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July 31, 2007
One more on the economics of children
What do you expect about people with huge families? Not culture, nor religion, but what would you say about how much money they have, how healthy they are, how good are their genes? Families cost money. Convincing your partner to invest even more on an extra child on the margin requires that you can afford it and that you think doing so is worthwhile. So what do you make of a family with 16 kids? Would you predict that they would be attractive, healthy, and financially successful? Think about how the fictional world of Big Love works and I think you'll agree.
Digg tipped me off to an old story about a family with 16 kids. The source was an article by a SF Gate Columnist back in 2005. I noticed several things in the article (despite the nasty and condescending tone) that are of interest to the economist. First, notice that woman is pretty, certainly above average appearance. This is of no surprise because "We can state with varying degrees of certainty that many physical characteristics that men and women find attractive serve as cues to “good genes” and/or high fertility in the other sex". This lady (Mrs. Duggar) is a classic example of being pretty as a costly signal that you are fertile. Jim Bob Duggar, the father is also a good looking guy, and on top of it is a successful (building his 7000 sf house for his family) real estate seller and former state representative, showing all the classic traits of an alpha male in leadership and financial success (he even had a 100 grand to spend on his own campaign). I couldn't get the video to play, but I wonder if he is tall and has a deep voice too.
Any other predictions?
How about the sexuality of Jackson, the 10th son. With each additional elder brother increasing a boy's chance of being gay by about 33%, we might guess that he's about 4 times as likely to be gay as as a first born son. If you buy that biology matters in sexuality.
Oh, and here is what they look like:
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:48 PM | Comments (0)
More on the economics of babies
In Are children a public good?, the economist blog discusses that subject we last visited in Does every futurist eventually become a eugenicist?. It is an interesting if incomplete discussion. The relevant matter isn't if they are public goods, because they literally aren't. Ever since at least the judgment of Solomon, we've know that the two classic tests of a public good, rivalry and excludability are both served by children. No, the more relevant question is "are the net sum of the externalities generated by having children positive, negative, or close to zero?" That would suggest what, if any remedy would be appropriate.
The answer isn't clear. The private (out of pocket) cost of having kids is between 125k and 250k for most Americans, and of course that is after tax income (so add 25% for income earned that is spent on kids). What does the state spend on children? Evidence from 5 distressed American cities (What Does Government Spend on Children? Evidence from Five Cities) says it is about 11,000 a year. That seems high, but recall that spending per public school student in NYC is about 10k alone, and it seems like plausible, but high estimate. Which suggests that if you average over families of various incomes and factor in the taxes, private spending is already pretty close to public spending. Without a clear financial answer we are left weighing intangibles. We have to consider the effects on social capital, the utility lost and gained by having children and being near them, the value of the capital sunk into schools that could be repurposed, the economic consequences of a world without children. In the last, I mean not just immediately, which is somewhat captured above, but what happens to the entire economic system when there isn't anyone to buy assets from you as you retire, or care for you when you are old and brittle. Of course, you can devote resources to robots and the like, but that's a cost you have to count too. To which I throw up my hands at an attempt to account for such intangibles. I would say that anyone who believes that there is a clear and obvious answer hasn't thought hard enough about this.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)
All hell breaks lose?
There is a scientific consensus that minimum wage laws our not effective. That doesn't mean that we are dead certain and it doesn't mean it is established with the same level of rigor that we know the gravitational relationship between objects. Nevertheless, we have parsimonious theories well supported by empirical evidence to suggest that they do not work, ones that are widely believed by practicing labor economists:
Over 73 percent of AEA labor economists believe that a significant increase will lead to employment losses and 68 percent think these employment losses fall disproportionately on the least skilled Only 6
percent feel that minimum wage hikes are an efficient way to alleviate poverty
New Survey: Majority of Labor Economists Believe Minimum Wage Hikes Cause Unemployment
Nevertheless, people love them. Perhaps not entirely without reason. Marshall Jevons reports a few other benefits from an OECD report. There was only one that rung at all true with me, that "Wage floors dissuade employers from pocketing tax concessions aimed at improving take-home pay of low-wage workers or passing on any payroll taxes by lowering wages."
With the pending huge minimum wage increase in Northern Marianas and American Samoa, we'll likely see one more example of how a big minimum wage (relative to prevailing wages) has serious economic consequences.
PS
I was surprised that only 21 of the 30 OECD countries had minimum wage laws. Would you be surprised to learn that that list of countries without minimum wage laws includes Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
Cave men with Blankets?
Dr. BlueEyedGirl (self described "blanket lover") asked last night "how ancient is the human desire to sleep covered by blankets?" Because animal skins require treatment (tanning) to last a long time, my argument was that required some modicum of human society, placing it at say the paleolithic era, though I think I said stone age. Checking Wikipedia this morning I discovered that tanning dates to about 2500 BCE, which is much later. "Weaving leaves" was her theory of early blanket-hood, and flax weaving dates to 3600 BCE. That said, evidence of clothing dates from 30,000 BCE, at least if you can infer that from the existence of sewing needles, which is solidly within the time period we discussed. So blankets probably date from around the same time, in the form of "...fur, leather, leaves or grass, draped, wrapped or tied about the body for protection from the elements".
But I was reading something else this morning that made me think that it was far more ancient that I had supposed. Consider the following quote from the article Swingers from a recent issue of The New Yorker:
Bonobos sleep on their backs--“maybe holding to a branch with just one foot, and the rest of the body looking very relaxed,” Hohmann had said, adding that “nest-building is the only thing that sets great apes aside from all other primates." (He speculates that the REM-rich sleep that nests allow may have contributed to the evolution of big brains.)
That puts the idea of taking pleasure in snugging up with a safe and warm place to sleep and having an active desire to construct a habitat to do the same, is something that all great apes share. That would make it something like 16 million years old.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
Have any sympathy for a terrorist with an Irish accent?
Regarding the terrorist activity and the British government's response in northern Ireland:
"More than 3,600 people, including around 2,000 civilians and 1,000 members of the security forces, were killed over the following three decades. Paramilitary groups were responsible for over 3,000 deaths while security forces killed around 300."
Wow.
British Army Stands Down in Northern Ireland
P.S.
Interesting to note that the security forces in Northern Ireland are mostly protestant, but here in the US, they are historically mostly Catholic, though both are Protestant majority (plurality at least) countries.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:09 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2007
Show don't tell
Debates may always rage about whether the rise of emoticons is better justified as a rise of intellectual laziness or a a desire for clarity and speed, but they are obviously well established online. In the article, Just Between You and Me, the NY Times explores the history of those little smiley and frown icons.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
It can't rain all the time
Two scholars (Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of Brookings ) and critics of the implementation of the war in Iraq now believe, after a visit to Iraq to see the new efforts of the surge, that the war is going much better and in a winnable direction. They discuss why in their Op=Ed in the NY Times, A War We Just Might Win.
This strikes me as bad for the Democrats. If a consensus is forming that the surge is working, that the Iraq war is being won just as the Democrats decide to pull out the stops to it shut down, then they will once again look like they don't understand national security. Sublime Bloviations echoes a similar thought.
If it is as McQ says, that " the huge difference a strong commander can make, and despite the nonsensical and baseless mutterings of Harry Reid concerning Petraeus' competence and veracity, he has made a huge difference in the fight in Iraq", then maybe we'll see a Petraeus in '12 candidate if the war is won.
Kyle E. Moore points out claims that these two analysts who have been cheering this war on for 4 years (they also want to exclude the two from the next Democratic presidential administration) and that Christian Science Monitor says that "...Iraq's leadership has failed to take advantage of some of the breathing room offered by the US-led surge against insurgents and militants." and that there is "paralysis to governmental institutions and has left parliament unable to make headway on 18 benchmarks Washington is using to measure progress in Iraq, including legislation on oil revenue sharing and reforming security forces."
TigerHawk point out that these guys have solid Democratic credentials including a stint on Clinton's National Security Advisor's staff. Are all those positions political? I don't know. He also shows strong evidence that while the two did favor the war in the first place, that they've been critical since at least mid 2005 (O'Hanlon, Pollack). He also rightly points out "that victory in the war against violent Islamism requires that the Muslim world polarize." and that this successful strategy does just that.
The Belmont Club echoes similar themes, but goes into greater analysis of the role of Al-Queda.
I hope if we stay we win and if we leave without winning that the Iraqis don't loose. I was beginning to lose hope that the former was possible and the latter preventable. This was a pleasant thing to wake up to on a Monday morning -- hope.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:27 AM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2007
How much apartment can I afford?
In Every Penny Counts, another generation of New Yorkers learns a lesson that I've figured out, but never seen in print. That if you scrimp and save (assuming your income is steady), you can afford a home that costs about 3.5 years gross salary.
On the other hand, if you live in NYC, love lattes, going drinking with your friends, and fancy weddings on your own dime, but you aren't in a hotshot career, then you get to rent.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:26 PM | Comments (0)
Internet Security quiz
McAfee SiteAdvisor Phishing Quiz
My results:
YOU ANSWERED 8 OF 10 QUESTIONS CORRECTLY
Rating: Safety Guru
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:51 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2007
Free radicals and communist mistakes
In Plumes and plumage, the economist reports that evidence from birds in the area of Chernobyl suggests that flashy feathers are not a arbitrary mating signal, that they are signs of true health and genetic fitness.
The underlying paper was Determinants of interspecific variation in population declines of birds after exposure to radiation at Chernobyl
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2007
Linguistic seigniorage
Seigniorage is the net revenue that accrues to the state from printing money. That is, when you print a $20 bill for 2 cents and then sell it to banks for the full price, the $19.98 is seigniorage. The economist in their article Linguistic follies: The economic consequences of the rise of English, points out their there is enormous economic rents associated with exporting a language as well. I like to call this profit "linguistic seigniorage", because it costs England very little to make an additional English speaker and though their are private benefits, England gets to keep much of the benefits from controlling much of the local supply of native speakers. Here are some details:
François Grin, a Swiss economist, argues that Britain enjoys hidden transfers from its neighbours worth billions of euros a year, thanks to the English language. He offers several reasons, starting with spending in Britain on language teaching in schools, which is proportionately lower than in France or Switzerland, say. To add insult to injury, Britain profits from teaching English to foreigners. “Elevating one language to a position of dominance is tantamount to giving a huge handout to the country or countries that use it as a native language,” he insists.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
Dying so that others may live
A major reason that the FDA exists is that people are concerned that if medicine is unregulated then people will take medicine that is dangerous or unproven. unfortunately, there is a class of people for whom contemporary licensed medicine is insufficient, it is a death sentance. So they are desperate to get access to the clinical trials which for now are pretty much the only mechanism of access to new drugs. But a bunch of people, mostly the dying and their families, who are fighting to try to get access to these drugs after they've been rejected from these trials. They call themselves the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, and they are hard at work suing the government to change the policy. My understanding is that they seek "terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients have a due process right to informed access to potential lifesaving investigational new drugs determined by the Food and Drug Administration to be sufficiently safe for expanding human trials, where there are no alternative government-approved treatment options."
In the great reason article I read about this subject, Dying for Lifesaving Drugs, I learned that the situation is a bit more complicated. Currently, despite improvements in statistical techniques and a streamlined regulatory process, the best and clearest way to demonstrate the efficacy of a new drug is a double blind trial in which half of a specially selected group of participants are given a placebo and the other half the new drug. But in the sorts of diseases that kill, which victimize the very sorts of folks for whom the Abigail Alliance is fighting it is hard to attract people into these studies. People know that they may receive no help if they participate. So if there is a clear mechanism for getting the drug outside the trial it may be impossible to run these studies. That would have serious reputations in drug development.
Reason says the following about this:
There is a serious argument to be made that the entire clinical trial system is antiquated, that it is time to stop counting piles of bodies and to start using more sophisticated measures of drug efficacy. Biomarkers, substances whose presence in the body indicates a particular disease state, could provide objective evidence on how a drug is working on a particular patient. As such measures improve, the need for placebos may lessen. "Clinical trials are very cumbersome," says Thomas Garvey, a gastroenterologist and former FDA supervisor who has designed thousands of clinical trials. "Although they are not the be all and end all. The science is evolving and getting better."A March 2005 editorial in The Wall Street Journal advocated scrapping placebo trials for cancer patients altogether, giving everyone access to the drugs, and using advanced statistical methods to measure patient progress versus the typical survival rate for a particular cancer. This is the kind of change the Abigail Alliance hopes for, but more incremental changes are already in play.
In an attempt to increase flexibility and reduce approval times, some pharmaceutical companies have begun to conduct what are known as "adaptive" trials. Standard trials are blinded: The findings remain secret from researchers until each phase of the trial is over, and they are conducted on general populations of patients with similar conditions. Even after a standard trial has ended, it can be difficult to know which patients within a population will respond most positively or suffer the most severe side effects from a particular drug.
Alternatively, adaptive trials allow researchers to analyze and respond to data as it comes in, personalizing treatments and assessing how patients with particular characteristics respond to particular dosages. Researchers can tweak the trial design as they move forward, perhaps dropping a method of treatment that proves unpromising or adding more of one type of patient that seems to be responding well. Trial flexibility may prompt shorter approval times and allow companies to sort good drugs from bad more efficiently. "It's a slightly less restrictive straitjacket," says Walker.
But the drug companies have every incentive to try to use these new statistical techniques alongside old ones to justify the safety and efficacy of their new drugs. So I must conclude that while they may be better than nothing, these alternative techniques are worse that the status-quo.
A solution which doesn't come up in the article is to give the right to the patients to take the drug but not a unlimited obligation of the pharmaceutical companies to provide it. That is, if no other treatment works and you are dying, then the drug company can sell you the drug if they want to under a regulatory environment that prevents the treatment from use as evidence for or against the drug and covers the drug companies from liability.
Sure I'd like to do away with the FDA, but maybe the above incremental reform would be a big step in the direction of freedom.
Reason points out that if the courts recognize this right of medical access, there will be serious implications:
If terminal cancer patients do have a constitutional right to lifesaving drugs, the limits of that right are hard to discern. What does it mean to be "terminally ill," after all, and where is the line between a lifesaving drug and a life-prolonging one? Could a suicidal cancer patient claim she has a constitutional right to marijuana in order to ease her pain? Does it make any sense to say a fundamental right hinges on the FDA's determination that a drug has passed Phase I testing? And if not, what does that say about the Controlled Substances Act, the Supreme Court's recent rulings on medical marijuana, and the FDA's role as medical gatekeeper?Although the Abigail Alliance has chosen not to assert a broader right of individual autonomy, the narrow right it claims seems to imply profound change to U.S. law. "Wouldn't the right you're asserting here also apply, then, to the right to therapeutic cloning, or to organ purchase?" Judge Brett Kavanaugh asked a few minutes into Ballenger's oral argument. "Don't we have to take into account the repercussions of what you're asking for here?"
This is a slippery slope, and it alarms supporters of the status quo. Once you argue that the government has no authority to deny Jennifer McNeillie access to cancer drugs, that she has a constitutional right to accept a certain level of risk, it becomes difficult to know where the agency's authority stops and her autonomy begins.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2007
How sad
"...the general results seem to depict statistically what many budget wonks in Washington have reported anecdotally for decades: over time, spending decisions of the Appropriations Committee are usually unrelated to the tax decisions of the Ways and Means Committee. "
From What really happens when you starve the beast
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:38 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2007
A new and improved belligerati
Welcome to the upgraded version of Belligerati. Upgrading was easy, but getting the new version to look as much as possible like the old version was rather tricky. I found the online resources available to help novice MT users like myself to be extensive and easy to follow, but the sheer number of items to tweak and customize made it take a few hours.
I hope you like it and I look forward to any suggestions you may have for its continued improvement.
..
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:56 PM | Comments (0)
A bit of shopping's past
In Why Woolworth Had to Die, American Heritage magazine discusses how expensive credit during the great depression led to the rise of the Woolworth discount store, and how the growth of the suburbs did it in. I was surprised to learn that the Woolwoth's store on 14th between 5th and University was the first store in the chain to have a lunch counter. I can only recall eating there once, a grilled cheese with french fries, it was good, but the other guests were scary and depressing.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
Formatting Issues
I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 and as you can see it messed with my style templates. I should be able to fix it over the next few days.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2007
Tragedy of the commons
In A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?, the NY times discusses the discovery of the Northern Darfur Megalake, an aquifer (underground lake) as large as Lake Erie in the conflict area of Darfur. The article points out that in part this conflict is driven by the limited carrying capacity of the land, and in part by external forces, so the increased availability of water may not be enough to prevent continued conflict.
How sad, to live in a place so miserable that more resources are a blessing, but a curse. Maybe now world leaders could raise the money to make a transformative peace. What would be really interesting is to treat this as a domestic terraforming project to make the wilderness green. Desertification is a reversible process with extra water and the money to plant trees. Why not raise the money to pay the people who live in the area Darfurians, Janjiweed, rebel groups, pretty much everyone, to extract water from the lake and put down soil retaining and shade planting trees and extracting the water they need (ones carefully chosen for tolerance to salinity and limited water usage). We know that unemployment makes young men more likely to use violence, so a giant make-work program with positive environmental effect could do some serious good. If you paid them a better wage then the violent groups offered, then invented a homesteading program where you allowed them to buy clear title to land, maybe we could get a permanent fix to the conflict there.
Unfortunately, what is more likely is that we will have an explosion of overuse of the newly discovered water, granting temporary reprieve, but eventually that water too will be overused, with too many people living on the land above it. Then the conflict will return, but with far more participants. Without a sense of the amount of water entering and leaving the aquifer, without a way to control efficient use (property rights or quotas), eventually we'll likely be back at a nasty, brutal desert conflict. Hopefully not.
The lake was found by a BU team, here is there press release:
"1,000 WELLS FOR DARFUR" INITIATIVE LAUNCHED
Dr. Farouk El-Baz, head of the BU Center for Remote Sensing which discovered the lake was the person quoted in all the articles. He CV shows he helped write over 600 articles. That's some career. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the academic paper associated with the new discovery or I'd have linked to that too.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2007
Not just of use for writing fantasy books
I love a nice, serious discussion of a ridiculous subject matter.
In Harry Potter: the economics, Megan McArdle (author of Asymmetrical Information over at janegalt.net) writes about magic in the Harry Potter series in a way that will be appreciated anyone who has thought long and hard about magic in role playing games or fantasy novels. In summary, if characters in our narratives aren't to be all powerful beings, then magic must be expensive, and it must be still more expensive on the margin. If the protagonists are to use magic then they must explain it a little, and there are a number of ways to do this, magic can consume us physically (say in the Bazil Broketail world), mentally (think Call of Cthulhu), through resources (Mana in the Rifts world), consequences of altering reality (Mage) or discipline and study (Jedi knights).
Her problem is that in the Harry Potter universe magic (at for least with the ability to do magic) is quiet easy. And easy magic, with its ability to violate conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics, should mean that wizards should run the world, and that material plenty should exist to the point of no scarcity. In fact, one wonders why the world would develop technology at all if there were a few wizards to make everything happen with a couple of words of psuedo-latin. But we don't have anything like that, and that inconsistency bothers her. Read the article (especially Harry, Shepperd, Klidre, and Monk), you'll like it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:12 PM | Comments (0)
Does every futurist eventually become a eugenicist?
Future Pundit, over at his new piece Do We Need More Babies Or Higher Producing Babies?, proposes utilizing new genetic analysis technology to "Restrict reproduction to allow only the creation of wealth creators." While he admits that it might "not become politically doable by Western countries (though the more pragmatic Chinese might pick up on it)". This follows on a discussion that Europe's demographics problem is seen as a problem of low birth rate but he sees it in fact as one of low density of highly productive workers. To fend off the outrage he expects to follow, he says "I do not recognize a basic right to reproduce. How can an act that creates huge external costs be a right? Second, eugenics is not an evil word. People practice eugenics on pets quite routinely. People practice human eugenics when they choose mates."
A few thoughts. One, one way to get a lot of these advantages on the margin is to subsidize families who agree to have additional children highly predisposed to productivity. Then you don't have to incite the state enforced eugenic outrage that his policy would engender. Two, I definitely don't by his externalities argument. The vast majority of the costs in externalities of raising a child are from polices voluntarily adapted by the government. Things like education, Medicaid, rent subsidies (title 9) and the like. The government simply cannot use privileges it gives its citizens (positive rights) as a justification for suppressing the negative rights of its citizens. Third, as a legal matter, it is a right. Skinner v. Oklahoma upheld a right to parenthood, and article 16.1 of the UN universal declaration of human rights says "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family". I agree that Eugenics doesn't have to be an evil word, but certainly as he uses it and as it is usually used, it is a statist one. Improvements the human condition often come from policies that have only modest impact on our material wealth, so I have great skepticism that genetically selecting for a class of genes that encourages wealth creation would be worth the price in freedom and diversity.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Survive a plane crash by choosing the right seat
"Survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin, based on all commercial jet crashes in the United States since 1971 where detailed seating charts were available". Via Popular Mechanics, Safest Seat on a Plane: PM Investigates How to Survive a Crash
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2007
But is he really doing better?
I was reading the article Obama’s Camp Cultivates Crop in Small Donors and learning about the metrics (beyond polls) by which nascent campaigns are measured.
In it, I learned that the Obama campaign was counting tickets and candidate souvenirs as donations to the campaign. Normally this would be just an accounting gimmick, as it superficially appears to give no additional revenue. However, it has juiced the amount of apparent money he has raised (generating additional press) and given him a large list of small donors that could turn into future donors.
This seems like a classic example of "what is measured moves", where something of little or no practical interest (the amount of money raised by the candidate from donations) serves as a proxy for the object of interest (the heath and potential of a campaign), and at first it serves as a good proxy. But eventually someone discovers that it is easier to move the proxy than it is the underlying fact, and so the connection breaks down. But, in something like a presidential campaign, maybe appearances are reality, maybe seeming to be successful long enough is all you need to win the nomination. Certainly, it is a kiss of death to seem as if you had no chance of winning the nomination.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:26 PM | Comments (0)
A waste of energy and money
I finally got an answer to something I'd wondered for some time, how much fossil fuel is required to make ethanol. A follow up was how does that energy compare with the amount of ethanol energy produced. The answer from David Pimentel:
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
Note however, that Michael Graboski disputes this finding on ethanol energy production.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)
A very strong prior
In A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization, John Tierney discusses the ultra-simple predictions of Dr. Gott of Princeton's Physics program. The question of interest is how long with something last. He then makes an assumption which seems weak at first but turns out to be humongous. He assumes "there is nothing special about the particular moment that you're observing this phenomenon".
So if something has existed for X units of time then the probability it will die (end, finish, whatever) in the next unit of time is 1 / (X+1) . Through an argument of mathematical symmetry, this suggests a 95 per cent likelihood, the future of a thing will be between 1/39 and 39 times as long as its past (2.5% on each side).
First, this is a neat parlor trick, because like a good con, once you agree to the premise you are in for the ride until the end. The problem is you are taking a datum, and enforcing a very power prior distribution on the parameter of interest. Saying that their is nothing special about today's observation is rarely true. For most events we'd like to make predictions about, there are other similar events, qualitative and quantitative data observed over time and distance, and theoretical and empirical reasons that they take a particular form. To ignore that is to discard information that not would allow you to make a more accurate prediction but also invalidates the nothing special assumption.
Second, you generate huge intervals around your life expectancy estimates, so one would be rather surprised if they happened to be wrong.
Third, is this technique falsifiable or disreputable? How many bad predictions would this have to make to teach us not to do it, as long as one can point out situations when it has worked?
Be careful making predictions when the only information you is a piddling single observation. Sure you can use a strong prior assumption about the distribution of the life expectancy for the thing you've been observing. However, since you have only one observation, all you are doing is blending your preconceptions with a single piece of evidence, and that's not going to be much different than going with your assumption in the first place.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2007
Harry Potter and the leaky publishing house
As many of you may already know, a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has leaked onto the internet. Cory Doctorow, in a posting over at Boing Boing suggests that the publisher's strategy of not releasing a version of HPatDH in an electronic version to fight piracy is a failure. I'm not so sure. This edition is assembled from photographs from someone with warehouse access. It is by most accounts lousy. Contrast that with a flawless, high-resolution pdf of the entire book. The former is of interest to cheapskates and those with a high value to finding out what happened early. The later might be a genuine substitute for the actual book. Given that the average ebook is only 800k, even a huge book like the last of the Potter series would only be a few megabytes whereas the photographed copy which is 46 megabytes. A pirated ebook would fit in most email-boxes, and many would find it preferable to then the $18 to 34 required to buy the printed copy.
So to be clear, the relevant concern is the marginal influence on the publisher's profits from releasing the ebook, not solely whether someone else is going to release an ebook anyway. Experiences like this are going to do the opposite of what Doctorow suggests that they will. Publishers have been and will continue to be reluctant to jump into the ebook field because printed books remain far harder to pirate than digital ones.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:49 PM | Comments (1)
July 16, 2007
Not all jobs in the army are equally dangerous
Women make up about 15% of the US army, and can serve in 90% of military occupations, yet of the 3,500 U.S. service members who have died in the war in Iraq, fewer than 80 women. If the gender percentages of US forces in Iraq mirror those of the armed forces as a whole, then we'd expect 225 dead female service members. That would suggest that female service members have jobs in Iraq that are 3 times safer than male service members. But now consider that 90% number. If again, those jobs have a similar makeup in Iraq as around the world, and we can assume that the job occupations are about uniform in the number of people who have them (unrealistic I know) then we would predict that 350 men have died out of categories that they share with women (see note below). That leaves 3080 who have died out of the 10% male only occupations. That makes those jobs 66 times as dangerous as the ones they are permitted to serve in!
Source: Soldiering Ahead from the Wilson Quarterly
Total Fatalities 3500 Estimated Fatalities by type Predicted fatalities if all jobs were equally dangerous Relative likelihood of death
Percent Women 0.15 70 525 0.13
Percent Men Dangerous Jobs 0.1 3080 350 8.8
Percent Men in Jobs with women 0.75 350 2625 0.13
Ratio 66
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)
Horrible comic
The QandO Blog tipped me off to the following comic:
Now I think this article is in terrible taste, as of course it ignores the intentions and differences between suicide bombers and American soldiers. But is is also wrong. What it proports are the common attributes or a suicide bomber are not uniform properties, and I'm not sure there are any.
Male:
As this article points out, there have been many female suicide bombers, including more than 30% of those by the Tamil tigers.
Willingness to die for a cause
There are many examples of people compelled to perform suicide bombings, including this boy.
Religious fervor
Check this chart out:
NUMBER OF SUICIDE ATTACKS BETWEEN 1980-2000
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and in India 168
Hizbullah and pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, Kuwait and Argentina 52
Hamas in Israel 22
The Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) in Turkey 15
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Israel 8
Al Quaida in East Africa 2
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) in Croatia 1
The Islamic Group (IG) in Pakistan 1
Barbar Khalsa International (BKI) in India 1
The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria 1
Not all the groups from the middle east are religious in nature:
"Some of suicide groups are motivated by religion, religious/ethnic nationalism, or ethnic nationalism. Al Quaida's religious philosophy transcends territorial borders. Hamas, the PIJ and Hizbullah are primarily religious groups, but they are also driven by ethno-nationalism. BKI is the only non-Islamic religious group. While the LTTE and the PKK are driven by ethno-nationalism, the PKK is also infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology. As such, the motivation of Hamas, the PIJ and Hizbullah suicide bombers is primarily Islam. The motivation of the LTTE and the PKK suicide bombers is mainly Tamil and Kurdish nationalism respectively."
Poor Education and Poverty
Remember the September 11 bombers? Many of them came from middle class backgrounds and several of them had college degrees.
Blind Obedience and Immaturity
Not sure how you'd measure these, but the usage of social presure and pre-commitment mechanisms like telling everyone you know about what you are about to do suggests that not all the participants are obeying mindlessly.
Belief in life after death
Again, see the example of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) who motivated their bombings with atheistic Marxist-Leninist ideology.
So don't believe everything you read, even from nasty, snarky, and trite cartoonists.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
Cellular phone records as evidence
The NY times has an article, When the Trill of a Cellphone Brings the Clang of Prison Doors, which talks about the increasing roll that cellular phone records have as evidence in court cases. A few choice quotes:
Examining cellphone data is a technique that has moved from being a masterful surprise in trials to being a standard tool in the investigative arsenal of the police and prosecutors, with records routinely provided by cellphone companies in response to subpoenas...
Many people know that cellphones can be used as global positioning devices in real time. Yet few are aware that phone companies keep records from transmitters for months or longer that can be used to trace approximately where a caller was at the time a crime was "The important thing about cell tower data is not what it proves, but what it can’t prove," he said. "Cell tower data cannot place a person at an exact location. And even if it could, if the phone is not surgically implanted, you still can’t prove it."...
Mr. Geragos conducted what legal observers have come to consider a groundbreaking cross-examination of the prosecution’s expert witness, focusing on the flaws in cellphone transmitter technology. He managed to disqualify two witnesses, he recalled, and forced a third witness, a telephone company employee, to admit that when cellphone traffic is very heavy, a signal can be redirected to a nearby tower.
Is there anything to make of this as a civil libertarian? I don't think so. While there is some expectation of privacy when you make a cell phone call, especially from a private office or a home, you are almost always sending radio waves through the public airwaves. So, ignoring whether it is right to use such evidence to establish probable cause, if cellular evidence is available to the government as well as to defendants, then, as the article indicates it can be used both to exonerate as well as to implicate. In general, technology like that is good, as it decreases the innocents in jail and the free guilty people.
Unfortunately, to the extent that we live in the sort of society where everyone is criminal of some sort due to a proliferation of illiberal and nannying laws, perhaps we should want more constraints on government power, even if it means on average more innocent people go to jail. Certainly, the government is better funded and more generally well equipped to take advantage of improvements in evidence gathering technology than the accused are. By one measure of prosecutors' effectiveness, the percentage of criminal defendants in federal court that end up pleading guilty or being convicted at trial is 95%, so it is fair to wonder if they really need more help.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)
July 14, 2007
How can we not make room for these people
In another tragic example of talented, honest, hardworking people trying to become Americans and yet continually stymied, the Washington Post examines 200 Indian Americans who teemed up to send flowers to Emilio Gonzalez, the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as a form of peaceful protest for being jerked around by an amoral, bureaucratic, and near-senseless immigration policy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2007
A bit of civil disobedience
You may not know that most (if not all) of the color printer manufacturers print nearly invisible dots on their prints that uniquely identify the printer they came from. It seems they did this at the request of the secret service and word of it has begun to leak out. The other day this property was referenced in an episode of Law and Order. The act of identifying or disguising the typewriter that produced a note is a classic occurrence in detective works of the 20th century.
You might be outraged by this, and if sufficiently so, you might call your printer manufacturer to complain about this practice. However, at least one person who did this claims that a few short days later they were visited by inquisitive members of the secret service. And that just doesn't sit with me. Complaining about a systemic infringement in our liberties should not be grounds for suspecting that person of criminal behavior. So the clever folks over at Seeing Yellow are fighting back with a bit of civil disobedience. They are asking everyone with these printers to call in, so that if the printer companies tell on you, there will be far too many for the secret service to check. If they get the hint that the public doesn't like this, that's a great benefit too. Now I don't own a color laser, so I can't call to be a part of this. But perhaps you can.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:25 PM | Comments (0)
Nature is wild
Check out this link to a home video of tigers in a zoo in china. Jurassic park style, they dump a live cow out of a truck and let the tigers dine on it. Not that bloody, but quite primal.
There is a bit of outrage over this on the internet, and I think that this points out a that distancing us from the grim reality of the meat we eat makes us more squeamish, not less. If very meat eating American had to spend 2 weeks working in a slaughterhouse there might be a few extra vegetarians afterwards, but what would really go away are all those movies that sentimentalized and apostrophized animals. We'd see that familiarity with animals brings more contempt than respect.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:15 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2007
Lady Bird Johnson
Lady Bird Johnson isn't someone I think of much at yet here she is coming up twice in one week. First, I'm watching this season's episodes of Big Love, and a billboard executive uses her face as a backboard of his wastebasket. It seems she led a campaign to have billboards banned. Then yesterday she died.
First ladies are perfectly situated for massive life. They are past child bearing age so they've survived childbirth and childhood, they are rich, and very high status. So I wondered, do how do their life expectancies compare?
So I took a list of first lady life spans and compared it with a list of white, female American life expectancies. I compared their life expectancies at the year of their birth for women who were thirty ran some averages. The average first lady lived 73 4/4 years while the average woman lived 66 1/2 years (averaged overs the years in question). So that's 7 years from factors of status and wealth.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2007
The Bronx as a great melting pot
Colin Powel speaks a bissel of Yiddish.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:11 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2007
Reminds me of Tommy Boy
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
That could work
In The Check was in the Mail, the blog "Kids Prefer Cheese" explores the following idea. If at some future date, China nationalized the property of US nationals, that we seize their debt holdings of US debt to repay those affected. They seem to be in favor of the idea, and I think it is of interest not just in that context, but in the event of war against China, it would also do as a way to harm China's standing.
One of the comments they quote states "The enormous secondary market in T-bills means that China can easily sell them to some third party who could redeem them at face value. I can't think of any way to close this loophole without effectively shutting down all trade in T-bills, which has enormous negative consequences for the U.S." I'm pretty sure this is wrong. T-bills, like the vast majority of US financial instruments are registered (as opposed to bearer) securities. That is, there is a ledger either at the issuer of the security or at the holding broker dealer that indicates who owns the security and that they are to receive any payments associated with that security. So yes, there is a record that China is the owner of record of those securities. By simply publicly stating that those accounts are frozen and those securities will no longer be valid I think the US could effectively shut down the bond holds of China in the event of a conflict. Would that hurt US bond holdings? That's hard to say, but it isn't without president. I cannot seem to find the reference, but I recall that in there was a company that had a few contracts with Germany before WWI that it tried to enforce after hostilities ended. They found that those contracts were nullified by going to war with the other party's government. Therefore, I doubt that serious creditors would believe that their investments would survive a war between their country and the US.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
July 9, 2007
Williams syndrome
In The Gregarious Brain, the NY Times explores Williams syndrome, a genetic form of retardation that causes fearless, extroverted conversation in its victims. It is amazing how much we learn about the human brain from those unlucky enough to odd defects. Makes me think I'd be a better economist with a psychology and a neurology course under my belt. I should look into that...
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2007
A cool list of human similarities
Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
Humans are naturally polygamous
Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
Beautiful people have more daughters
The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male)
Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
The two coolest ones to me were "The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of" and "Most suicide bombers are Muslim" The former claims that it is your wife's age and not your own that triggers the crisis, and the latter is a surprisingly insightful argument about polygamy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:15 PM | Comments (0)
July 3, 2007
Canyons are mountains in reverse
Yesterday, Klidre, OM (Klidre's girlfriend), and I went to the Grand Canyon. Some observations:
1) Most of my former climbing has been on mountains (or hills) and you can see them coming. That gets you excited as you get near. The Grand Canyon however, despite being huge, can only be seen from the ground when you are near. That said...
2) Klidre said that the first time you see the Grand Canyon, your face lights up in wonder like a 5 year old at his first baseball game. I can vouch for that. It was simply amazing. You witness it and you have to appreciate the wonder of creation. The size, the colors, and the plant life (it was lush compared with the desert I imagined) combined into a stunning view.
3) It was an interesting mix of easy and difficult. We hiked Bright Angel Trail (Description and Pictures). What made it difficult was that the heat in the sun was brutal, and the grade was quite steep and you do the easy part (down) when you are most well rested. On the other hand, there is water at points along the trail, so you don't have t carry a whole day's water at a time. The trail isn't crowded, but it is in heavy use, so if you need a Band Aid for a blister someone will be there to help. Unlike say, the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, there is also shade. The overhang of the cliffs provide shade, and in places, shade even at noon. That made rest stops much more restful.
4) The parks department is well run, at least at the operational level. The trail was well maintained and the view was just amazing. The signs were clear and didn't distract from the natural surroundings more than necessary. We asked a few rangers for advice over the course of the day. they had suggestions on trails, techniques, and were knowledgeable about terrain, plants, and the canyon's rock formations.
5) Many hikers were not properly prepared. People wore foolish and impractical clothing while hiking, and many (though inexperienced) set out on long hikes without regard to their duration. We saw a group of college age girls who said their hiking experience was one hike the day before carrying a liter of water each (about a third of what we brought) continuing on after we gave up at the 1.5 mile marker.
6) The rangers are nice and effective cops. While waiting stopped for bus to finishing loading, a woman in an SUV backed her car up into my rental car. She smashed up the front of my car, leaving it drivable but damn ugly. She and her husband were French, nice folks on tour of the US. We called 911 and they sent over rangers to fill out an accident report. Ranger Sias was polite, efficient, and arrived promptly. She had extra pens so we could fill out our statements, was able to make copies and process lots of information right from her vehicle. The driver of the SUV ended up with a $135 ticket for "dangerous backing up". All and all we were delayed by 45 minutes and no one was hurt, that's about the best accident you could hope for.
Hertz again showed effortless competency, comping me for my half tank of gas, and giving me a new car withing about 15 minutes of dropping off the broken one.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:18 AM | Comments (1)
July 1, 2007
Travel Misadventures - why I may never fly US AIrways again
As many of you know, Klidre is in Flagstaff doing planetary geology research for the summer. As part of an extended celebration of taking my last qualifying exam on Friday, I decided to fly to Flagstaff to visit him for a few days. I had a 6:30 am flight which, including stopover got into flagstaff at 8:30 am. I finally arrived at his house at 8:30 PM, 12 hours later.
When I got to the airport at 5:30, boy was I surprised to find out that my flight to Flagstaff had been canceled due to mechanical problems. My connecting flight to Phoenix was OK, and following rule 5 of my father's rules of consulting, I figured it would be best to keep moving forward. So I took a standby position on a 11:45, a got a confirmed seat at 1:15. The 11:45 was oversold, so I didn't get on. I recall that I can get a meal voucher if I wait more than a few hours, and they eventually give me one, but of course they don't suggest it. I considered taking a bus, in fact that was Klidre's suggestion in the morning. In hindsight, that was the obvious best call, but it was a 2.5-3 hour bus ride and about $35, so it wasn't an obvious call. Another alternative, renting a car in Phoenix wasn't going to be easy either, what with finding a good rate on getting a car there but dropping it off in Flagstaff. Further, driving through massive amounts of unfamiliar AZ desert without company sounded boring and a bit scary. So I get my Quizno sub, which was gross, but almost covered by my meal voucher and better than my alternatives in that I could get grilled chicken on whole wheat.
Eventually, we board the 1:15. I've never been on a 37 seat plane before, and I was unprepared for how it did with the thermals of AZ. The turbulence was awful and my thoughts went to dark things. Most planes are warm when you board them, but cool off quickly when the engines start and the cooling system gets the juice it needs. So I thought something was up when the plane was still quite hot 20 minutes into the air. At this point the pilot comes on and says that there is a problem with one of the planes generators, and that after flying around for another half an hour to get to safe landing fuel we would be going back the Phoenix. Why when we were so close to Flagstaff? They never told us, but I assume that it is because they don't have any mechanics and electrics repair capabilities in Flagstaff, where as Phoenix is a hub with all sorts of that stuff. At this point I am out of my mind with anger towards US Air and frustration at the wasted day. I went to the customer service line (8 people ahead of me, 1.5 hour wait!) but they couldn't do any faster or give other compensation, if I wanted that I had to write in, but I should expect 4-6 weeks for a response. Six pm comes and goes, and the plane isn't boarding. Eventually at 6:45 they board the plane. As we walk out to the puddle jumper, a staff person comes to stop us, "There is still (!) a problem with the plane." They send us back inside. This time a short wait of 20 minutes and we are allowed to board the plane, this time with working AC, and actually less bumpy too. It turned out that the radio was broken and needed t be replaced. By about 7:45 we arrive in Flagstaff, a beautiful little airport that looked like a fancy hunting lodge. The car rental place had my car waiting for me, and just in time because they closed at 8. Isn't it amazing how some organizations show flawless capability while others seem incompetent even in their core competencies?Of course my baggage wasn't there, because it was just that sort of day. There wasn't any staff working the front of the airport, they were all in back helping launch the last plane of the day, it took forever to get them to send someone to help me, but eventually an off duty staffer punched back in. First he tried to help this lady trying to scam a cheap flight using several deal programs. She was ultimately unsuccessful, but she did take a long time to be proven so. Finally, I got some attention at about 8:15, and I begged them to check the back for my bag. There it was, it probably came through on my standby flight from 9 hours earlier.
Finally, stuff in hand I get to Klidre's house. He rented a great condo for the summer and Flagstaff is beautiful. We walked around the Northern Arizona University campus while we waited for a table at the great local pizza joint. We had a pitcher of microbrew, eat some scalding pizza, and all seemed well. We stopped for a bit more supplies on the way home, popped District B13 into the DVD player, which was surprisingly good, and then my 19 hour long adventure ended in sleep.
P.S.
Of the 6 flights that go to Flagstaff every day, yesterday 3 of them (at least that I know of) were delayed or canceled due to service issues. Methinks it is time for a new set of planes.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:55 AM | Comments (1)