did 45 minutes of aerobic training three times a week, another doing the same amount of resistance training, a group that did both, for a total of an hour and a half of exercise three days a week, and a fourth group that did no extra exercise.

The exercisers used treadmills or exercise bikes, or weight machines, at a health club. The volunteers liked the exercise and stuck with it, Sigal said.

“I think there is a widespread cynicism even among medical people that people will actually exercise,” Sigal said in a telephone interview.

They were given a diet to follow that should have prevented any weight loss, and then their blood sugar, cholesterol, weight and other vital statistics were measured.

Blood sugar levels fell with exercise and most importantly, hemoglobin A1c, which measures the blood sugar average for the past 3 months, fell by half a point on average in the people who did one form of exercise and a full point in those who did both.

A1c should be between 4 and 6 but the patients started out with A1c values ranging from 6.6 to 9.9, Sigal’s team wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A one point drop in A1c is associated with a 15 percent to 20 percent decrease in major cardiovascular events such as heart attack or stroke and a 37 percent reduction in complications such as kidney, eyes and limb damage.

“There were some who brought their A1c into the normal range,” Sigal said. Some also were able to lower their doses of medications and many lost weight and body fat.

“Imagine an inexpensive pill that could decrease the hemoglobin A1c value by 1 percentage point, reduce cardiovascular death by 25 percent, and substantially improve functional capacity (strength, endurance, and bone density),” Dr. William Kraus of Duke Medical School and Dr. Benjamin Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center wrote in a commentary.

They said doctors should prescribe exercise to every diabetes patient.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Immigrants, Our Country Needs Them

Monday, September 17th, 2007

In Immigrants, Our Country Needs Them, Nick Schultz interviews British economist Philippe Legrain, who’s new book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, just came out:

Schulz: Lots of folks in the US say something to the effect of “I have no problem with legal immigrants, it’s illegal immigrants that are the problem.” What do you make of that argument?

Legrain: I think the argument is back to front. Illegal immigrants are not the problem, they are the symptom of the real problem: immigration restrictions that are economically stupid, politically unsustainable and morally wrong. Far from protecting society, immigration controls undermine law and order, just as Prohibition did more damage to America than drinking ever has.

That immigrants are in the US illegally is a sign not of moral turpitude but of misguided government intervention in the labor market: since employers cannot obtain visas for foreigners to come work legally, immigrants have no choice but to come illegally instead. These generally hard-working and enterprising people’s only crime is wanting to work hard to earn a better life for themselves and their children – the epitome of the American Dream. Without them, America would grind to a halt. Who would do construction work, clean dishes, hospitals and hotel rooms, and look after Americans’ young kids and elderly parents?

In any case, even if you think the federal government should be banning immigration from poorer countries, it cannot enforce the law without turning the land of the free into a police state. That is something which no true American patriot would want. If only for pragmatic reasons, then, opponents of immigration should accept the case for looser controls and regularizing the status of the 12 million or so illegal immigrants.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Beyond the Flynn Effect

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Tyler Cowen notes that James R. Flynn — of the Flynn effect — has a new book out, What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect, that argues that we are much better at “freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations” than previous generations:

In other words, people in earlier times really were stupider when it came to abstract thought, but this was primarily for environmental reasons. These people also had more daily, practical skills, again for reasons of practice. We in contrast receive daily workouts with hypotheticals, rapidly moving images, and spatial reasoning. So Flynn is suggesting that IQ isn’t more multi-dimensional than it may seem. The Flynn Effect gains are in fact concentrated in the most spatial and abstract versions of IQ tests.

Flynn summarizes the “Dickens-Flynn” model, through which environment and IQ interact in multiplicative fashion. Smart people seek out environments which make them even smarter, and this helps reconcile the cross-sectional IQ data (adoption doesn’t change IQ so much) with the time series of increasingly higher IQ scores (environments are changing for everybody).

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Politically Incorrect Paper

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Alex Tabarrok shares the latest Politically Incorrect Paper:

Several years ago Bill Cosby chided poor blacks for spending their limited incomes on high-priced shoes and other items of conspicuous consumption instead of investing in education. Cosby was widely criticized but I went to the numbers, specifically Table 2100 of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and found the following for 2003:

Average income of whites and other races: $53,292.
Average income of blacks: $34,485.

Expenditures on footwear by whites and other races: $274
Expenditures on footwear by blacks: $440.

As I noted then “to do a proper comparison we would have to correct for income and other demographic variables.” The correction has now been done by three researchers in an NBER working paper (non-gated version). The results didn’t surprise me. How about you?

Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that they are relatively constant over time, and that they are economically large.

To give the authors credit where credit is due they also show that the differences in conspicuous consumption are large and important. The differences in spending on clothing, jewelry, and cars, for example, can explain half of the differences in wealth between the races (conditional on permanent income) and a significant share of the differences in education and health spending.

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How to back up the truck in the leveraged buyout business

Monday, September 17th, 2007

How to back up the truck in the leveraged buyout business cites the Wall Street Journal on a recent Wharton study:

[A new Wharton] study shows that, on average, leveraged-buyout funds can expect to collect $10.35 in management fees for every $100 they manage. In comparison, slightly more than half as much — $5.41 for every $100 — comes from carried interest [their share of the profits on the actual deals they do]…

The Wharton study draws from a unique trove of data, the actual performance records of a large institutional investor in private-equity funds. That investor shared data from 144 separate buyout funds from 1992 to 2006, with authors Andrew Metrick and Ayako Yasuda, both Wharton professors of finance…

In the 1980s, fledgling private-equity firms — with funds rarely topping a few hundred million dollars — charged investors a fee of 2% to 3% of cash under management. The fees were to “keep on the lights” — to pay the rent and hire assistants — before their funds generated any profit. Since then, multibillion-dollar funds have become common, and that management fee has evolved into a lucrative source of revenue. A $10 billion fund can generate $200 million a year for a private-equity firm just in management fees…

That’s just the beginning though:

LBO funds also get paid “monitoring and exit transaction fees charged to portfolio companies” (fees that vary based on deal exits), plus “entry transaction fees charged to portfolio companies” (fees that are fixed based on deal entries). These fees of course also come out of the shareholders’ pockets, i.e. the investors who invest in the LBO funds. And they add up — in total, another $4.00 for every $100 managed. Which means LBO funds extract total fees of $19.76 for every $100 invested — of which, as noted above, only a little more than a quarter actually comes from carried interest, i.e. their actual economic purpose for existing.

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Jules Verne deserves a better translation service

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Adam Roberts argues that Jules Verne deserves a better translation service:

I’d always liked reading Jules Verne and I’ve read most of his novels; but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood I hadn’t been reading Jules Verne at all.

I’ll explain what I mean. Verne has been globally popular since the 19th century, and all his titles have been translated into English, most of them soon after their initial publication. But almost all of them were translated so badly, so mutilated that “translation” is something of a misnomer.

Some of this I knew already. I’d heard that the original translators into English felt at liberty to cut out portions of Verne’s original text, particularly where they felt he was getting too “technical” or “scientific”; and I’d heard that one of those early translators — the Reverend Lewis Page Mercier — had bowdlerised any sentiments hostile towards or injurious to the dignity of Great Britain (such as might be uttered by Captain Nemo, an Indian nobleman who had dedicated himself to an anti-imperialist cause). I knew too that the original English translators tended to mangle the metric system measurements of Verne’s careful measurements and descriptions, either simply cutting the figures out, or changing the unit from metric to imperial but, oddly, keeping the numbers the same.

But I didn’t understand just how severe the issue was until I set about preparing an English edition of a Verne title myself. It came about because I was publishing a novel of my own called Splinter, a 21st-century and fairly postmodern riff upon one of Verne’s lesser-known titles Hector Servadac. My publishers decided to put out a special box set of Splinter and Hector Servadac together, and asked me to sort out copy for the latter. I thought it would be a simple matter of reprinting the original, usefully out-of-copyright 1877 English translation, and blithely said yes.

But when I checked the 1877 translation against the original my heart sank. It was garbage. On almost every page the English translator, whoever he, or she, was (their name is not recorded), collapsed Verne’s actual dialogue into a condensed summary, missed out sentences or whole paragraphs. She or he messed up the technical aspects of the book. She or he was evidently much more anti-Semitic than Verne, and tended to translate what were in the original fairly neutral phrases such as “…said Isaac Hakkabut” with idioms such as “…said the repulsive old Jew.” And at one point in the novel she or he simply omitted an entire chapter (number 30) — quite a long one, too — presumably because she or he wasn’t interested in, or couldn’t be bothered to, turn it into English.

He does recommend William Butcher’s recent Oxford World’s Classics translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — which, by the way, refers to the distance traveled while under the sea, not the depth.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

The Roman Arena

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Archaeologist Shelby Brown writes about The Roman Arena:

Gladiatorial duels provided the crowd with a direct opportunity to participate in life-and-death decisions. A gladiator who knew he was about to lose his duel would ask the munerarius to pass judgment on him and grant him missio — allow him to be “sent away” (missus) alive. A fighter who was still standing would raise his finger in the air, while one who was down would raise his arm or make some other gesture to signal defeat. A munerarius was expected to turn the matter over to the crowd, which expressed its verdict by yelling or by making the famous gesture generally assumed to be “thumbs down.” The art depicting gladiatorial combat illustrates that referees intervened between the fighters while the munerarius decided what to do. A gladiator who fought well enough to win his duels (or to lose but earn missio) was a good investment, since he knew how to please an audience and survived to fight another day. Under the system of missio, the time and money invested in training gladiators was not wasted after only one combat.

The audience demanded courage and respected a good combatant, whatever his social standing. An exhibition of skill or bravery was supposed to be uplifting (Pliny, Panegyric 33), and a gladiator who was not granted missio was expected to kneel with dignity to accept the death-blow. If he pleased the crowd and survived long enough, he could eventually win his freedom. Many gladiators whose chances for a decent life outside the arena were small, or who did not want to abandon excitement and fame, actually reenlisted when they had served their time. A parallel, although a less deadly one, can be drawn with boxing and now “ultimate fighting” to which retired fighters sometimes return. The numerous funerary monuments erected by family members for gladiators who died in the arena indicate that, in the long run, a voluntary gamble with one’s life did not pay. Surviving even ten combats was rare (see Edwards 2007, page 51, listed in the bibliography).

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Seeing the Heavens in Hi-Def

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Astronomers are Seeing the Heavens in Hi-Def, from earth, not space, with remarkably cheap equipment:

Can a $20,000 camera coupled to a 60-year-old telescope shoot sharper images than the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope? Absolutely, say astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology.
[...]
To create their system they made the most of an existing technology, adaptive optics, and enhanced it with a super-high-speed digital camera that’s capable of shooting 20 images every second, says Nicholas Law, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar who worked on the Lucky project.

Adaptive optics is a way of correcting the atmosphere’s distortion of light as it enters the telescope. A sensor measures the distortion and corrects most of it using a flexible mirror that shifts the light back into straight lines. Then the Lucky camera shoots in rapid-fire fashion, and astronomers select the images that capture moments when atmospheric distortion is minimal.

Posted in Science, Technology | No Comments »

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