Frankly Fundamentalist

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Bryan Caplan notes that Barney Frank gave another example of what he calls democratic fundamentalism:

If you don’t want politics in this process, you probably shouldn’t be handing it over to 535 politicians. That’s democracy.

The first sentence, of course, is rhetorical: Don’t hand things over to 535 politicians?! Ridiculous!

The second sentence is where the fundamentalism shines through: So what if we paid $100B in pork/bribes to pass this bailout? Since we did it democratically, you have no business criticizing us.

Notice: If someone said, “So the economy’s tanking. That’s capitalism,” everyone would assume the speaker wanted to limit capitalism. But when someone says, “That’s democracy,” we assume the speaker wants to end the conversation. Democracy is truly the sacred cow of the modern world.

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Morning Commentary

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Arnold Kling offers his Morning Commentary on last night’s debates:

The debate was truly awful. The financial crisis was caused by greed (McCain) and deregulation (Obama). We need energy independence. Our priority is to do everything at once (McCain). We will cut spending by spending more (Obama). We can create jobs.

Let me ignore the rest, and focus on jobs. We can create jobs by getting rid of computers and going back to carbon paper for communication and paper and pencil for arithmetic. We can create jobs by getting rid of electric motors and going back to human power to run factories. As long as wants are unlimited, you don’t need to create jobs.

If the candidates were out to correct economic ignorance instead of pandering to it, the debate would not resemble last night’s in any way. There was no winner. Only losers.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Deafening Silence

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Robin Hanson notes that a devastating argument against a status quo policy can be met by complete silence and disinterest — like the deafening silence that greets this argument from Dan Klein:

Counterparts to the FDA function in other countries. The FDA could adopt a standing policy that drugs permitted in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, etc. automatically become permitted in the US. Why doesn’t the FDA adopt such a policy? Is it because a drug that is safe and effective in Australia, Canada, or France may not be safe and effective in the United States?

Now he points to more deafening silence in response to a review of medical licensing:

By almost all accounts, the quality of services consumers get from non-physician clinicians is at least on par with what they would get from a physician performing the same services. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies compare outcomes in situations where patients are treated by a physician, a physician assistant, or an advanced practice nurse. Outcomes appear similar [15] – an important factor, considering that non-physician clinicians can provide many services at a much lower cost. …

A review of more than 50 studies by the American Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education found that the peer reviewed studies “almost uniformly conclude that … a non-physician clinician … can provide an acceptable level of care.” The Council did note that some observers find serious flaws in the literature, including small samples, lack of control subjects, and failure to control for differences in the severity of illness treated by physicians and non-physician clinicians. Nevertheless, physician groups are unable to point to studies showing worse health outcomes with mid-level clinicians.

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For Air Traffic Trainees, Games With a Serious Purpose

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Nearly two-thirds of the Federal Aviation Administration’s 15,000 current air traffic controllers will have retired by 2017. The mandatory retirement age is 56, and controllers were hired by the thousands in the early ’80s after President Ronald Reagan fired the previous controllers for going on strike.

Thus, a whole bunch of trainees need to get up to speed, in an industry that hasn’t needed to train many new employees for decades. To meet this challenge, the FAA is turning to games with a serious purpose — what one instructor has dubbed “a big Xbox”:

Officials say they are hoping that the use of the simulators will cut training time 20 percent to 60 percent. Training costs average $74,000 a controller but vary widely, being higher for the busiest, most complex airports.

The agency has used simulators for radar training for years, but it recently began installing simulators for control towers. O’Hare International Airport in Chicago has one, and others will be scattered around the country.

At the academy, six simulators run about 18 hours a day, but the F.A.A. also continues to use its old training method, built around a plywood airport model on a table in the middle of a classroom.

Trainees simulate flights by carrying model planes around the room and following instructions from a controller. Masking tape on the floor, marked with handwritten numbers, represent miles from the end of the runway.
[...]
The screening process for candidates has gone high-tech, too. In the 1990s the F.A.A. developed a six-hour computerized aptitude test that it refines from time to time. Recruits must answer geometry questions and solve math problems in their heads — for example, if a plane travels a certain number of miles in 90 minutes, what is its groundspeed, in miles per hour?

Then come game-like tests, designed by psychologists. In one, a bit like Tetris or Frogger, three parallel belts, running at different speeds, drop colored letters toward the bottom of the screen. The test-taker must try to grab each letter before it drops, and put it in a bin of the appropriate color. The player also has to drag the bins into place, and when the supply runs low, order more bins.

The hard part comes when the screen disappears and the computer asks questions like: How many bins were in use? How full were they? What letters were still on the belts?

Scoring well on the test is supposed to reveal the qualities that make a good air traffic controller, including the ability to work under pressure and maintain “situational awareness.”

Another game simulates actual air traffic. A screen shows a box that holds two airports, each with a single runway, useable in a single direction. The box also has four exits. Planes appear randomly, each bound for an airport or an exit.

The controller must assign the planes a speed, an altitude and a heading. The planes are allowed to exit only at high altitude, and to land only from low altitude and low speed.

When the game ends, the computer calculates how long the planes flew compared to a theoretical minimum, how many made it through the correct gates, how many crashed into the walls at the edges of the box and how many were directed too close to one another.

The test is intended to measure short-term and long-term memory, thinking ahead, multitasking, flexibility, tolerance for interruptions, and composure.

Academy students are also given a hyperactive version of Pac-Man to play in their spare time. The idea is to keep students’ skills sharp, instructors say, and hone their ability to watch several targets at a time.

Posted in Education, Games, Technology | No Comments »

Desert Frog vs. Turkey

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

A fellow going by the handle of “DesertFrog” recently decided to research the lethality of the “lowly” .22 against a frozen turkey wrapped in three layers of clothing — and he was quite surprised by just how accurate and lethal it turned out to be:











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The Afghan War Is for the Future of Pakistan, India and the U.S.

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Robert Kaplan believes that the Afghan war is for the future of Pakistan, India and the U.S.:

Pakistan’s future may hinge on the degree to which the United States can work with the Pakistani military to keep the Taliban rebellion from expanding not only throughout Afghanistan, but into Pakistan’s own cities as well.

Paradoxically, that will mean making deals with some Taliban groups against others. For the Taliban are not a monolithic organization, but bands of ornery Pashtun backwoodsmen who have been cut out of the power base in Afghanistan by an increasingly corrupt and ineffectual government in Kabul. They are not Al Qaeda: they lack a well-defined worldview and some are susceptible to political entreaties. But if our drone air strikes are not accompanied by nation-building steps like constructing roads and water wells, we will fail and Pakistan will be further destabilized.

A failure in Afghanistan that destabilized Pakistan would do India no favors. Indeed, Pakistan would not go quietly into history. Sindhi and Baluchi separatists talk openly of an alliance with India if Pakistan unravels. But India, while its intelligence services now and then stoke Baluchi separatism, is terrified of such a development.

India’s gravest problem — the one that has bedeviled its rise to great power status and with which its army is obsessed — is the fact that it shares long borders with dysfunctional states like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The more responsible Indian nationalists see their country’s expansion not in terms of hard conquest, but in terms of soft economic envelopment of its neighbors. And an American failure in Afghanistan would set in motion a string of consequences that threaten such a benign vision.

In the end, victory in Afghanistan can be defined by achieving the kind of security there that existed in the 1960s, when King Zahir Shah controlled the major cities and the roads connecting them, and a relative peace reigned. Even under a weak central government, Afghanistan could finally achieve economic salvation: the construction of a web of energy pipelines that have been envisioned for years connecting Central Asia with the Indian Ocean. These might run, for example, from the natural gas fields of Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan and into the dense population zones of Pakistan and India, with terminals at ports like Gwadar in Pakistani Baluchistan and Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat.

In other words, in Afghanistan we are not simply trying to save a country, but to give a whole region a new kind of prosperity and stability, united rather than divided by energy needs, that would be implicitly pro-American.

Posted in Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

Giving the Watchmen Motion

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

A new Watchmen movie is coming out, but that’s not the only new version of the story audiences can expect. Dave Gibbons, the original artist, discusses giving the Watchmen motion in what’s called a motion comic:

One of the attractions for me of having Watchmen made into the first Motion Comic was just that — it was breaking new ground. It was pretty good candidate for Motion Comics as the line style was very clear as I had drawn it years ago and therefore very easy to animate. John Higgins used a very flat, interesting color palate which made the technical aspect of animating easy. Also the story is a complete story — you know a beginning, middle and an end. The person who happens upon the Watchmen Motion Comics does not need to have any previous knowledge of continuity. So I suppose it’s another way to look at the material.

When I first looked at the samples of the Motion Comics, I thought they were quite well done but there are a few things that need tweaking, some things and that could be improved quite easily. One of the problems with the Watchmen material is that I’m so familiar with it and it’s hard to get an unbiased view on it. So I showed it to some friends and family who are in the business of games and animation. Of course we discussed the technicalities of it, but everyone remarked how well it was done. The “civilians” that I showed it to, particularly my two teenage stepdaughters, just thought it was great. They thought it was so exciting. They wanted to learn more and see what happened next in the story. So I think that really convinced me that this was a way of getting the material out to people who might not be aware of the comic, who might not pick up the comic and get some great entertainment value out of it.

Perhaps this will drive people to the original graphic novel.

Posted in Alan Moore, Media | No Comments »

The Body as Bacterial Landlord

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Robert Lee Hotz looks at The Body as Bacterial Landlord:

When scientists discovered that bacteria, not stress, caused most stomach ulcers, the insight overturned a century of medical dogma, transformed clinical practice and garnered a 2005 Nobel Prize for the two researchers who made the connection so many others had missed. After people adopted antibiotics to treat gastric distress, though, microbiologist Martin Blaser and his colleagues at New York University began to document an odd medical trend.

Ulcers did drop dramatically, as expected. So did the incidence of stomach cancer. As the bacteria, called Helicobacter pylori, virtually disappeared among children, however, cases of asthma tripled. So did rates of hay fever and allergies, such as eczema. Among adults, gastric reflux disease became more common, as did some forms of esophageal cancer, researchers noted.
[...]
Until recently, half of humanity harbored these H. pylori stomach bacteria, according to a 2002 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Indeed, we appear to have evolved together. Among those born in the U.S. during the 1990s, however, only 5% or so still carry these microbes, largely due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.

After analyzing health records of 7,412 people collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, Dr. Blaser and NYU epidemiologist Yu Chen reported this summer in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that children between three and 13 years old who tested positive for H. pylori bacteria were 59% less likely to have asthma. They also were 40% to 60% less likely to have hay fever or rashes.

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Under Pressure

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Under Pressure describes the upbringing of a pair of golf prodigies:

Mr. Martin, who played soccer and tennis in high school, in addition to ping pong, says he wished he’d concentrated on a single sport growing up. Then he might have had a chance to play on a team in college at the University of North Carolina. When he became a parent, he wanted to see how good his children could become if they focused on a single sport and had top instruction.

When Zach was a toddler, his father hired a baseball coach at nearby Barton College to teach him the fundamentals of hitting and throwing. He paid women on the Barton College soccer team $20 an hour for kicking and dribbling lessons, turning the kids into top players on their travel and recreational league teams.

At 5, Zach attended tennis camp at North Carolina State University. The next year, when the boys were 4 and 6, Mr. Martin signed them up for weekly golf lessons with a friend who was an assistant pro at a local club. Both exhibited decent hand-eye coordination. Josh had that sweet, natural pendulum stroke.

With regular practice and lessons, their games improved, as did their results in local tournaments their father signed them up for. By the summer of 2003, both were state champions and top 10 finishers at the U.S. Kids World Championship in Virginia. “That’s when I said, ‘It’s on,’” Mr. Martin says.

The Martin boys’ baseball, soccer and tennis careers were officially over. “I was just excited we weren’t going to have to shuttle them around to all these different sports and practices anymore,” Mrs. Martin says. “We were getting pretty stressed.”

Zach Martin says he misses other sports, especially the camaraderie his friends enjoy in team sports. “I do love golf, though,” he adds. “Really, I do.”

Golf long ago ceased being a game in the Martin family. It is a way of life that sucks up nearly every penny of disposable income. Most weekends are spent traveling to tournaments or to other courses, perhaps in the Appalachians or down at Myrtle Beach, that expose the boys to new challenges. The Martins drive the carts or carry the clubs while the kids play.

Three years ago, the Martins decided to sell their four-bedroom home in Wilson and move two hours east to a two-bedroom, $289,000 townhouse in Pinehurst, a golf Mecca with thousands of retirees, towering pine trees and eight sprawling courses, including the legendary Pinehurst No. 2, host of the men’s 1999 U.S. Open Championship. Pinehurst offered proximity to a variety of courses and the best coaching available.
[...]
On a series of Excel spread sheets Mr. Martin keeps statistics on nearly every competitive round his children have played in the past five years. After the boys drop their final putts, the family goes out to lunch and the boys spend several minutes replaying each hole in their minds, writing down the number of fairways and greens hit, sand shots, saves and putts; or in other words, every calculation a pro golfer keeps.

Mr. Martin then processes the data so, for instance, he can show Zach he hit the fairway on just 70% of his drives this summer compared with 78% during his winter play, but his putts per round dropped from 31.6 to 30.2 for an average of 1.87 putts per hole compared with 1.93.
[...]
The boys play as many as five rounds each week. Most days they arrive home from school, wolf down a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and head out to the course. During the summer, they tee off for 18 holes at 7 a.m. nearly every day they are not at a tournament. They rest during the afternoon, then go back out at 5 p.m. and play until dusk.

The devotion comes with a steep price. The Martins paid $15,000 to join Pinehurst, and nearly $5,000 a year for their membership. Cart fees are $18 each time the boys play. Lessons with Pinehurst pro Eric Alpenfels, rated one of the country’s top 50 teachers by Golf Digest, cost another $2,500 annually.

The boys play 25 to 30 tournaments each year with entry fees that range from $100-$300 for each player. A five-day trip to the Callaway World Junior Championships near San Diego can cost more than $3,000 if they can’t use frequent flier miles. Gas for their minivan for a trip down and back to the two tournaments in Florida can run another $1,200. The boys’ custom clubs cost about $3,000 for each set and have to be changed every other year.

Posted in Fitness | No Comments »

Geek ABCs

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

I must admit, I grokked far too many of Jared von Hindman’s Geek ABCs.

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Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin:

Russian state-controlled media already have shown the powerful prime minister at the wheel of massive racing truck, shirtless on a fishing excursion, and tracking a tiger through the Siberian forest — just a few of the he-man presentations designed to boost his public image.

On Tuesday, he presented an instructional judo DVD that bears his name and shows him throwing an opponent to the mat.

“Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin” is the product of collaboration between Putin — a black belt — and other judo enthusiasts, including former World and Olympic judo champion Yasuhiro Yamashita. It apparently was privately made and intended mainly for Russians studying judo.

Early Tuesday morning, minutes into his 56th birthday, Putin talked about the video at a presentation before journalists and other guests at a state-owned venue. Putin said the video’s title was little more than an “advertising trick.” Anyone who watches it “will be learning not from your humble servant but from real geniuses” of the martial art, he said.

Posted in Martial Arts, Policy | No Comments »

ADHD drugs cut risk of drug abuse, smoking

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

According to a recent study, ADHD drugs cut the risk of drug abuse and smoking in teenage girls:

Wilens and colleagues studied 140 girls with ADHD aged 6 to 18 — 94 percent of whom were taking stimulant medication — and 120 girls without ADHD. The girls periodically had psychiatric evaluations over five years.

The researchers wanted to see if treating girls with ADHD might increase the risk of smoking and substance abuse. Instead, it lowered the risk.

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Water means life

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

NPR recently played a recording from an old (1974) BBC transcript to be used in wake of nuclear attack):

This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.

Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes you could be exposing yourselves to greater danger.

If you leave, you may find yourself without food, without water, without accommodation and without protection. Radioactive fall-out, which follows a nuclear explosion, is many times more dangerous if you are directly exposed to it in the open. Roofs and walls offer substantial protection. The safest place is indoors.

Make sure gas and other fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are
extinguished. If mains water is available, this can be used for fire-fighting. You should also refill all your containers for drinking water after the fires have been put out, because the mains water supply may not be available for very long.

Water must not be used for flushing lavatories: until you are told that
lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made. Use your water only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. Water means life. Don’t waste it.

Make your food stocks last: ration your supply, because it may have to last for 14 days or more. If you have fresh food in the house, use this first to avoid wasting it: food in tins will keep.

If you live in an area where a fall-out warning has been given, stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out. When the immediate danger has passed the sirens will sound a steady note. The “all clear” message will also be given on this wavelength. If you leave the fall-out room to go to the lavatory or replenish food or water supplies, do not remain outside the room for a minute longer than is necessary.

Do not, in any circumstances, go outside the house. Radioactive fall-out can kill. You cannot see it or feel it, but it is there. If you go outside, you will bring danger to your family and you may die. Stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out or you
hear the “all clear” on the sirens.

Here are the main points again:

Stay in your own homes, and if you live in an area where a fall-out warning has been given stay in your fall-out room, until you are told it is safe to come out. The message that the immediate danger has passed will be given by the sirens and repeated on this wavelength. Make sure that the gas and all fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished.

Water must be rationed, and used only for essential drinking and cooking
purposes. It must not be used for flushing lavatories. Ration your food supply: it may have to last for 14 days or more.

We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours’ time. Stay tuned to this
wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries until we come on the air again. That is the end of this broadcast.

Harry Shearer reads the transcript aloud, not in the style of Kent Brockman, but in the style of Walter Cronkite.

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Indie Video Games Come of Age

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Christopher Lawton notes — “from the underground,” which is on odd place for a Wall Street Journal writer to be — that “indie” video games are coming of age:

“Chronotron” made its debut on Kongregate’s site in May and has since amassed more than one million game plays. In return, Kongregate gave Mr. Rheaume 50% of the advertising revenue it got from the ads that ran alongside the game. So far he’s made more than $1,000 from the advertising. “It’s been surprising,” says Mr. Rheaume of his success on Kongregate thus far.

I’m not sure that $1,000 over the course of five months is particularly impressive, but it was an amateur effort by one hobbyist — and the market as a whole is quite large:

Overall, revenue for the casual-gaming market — including downloads, subscription fees and advertising sales — reached roughly $1 billion last year, according to Parks Associates, a market-research firm. Michael Cai, an analyst with Parks, says there are more than 150 million Internet users in the U.S., and the majority of them play some kind of casual game.
[...]
Among the companies reaching out to smaller developers is Kongregate. Before, the San Francisco startup shared advertising revenue with its developers. But starting this month, the company will also give developers up to 80% of the revenue that’s generated when gamers purchase premium features.
[...]
Big gaming companies such as Microsoft Corp. and EA are also connecting with small game developers. In July, Microsoft began testing a service on Xbox Live — its online gaming and entertainment service — that allows independent developers to distribute games, set their download price and share in 70% of the revenue from premium fees. Microsoft also released XNA Game Studio, an easy-to-use software tool that lets the masses develop unique games. The software can be downloaded free online, but developers would have to pony up $99 a year in order to submit games to Xbox Live.

Posted in Business, Games | No Comments »

When Stocks Tank, Some Investors Stampede to Alpacas and Turn to Drink

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Jennifer Levitz notes that when stocks tank, some investors atampede to alpacas and turn to drink, “investing” in bottles of champagne, parking spaces in major cities, condos in Peru or Croatia, cypress farms in Costa Rica, odd farm animals like alpacas and emus, and bags of pre-1965 U.S dimes and quarters, which are 90% silver and in limited supply.

I found this bit slightly disingenuous:

Gold coins also are in great demand. Last week, the mint suspended sales of American Buffalo 24-karat gold coins because it can’t keep up with soaring sales. Last month, a record 14,000 bidders — 17% more than the previous high — turned out for a coin-and-currency auction in Long Beach, Calif., that generated $35 million in sales.

A real business does not suspend sales when it can’t keep up with demand. You’d think the Wall Street Journal would comment on that.

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