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February 27, 2009
The past is a different place
Of course, we cannot tell how the future will feel, but one simple test is to ask ourselves how we feel about the past - are we angry that our great-grandparents did not live more frugally so that we would now be richer? Personally, of all the things I would have liked my great-grandparents to do differently, this is not one of them. However, you may feel differently.I don't buy economists' case for fighting climate changeIs there an ethical basis for being concerned about global warming that does not depend upon the notion that quite generally we are radically negligent about future people? I think that there is, but this concern depends upon a rights-based notion of ethics rather than on utilitarianism.
The past was a hard place, and I took do not regret that my ancestors didn't save more. In the scheme of human endeavors I wished they spend more on research, medicine, and innovation than giant temples, but the total amount of saving is hard to second guess when many people had little.
What does bother me is the needless extinction. The dodo, the carrier pigeon, the Tasmanian wolf and other animals that were not driven to extinction by the need for food or other essentials, but just because they were an annoyance or even for sport. If we did in the Wholly Mammoth, perhaps we did so because we were a species on the edge struggling for survival in an unkind world. Similarly, if some frog went extinct so that we could drain our swamps to keep our children from getting malaria, that too I understand. But there are a few obvious cases that are simply a waste, and I regret my species did those things.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:30 PM | Comments (0)
Getting a beating for your rightousness
I had an inkling that Christopher Hitchens was brave when he submitted to water boarding to learn if it was torture. Recently however, he defaced a swastika on a sign in Beirut and received a beating for his troubles.
Read all about it.
Christopher Hitchens and the Battle of Beirut
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
Treating human waste
I was surprised to learn that it is easier to reuse and to make harmless human waste when urine and solid waste are separated before they are sent to the waste processing facility.
Sewage, according to the United Nations Environment Program, is the biggest marine pollutant there is. Wastewater-treatment plants work to extract the nutrients before discharging sewage into water courses, but they can’t remove them all. ...When a rainstorm suddenly sends millions of gallons of water into an already overloaded system, the extra must be stored or — if storage is lacking — discharged, untreated, into the nearest river or harbor. Each week, New York City sends about 800 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of sewage-polluted water into nearby waters because there’s nowhere else for it to go.Research by Jac Wilsenach, now a civil engineer in South Africa, found that removing even half of the nutrient-rich urine enables the bacteria in the aeration tanks to munch all the nitrogen and phosphate matter in solid waste in a single day rather than the usual 30. Urine diversion also makes for richer sludge and produces more methane, which can be turned into gas or electricity, Mr. Wilsenach said. In short, separating urine turns a guzzler of energy into a net producer.
I was also surprised to learn that urine contains more nutrients than solid waste does:
In Sweden, some of the collected urine — which contains 80 percent of the nutrients in excrement — is given to farmers, with little objection
Yellow Is the New Green
All and all it is an interesting article on our waste processing future. I once read a science fiction story where households had salt water and fresh water taps in their sinks so that the didn't wast precious fresh water cleaning themselves when abundant salt water would do. That seemed impossibly impoverished to me as a kid, but a future where there are multiple pipes into and out of the house seems increasingly plausible in a world where fresh water is expensive and so is disposing of human waste.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:25 AM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2009
Interesting fact of the day
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)The Indian Railway King
I'm sure this depends on how and who you count. The US military (including those in reserves) is 3,385,400 (plus hundreds of thousands more civilians in the DoD) people where as the NHS has 1.3 million workers. So it might not be third. Indian railways has 1,406,430 employees as of 2007, so that might not be second. Even if you only count full time US military staff, that is 1,444,553 people, still putting it ahead of the Indian Railways. Either way, it is interesting to note that of the 5 organizations commonly listed as the world's largest employers, two are armies, two are socialized public services (health care and railroads) and only one is a private business (Walmart). I recall similar lists when I was a kid, and AT&T before it was broken up would have been on this list, with about a million employees right before break-up. Of course, that might be considered just another government sponsored monopoly and not the private enterprise that Walmart more clearly is.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
This is really cool
Retro Game Challenge is a game by Xseed Games that is a parody of all the 8-bit video games we played in the 80s. They are tied together, so you progress through the history of video games, and they develop better graphics and into larger games. Reviewers seem to like it, and includes touches like an in-game game-magazine with cheat codes and game objectives informed by modern games.
Check out the video review below.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
Can you hear a a tone that is generally only heard by people under the age of 25?
Created by Train Horns
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)
A badly designed trading system
In a statement, UBS said an error from one of its internal trading systems mistakenly placed an order for three trillion yen instead of the intended 30 million yen. UBS placed a cross order -- simultaneously buying and selling an issue – on the TSE's system for off-hours trade.At around noon, the TSE halted trade in Japanese videogame maker Capcom's 15 billion yen convertible bond issue, which is due to mature on March 31. The bourse later said it would cancel the mistaken trade [at no cost to UBS].
UBS Japan Unit Places Erroneous Bond Order
It is hard for me to see this story as anything other than a public admission of failure by technology managers and controllers over at UBS. I worked on an electronic trading system for futures, and every trader had a limit, set by either the firm or the exchange if the firm didn't set one lower to limit the number of contracts they could trade. I'm stunned they didn't think to implement such a system over at UBS. It could be that they did develop such a system, but their internal controls failed to populate what their limit should be, but even if that is the case that reflects poorly on UBS, implying that they either do not understand how to develop useful default settings or overrode good defaults through incompetence. If they didn't have the limit functionality in their software, that isn't good either. So, as I said, this doesn't reflect well on UBS.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:41 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2009
How the mighty have fallen.
From an email I just received:
It has occurred to me that owning one share each of the two largest banks in the US (Citi and B of A), the two largest auto companies (GM, F) the largest insurer( AIG ) and one of the most upscale department stores ( Saks Fifth Ave ) would not be enough to buy you a ticket to a movie in NYC, that costs $12 per adult.C= 1.95
BAC=3.79
GM= 1.77
F= 1.58
AIG= .54
SKS= 1.70TOTAL=$11.33
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:46 AM | Comments (0)
Selection effect
It seems that some lenders are offering horrible terms to dissuade borrowing for large mortgages:
Some banks, though, are quoting much-higher jumbo rates. Mortgage brokers say that indicates that lenders are reluctant to make jumbo loans and are setting their prices high to deter new deals. For example, Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. in Ocala, Fla., recently listed a 7% rate on a 30-year fixed-rate jumbo loan, but charges up-front origination fees equal to 5% of the loan.Jumbo Mortgages, Jumbo Headaches
That's pretty terrible. It must scare off a lot of business. I wonder what sorts of people want a mortgage like this? I wouldn't think it was a particularly desirable group who would want credit on such desperate terms. If they do any loans with terms like these, I bet they are to a lousy group of borrowers. It might be dear enough terms to make it worth doing anyway, but given the information asymmetries, I doubt it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:09 AM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2009
What I'd want to know to believe in the stimulus is not certainty
Justin Fox says, "I guess what continues to perplex me at least a little is how lacking in the customary rigor of modern academic economics the arguments for stimulus are." (Brad DeLong tutors me on fiscal stimulus). Then Brad Delong says, "Lacking in the customary rigor..." Justin could mean either of two things: 1.Rigorous economics should produce tightly-estimated conclusions based on statistical sieving of mountains of data, like: when Safeway cuts grocery prices by 1%, its sales rise by 1.456%. 2.Rigorous economics should involve lots of theoretical equations with sigmas and rhos and betas in them.
Can you say false dichotomy? He's saying you could only remain opposed to his position if either you demanded a high level of significance or if a lot of algebra underlies your estimates. I'm saying that one could easily currently be skeptical without requiring an high level of statistical precision. For example, you could just want external validity and perhaps 5 or even 10% significance.I'd like more data to be convinced of stimulus efficacy, but I don't necessarily require enough for a 1% confidence interval. When you have as few data points as we have on a stimulus, you can barely do any statistics at all. Standard errors are huge and intervals around the mean easily do not contain the true value.
In general, shouldn't the burden of proof be on those who want the policy intervention? If the best evidence we have of high stimulus multiples is a couple of mildly relevant anecdotes, I challenge that the meeting of that standard, and I don't need a high degree of (necessarily model specific) parameter precision to make that challenge.
Given the proceedure with which I see my government spending money, the timing of the spending in the stimulus, the things the money is set to purchase (categories without particularly high unemployment and therefore a lot of unused labor resources) , and the size of the stimulus, I struggle to see relevant external validity in any multiplier number that anyone has discussed. I retain a prior that with the exception of a few public goods and private goods but publicly provided infrastructure projects, that in general the government spending multiplier is 0 or negative.
Could we really believe that at all levels of government expenditure, during a recession like ours, that government stimulus spending not only generates enough private activity to completely repay the taxes on the money spent on that stimulus, but that it further creates economic activity beyond that? From our government of $300 ashtrays, mars rovers that crash, schools that don't teach, bridges to nowhere, where Boston's big dig was 9 billion dollars over budget, and NYC hasn't built a second avenue Subway despite 40 years of trying, I am skeptical.
It is true that we are seeing a rather sudden shift to savings which may be triggering the so called paradox of thrift is a problem. However, we do actually need to save much more as a society. American's have sae too little for too long, and now that the boomers are retiring, we have an enormous amount of benefits to pay them, and we need savings to do so. The benefits of thrift may outweigh the costs, even if Keynes was right and those costs are real. I'm ignorant of how to estimate these costs and benefits, but then, I'm not proposing a trillions be spent to fund my ideas.
Others might say, "If we were considering intervening in a perfectly competitive market then, yes, the burden of proof should be on those proposing the policy. But this is a world of the second best. There are numerous distortions in the aggregate so it's not the case that "doing nothing" is actually doing nothing. This is especially true since the policy environment is dynamic---e.g. the Bush tax cuts will expire, etc." I appreciate this point, but you cannot claim that this stimulus what a natural continuation of government policy as usual. Practically by construction the stimulus was filled with projects that were second rate and not worth funding in general circumstances. Most of the first rate projects they have been built already. I think we have to do better than this. This certainly is a world where we are far from the competitive general equilibrium. But the theory of second best is something that does not hold as a law. Sometimes movements towards a competitive economy create efficiency gains, and sometimes they don't.
That is why I retain my belief that this stimulus is a wasteful policy with negative consequences on national productivity and efficiency.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:46 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2009
A law to keep down tyrants
It is hard to imagine a more serious crime than those who wield the nearly unchecked power of the state as a tool to abuse the people for their own gain.
With the recent revelation that two Pennsylvania judges rook bribes from private prisons to give maximum punishments (Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit) instead of the common ones the cases merited and evidence that medical examiners in Mississippi doctored evidence to help prosecutors convict (Did dental examiner create the bite marks that put a man on death row?), I have a simple proposal. This isn't shouldn't be treated as criminal evidence tampering. It should be treated as kidnapping.
If you are entrusted with state power (as medical examiners, policemen, judges, and district attorney's are), you abuse that authority to knowingly misled the courts in their aim of justice, and that results in someone's incarceration, we should treat that as though you locked them in your basement. Instead of the 87 months for wire fraud and income tax fraud that the judges were convicted under, they should have to face the electric chair for hundreds of acts of kidnapping and if not spend the rest of their lives in jail.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:01 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2009
How many people have lived to a hundred
The BlueEyedGirl and I were wondering how many people have ever lived that lived longer than her grandfather, who is currently in his mid nineties. Then I saw an article on estimating the number of centenarians:
The Census counted 32,194 centenarians in 1980, for example. But an analysis published seven years later estimated that only 15,000 were true centenarians. Many of the rest were children under 13 whose birth dates were incorrectly placed in the 19th century. Others were the result of older Census respondents mistakenly listing children in their household as parents. The Census counted these phantom household members, and assigned them an older age than the respondent, sometimes topping 100.Living to 100 May Be Easier Than Counting Those Who've Made ItRealizing this problem, the Census Bureau didn't allow for any children or grandchildren over age 90 starting in 1990. But the centenarian count that year of 37,306 was still highly questionable. For instance, the Census counted more than 1,500 whites 110 or older. But more than two-thirds of them said they had no mobility or personal-care limitations -- a "very doubtful" result suggesting many weren't really that old, according to a subsequent Census report.
Let's say the number above is right. There were about 248 million people in 1990 so that makes for 15 in every 100 thousand people. Let's take that a generous upper bound for the rate of centenarians in human history, noting that in a couple of societies like contemporary Japan, it is probably higher. We know that conservatively over 106 billion people have ever lived (Wow fact of the day), which would make for about 16 million people to make it to a hundred.
Most of the people who ever lived did so under standards more akin to subsistence farming than contemporary America, so that number is much too high. But it might due as a decent upper bound.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:25 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2009
This is good for America
People who have jumped through the hoops required to be legal immigrants in the United States will now have access to a program where they can join the military for a program of approximately 3 years and where they can become citizens within as little as six months of signing up.
U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship
The military gets access to a high quality pool of workers with unbeatable language skills and they get something of enormous value, permanent residency in the United States and all the rights and duties of citizens.
Some are rightfully concerned that the military not become one of those jobs that Americans just won't do much like grounds keeping, fast food service, and house cleaning have in many ways become. By rapidly making soldiers into citizens there is no dilution of the honor of military service, unlike say the French Foreign Legion, where three years are required for citizenship, or the British with their Nepalese Gurkhas who never get it. A year into your service you are no different from any other American who signed up to serve his country. Except maybe that since you are from some place interesting you speak an exotic language of great military value and you are likely of great drive and higher than average education because you managed to get here and pass through the requirements visa program, many of which are for skilled workers.
If you think this sounds like an easy back door into America, guess again. Check out the following chart: What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:01 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2009
Webdrive, I take back the nasty things I said
I am thrilled to report that version 8.22 of Webdrive not only seems faster than the version 8 I had been using, but it also has a new option to hide files beginning with a ".", which had been a serious bane of my technological life.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
OCR is getting quite good
I recently upgraded from the free ScanSoft OmniPage SE 4.0 that came with my scanner to the full power OmniPage Professional 16.
The former was decent. I liked the work flow, but the inability to designate regions of the document at spreadsheet or text meant that when I scanned a table, significant effort was still required to get the data into a usable form. Often I had to copy the data into a text file, replace tabs with spaces or commas, and line things up. A lot better than typing it all myself, but still a hassle.
However, when I upgraded to OmniPage Professional 16, not only was the work flow identical, but now I could specify the regions holding tables and text, and the OCR was even better. Now a simple copy and past of the results into a spreadsheet. The program did have the ability to export the results as a spreadsheet too, but that didn't work as well. That process just exported a series of cells containing an entire table's data in one cell. Still, the process is now a lot faster and more accurate, and I would now consider scanning a document to avoid retyping its contents a real alternative.
Now if only Webdrive didn't suck so much.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)
Might just be a load of nonsense, but a fascinating possibility
I enjoyed an article from The American Scientist, Healing Heat: Harnessing Infection to Fight Cancer. It discusses how infections that cause fevers as well as their antigens may cause the body to turn off its normal protections against attacking its own cells, thereby allowing the immune system extensive freedom to battle tumors and cancer. Although very dangerous at times, because to be effective it has to cause a high fever, this may be an effective method for patients suffering from inoperable cancers.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:39 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2009
The Republicans didn't stop this recession so should they be silent about getting us out?
"When it comes to economic policy, now would be an excellent time for the Republican Party to enjoy a little quiet time. "History Lesson by Brad Delong
It would seem that when the Democrats don't need their votes to pass bills, they can stop listening to the Republicans. Until then, they derive their legitimacy not from the quality of their ideas, but from the democratic process that selected them. That goes just as well for the Democrats or for that matter the leaders of the democratic socialist governments of Europe, who similarly provided little legislative ideas that would have prevented this mess,
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 9, 2009
So that's why they do that
Did you ever wonder why airlines make it difficult or impossible to transfer your ticket to another passenger? I always assumed that it generated profits but I was unsure of the mechanism. It couldn't just be to sell more tickets, because re-sellable tickets would be more valuable because cancellation wouldn't be a big concern.
The WSJ sheds some light:
Most airlines make their tickets "nontransferable" to protect their fare structures and maintain control of their inventory. Otherwise, entrepreneurs might hoard cheap tickets and then resell them at higher prices closer to departure. Or big companies might buy up a batch of cheap tickets for frequently traveled routes and then assign them to business travelers when trips are planned.
Why Fliers Can't Donate Unused Tickets
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:15 PM | Comments (0)
Comparative misery suggests a mild recession
Cafe Hayek (How Bad Is this Economic Downturn?) pointed me to an Op-Ed by Alan Reynolds (IT'S A RECESSION NOT A 'CATASTROPHE') that tries to calm the panic over the current recession.
I enjoyed the essay and I share the concern that undue panic is encouraging bad policy making.
One of the measures that Reynolds cites as evidence that we are not in a catastrophe is the so called misery index, which adds the sum of inflation and unemployment together to try to measure how unhappy we all are.
I took NBER recession dates and The US Misery Index January 1948 to December 2008 to look at the misery over past recessions. I calculated the average misery rate for the period that I had data for (9.42%) and then generated an excess misery statistic, which is that month's misery index less the average misery. Then for each NBER recession, I added up the excess misery of all months in the recession. That generated the following table.
Recession Cumulative Average Start Excess Excess Dates Misery Misery 1948-11 -45.56 -3.80 1953-07 -47.00 -4.27 1957-08 -5.15 -0.57 1960-04 -22.99 -2.09 1969-12 14.85 1.24 1973-11 124.61 7.33 1980-01 82.23 11.75 1981-07 123.65 7.27 1990-07 21.61 2.40 2001-03 -16.64 -1.85 2007-12 1.83 0.14
As we can see, the current recession actually has small excess misery. The average not including the current recession is 22.96% cumulative excess misery and 1.74% average excess misery per month during those recessions. By either standard the current recession is thus far mild. If the inflation and unemployment numbers remain comparable, we'd need almost 14 years more recession for this one to be as miserable as the average American recession.
That said, the average US recession has only been about 12 months in length, and most forecasters believe this will last out all of 2009, so we are already shaping up for a recession that is longer than any in the sample. Also, the chart shows a lot of variability in these measures across recessions. Especially in the early recessions the misery index seems a poor guide to a recession. This may be a legacy of going on and off the gold standard, but that's just speculation.
If (and that's a big if) the misery index is a good measure of recession severity, then as Reynolds suggests, this recession appears to be a very mild by the standards of the last 50 years. Of course, this could be the recession that is so demonstrably horrible that the cumulative misery index is buried as an irrelevant severity measure. Time will tell.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
A new Amazon Kindle
The new ebook reader from Amazon has been announced, the Kindle 2.0. Buy it there at Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation). The price is the same, it has almost 10 times the storage capacity, the battery life is better, the screen has 16 shades of gray instead of 4, and the difficult to use navigation wheel is replaced with a click-able knob. It is now half as thick. Downgrades include lack of expandable memory (the old model took SD cards) and no user changeable battery.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)
February 8, 2009
Funny, and mildly unsafe for work
Read this and laugh a lot:
When Your Credit Card Signature Fun Backfires
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
Two links
Comics Grammar and Tradition is an extensive discussion of the various meanings of visual formatting rules in Western comics. There were several I didn't know, including telepathy and coughing. I wonder if they would have changed my understanding of any of the comics I've read. My gut tells me know, but I'm not really in a position to substantiate that.
On another note, I draw your attention to the following obituary: Blossom Dearie, Cult Chanteuse, Dies at 82. After 727 words, I find that I can add several strange things to the list of topics that I don't understand. It really is a peak into a small world of odd verbs, places, and people I've never heard of. It makes me want to read more obscure obituaries.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:56 PM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2009
More on if demographics is destiny
In 1976, census data show, 59 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 20 percent had five or more and 6 percent had seven or more.By 2006, four decades after the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to use birth control (and the last year available from census studies), 28 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 4 percent had five or more and just 0.5 percent had seven or more.
Two generations ago 12 times as many women had 7 children as they do now. I always found this sort of thing astonishing, because the time when the genetic returns to having children is highest is just when everyone else starts having fewer of them.
I liked this retort.
As for the other pointed questions about large families, defenders have developed standard comebacks, lists of which circulate on the Internet.How can you afford so many? "Lifestyles are expensive, not kids."
But that said, there are a lot of wealthy families out there with 6 figure nanny/house cleaner / camp / private school budgets. To act like you don't face a trade off is a bit naive. But of course, if you live in a suburb with good public schools, those are typically paid for out of real estate taxes. Having a large number of children means that you spread those taxes among a larger number of students/ children and pay way less per child for those benefits.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:45 AM | Comments (0)
Another take on bad statistics at Wired
In bad statistics at wired I discussed an article over at Wired where they suggest that the Playboy Playmates are rapidly becoming cartoon parodies of real women. I argued that was mostly because young American women had become fatter and the Playmates had not.
Mahalanobis has another take over at Re: Today's Playmates (Wired) he points out that "Playmate BMI reached a low in the mid 80ies and afterwards actually trended slightly upwards". He also tipped me off to the fact that the article is online (Infoporn: Today's Playmates Are More Like Anime Figures Than Real Humans) and so is the BMI data.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
February 6, 2009
The ethics of robot warriors
In 2002, for example, an Air National Guard pilot in an F-16 saw flashing lights underneath him while flying over Afghanistan at twenty-three thousand feet and thought he was under fire from insurgents. Without getting required permission from his commanders, he dropped a 500-pound bomb on the lights. They instead turned out to be troops from Canada on a night training mission. Four were killed and eight wounded. In the hearings that followed, the pilot blamed the ubiquitous “fog of war” for his mistake. It didn’t matter and he was found guilty of dereliction of duty.Change this scenario to an unmanned system and military lawyers aren’t sure what to do. Asks a Navy officer, “If these same Canadian forces had been attacked by an autonomous UCAV, determining who is accountable proves difficult. Would accountability lie with the civilian software programmers who wrote the faulty target identification software, the UCAV squadron’s Commanding Officer, or the Combatant Commander who authorized the operational use of the UCAV? Or are they collectively held responsible and accountable?”
This is the main reason why military lawyers are so concerned about robots being armed and autonomous. As long as “man is in the loop,” traditional accountability can be ensured. Breaking this restriction opens up all sorts of new and seemingly irresolvable legal questions about accountability.
In time, the international community may well decide that armed, autonomous robots are simply too difficult, or even abhorrent, to deal with. Like chemical weapons, they could be banned in general, for no other reason than the world doesn’t want them around. Yet for now, our laws are simply silent on whether autonomous robots can be armed with lethal weapons. Even more worrisome, the concept of keeping human beings in the loop is already being eroded by policymakers and by the technology itself, both of which are rapidly moving toward pushing humans out. We therefore must either enact a ban on such systems soon or start to develop some legal answers for how to deal with them.
Military Robots and the Laws of War
Astonishingly interesting. Read the whole thing.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
February 4, 2009
Best news I've heard all morning
The Washington Post is reporting that Democrats lack the votes to get the stimulus package passed in the senate. They are talking about cutting $200 billion from the $819 billion version passed last week in the house. See the article over at Senate Lacks Votes to Pass Stimulus
I still believe that is $619 billion too much stimulus, but that's a good start.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:29 AM | Comments (0)
February 3, 2009
What were prices back when?
From time to time I have to read an economic variable from America's past. The cumulative effects of inflation have left past prices and profits difficult to translate to contemporary quantities. It is a hassle to fire up an inflation calculator each time I see such a number, so I wanted some rules of thumb. Today, I decided to make my own. Using BLS data and I converted the relative prices into their fraction of 2008 prices.
Year Approximate Fraction of 2008 Prices
1936 1/16
1947 1/10
1956 1/8
1973 1/5
1975 1/4
1979 1/3
1985 1/2
For example, in 1947 prices were approximately 1/10 what they are today, but in 1975 they were about 1/4 what they are today. .
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:13 AM | Comments (0)
February 2, 2009
Bad statistics on cars at the ISO Quality Planning
ISO Quality Planning has a new study ranking the rates at which various cars get tickets. Life Hacker discusses the same report in their piece The Most Ticketed Cars on the Road. The Hummer H2/H3 comes in as the number one most ticketed car, and the study writers provide the following quote: "The sense of power that Hummer drivers derive from their vehicle may be directly correlated with the number of violations they incur, or perhaps Hummer drivers, by virtue of their driving position, are less likely to notice road hazards, signs, pedestrians and other drivers.".
This is possible, It could be that there is a treatment effect where driving a Hummer causes you to be a more unsafe and illegal driver. I would caution against this reading this ranking.
For one reason, there very few hummers on the road in comparison with the best selling cars in America. The fewer the number of cars on the road of a certain model, the fewer drivers it takes to monkey with the ratio of tickets. This causes the standard deviation of ratios in small groups to be much larger than the standard deviation of ratios in large groups. In fact, I discussed this phenomena before in Interesting article but bad statistics. As such, it may seem remarkable that there are 40 times as many tickets per car given to Hummer drivers than Jaguar XJ drivers, but given the heterogeneity in the number of each car models sold in the USA and the resulting heterogeneity of small car ticket ratios, this isn't nearly as unusual as it seems.
For another reason, the selection effect is massive. Certain kinds of personalities, genders, and ages of people are attracted to different cars. Those same factors would cause variation in the accidents and motor vehicle law breaking in any car they drove, not just in the cars that they happened to buy. This is going to skew the ratio, even if Hummers have no effect on the safety with which people drive.
I see much if not all the variation in car ticketing rates as explained by these two channels, and so I'm skeptical that the car itself has any treatment effect.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)