We Built This City

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

The new Muppets soundtrack features We Built This City, the 1985 number-one hit by Starship — which was no longer Jefferson Starship by that point.

Blender magazine named it the worst of its “50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever” — and Rolling Stone readers voted it the worst song of the 1980s.

Hearing it again after 26 years, I have to ask, what’s the deal with the “Marconi plays the mamba” lyric? So, the (arguable) inventor of the radio plays… a venomous snake? Does it make that much more sense for Marconi to play “the” mambo?

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

The Economist on Seasteading

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

The Economist looks at seasteading and its legal hurdles:

Until seasteaders are ready to cut their ties with the land altogether, they will want to build their colonies not much more than 12 nautical miles (22km) offshore — the limit of countries’ territorial waters — otherwise travelling to and from the seastead will take too long. But the laws of the sea give countries powers to enforce some criminal laws up to 24 nautical miles out and to regulate some economic activities in a 200-mile “exclusive economic zone”. Ships are granted exemptions, but a seastead tethered to the seabed would not qualify.

Some countries (notably America) assert the right to extend their jurisdictions, in matters affecting their citizens, across the entire planet. And like any other seagoing structure, a seastead would be obliged to register with a “flag state”, to whose maritime laws it would be subject. Some flag states are lax about enforcement but if, say, America disapproved of the goings-on aboard a seastead, it could lean on such states to get tough — and offer enforcement on their behalf. In the 1960s Britain’s government shut down pirate-radio ships not by sending the navy to attack them but by banning British suppliers and advertisers from doing business with them.

In all, the leaders of the seasteading movement concede that they will have to avoid getting into anything too provocative — drugs, pornography or money-laundering, for example. As for taxes, America already demands that its citizens pay income tax even when they are living abroad — and that would include living on a seastead. There is nothing to stop other countries following suit and indeed getting extraterritorial about other taxes too. Until seasteaders are able to bank their money with independent, ocean-going financial institutions, they may not be able to escape the taxman’s clutches.

The biggest “legal” hurdle would be maintaining sovereignty:

Linguists quip that a dialect is a language without an army and a navy to enforce its status. Theologians likewise say that a cult is simply a church that lacks political clout. Seasteads may end up as wannabe sovereign states without the means to defend their autonomy against land-based governments. The first ones to overcome the many technical challenges, raise the money to construct their vessels and set out for the open seas will be quite dependent on terrestrial authorities’ goodwill. But countries short of available land, or whose leaders are struggling to pass liberalising reforms against resistance from vested interests, may tolerate limited experiments in low-tax, rule-free self-government. So the seasteaders may be in with a chance.

Given the huge costs and risks involved, perhaps the ideal builders of seasteads will not be small groups of innovators like the Blueseed team, but giant engineering firms such as Mitsubishi, India’s Tata group or Samsung of South Korea. Indeed, as Mr Keenan notes, the most viable political model for a seastead may not be a libertarian democracy but an enlightened corporate dictatorship.

Even an economically savvy publication equates libertarianism with democracy and corporate landlordship with dictatorship.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Nest Learning Thermostat

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

David Pogue reviews the Nest Learning Thermostat, which brings the iPhone aesthetic to HVAC:

Don’t snicker. This isn’t trivial. According to Nest, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats in this country alone; 10 million more are bought each year.

Half of your home’s energy is controlled by this ugly, beige tool. Most people never even bother to program their programmable thermostats. As a result, their houses actually use more energy than homes without them. Two years ago, the federal government eliminated the entire programmable thermostat category from its Energy Star program.

As the kind of rara avis who installed and programmed his own programmable thermostat — let’s not bring up the fuse I blew on the heater’s circuit board — I wasn’t sure that the $250 learning thermostat would have much to offer me, but, Pogue says, it introduces four radical changes:

RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s nearby.

Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after all, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most beautiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.

RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s online. It can download software updates. You can program it on a Web site.

You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and change it — to warm up the house before you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vacation-home owners all over the world are wiping drool off their keyboards.)

RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for work, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)

Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidity were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.

RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $250 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in less than two years.

The mere act of having a correctly programmed thermostat is the big one, of course. Why should you waste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at work all day?

But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer other goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains two proximity sensors (near and far), which detect whether anybody is actually in a room. If the sensors decide that nobody’s home, they let the temperature drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.

This feature is useless, of course, if your thermostat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet or behind an open door. But often I’ll return from a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the heat, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest!

Nest says that turning down your thermostat by even a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy. To that end, it offers a little motivational logo: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a positive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effective than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater.

The wi-fi sounds great, but what I really need is a better way to send heat right where I need it — and without drying out the air to lip-cracking, nose-bleeding extremes.

Posted in Business, Technology | 5 Comments »

Decision Quicksand

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Two marketing professors were able to demonstrate that hard, unimportant tasks lead us into decision quicksand:

In the first experiment, 106 participants in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online labor market were presented with real-world choices about which task they’d take on, for pay. They could either change their decision later, or not (making it “important” or “unimportant”). And the choice either involved a choice between two jobs, in which one was clearly more pleasant for the money involved, or among four jobs, with various plusses and minuses (making it “difficult” or “easy”).

The Mechanical Turkers, as they’re known, spent roughly the same amount of time making the easy decisions, regardless of whether they were important or unimportant. (After all, they were easy decisions!) They spent a little longer on the hard, important decisions, though the difference wasn’t statistically significant. But they spent much more time on the hard, unimportant decisions — in fact, double the time they spent on the easy, unimportant decisions. Afterwards, these people also reported themselves less happy about the process.

The researchers basically repeated the experiment using decisions about hypothetical airline flights and course selections, finding the same result: Faced with complexity, and urgency, we can be decisive. Faced with complexity, and no urgency, we waste our time. Researchers referred to the tendency as “decision quicksand.”

In the context of unimportant-but-challenging decisions, people were more inclined to seek out fresh sources of information, dragging out the decision. When they were misled into thinking that they’d spent more time on an unimportant decision than they actually had — a stopwatch was sped up — they chose to spend even more time, effectively doubling down on their time investment.

Posted in Business, Science | 4 Comments »

Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem is an odd name for educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s discovery, first reported in 1984, that one-to-one tutoring isn’t just a little bit better than conventional classroom teaching:

Bloom found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods — that is, “the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class”. Additionally, the variation of the students’ achievement changed: “about 90% of the tutored students… attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%” of the control class.

The two-sigma part refers to average performance of ordinary students going up by two standard deviations when they received one-to-one tutoring and worked on material until they mastered it, and the problem part refers to the fact that such tutoring doesn’t come cheap.

My first reaction is surprise at the degree of the effect, but it should be obvious that advancing 30 students in lock-step means that many will be bored, a few will be in the sweet spot, and many will fall further and further behind, as the material builds on previous material they never learned.

So, my conclusion would be that conventional classroom teaching is largely a waste of time — but that’s not where educational experts place their emphasis:

Although much recent attention has focused on gaps in the achievement of different groups of students, the problem has been with us for decades. This paper presents the problem as one of reducing variation in students’ achievement, and reviews the work of renowned educator Benjamin Bloom on this problem. Bloom argued that to reduce variation in students’ achievement and to have all students learn well, we must increase variation in instructional approaches and learning time.

I suppose they see it as Bloom’s Paradox.

In his original paper, Bloom notes that a full-size classroom can get one-sigma results by switching to mastery learning, where students are tested not just for a final grade on a unit but to uncover where they need to do further corrective work, so they keep at it until they get it right.

It is odd, when you think about it, that we give students As, Bs, and Cs, and then advance them all to the next course, when they really should study the material until they earn a solid A before moving on — unless the goal of education isn’t conveying information but ranking students.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments »

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