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June 30, 2009
Composition Effects?
The court was remarkably polarized in the 74 signed decisions it issued this term, dividing 5-to-4 or 6-to-3 in almost half of them, up from roughly a third in the three previous years. The court reversed lower courts about three-quarters of the time, up from two-thirds in the last term. ... Justice Kennedy was in the majority 92 percent of the time and in all but 5 of the 23 decisions in which the justices split 5-to-4. Those decisions were, moreover, often divided in the expected way: in 16, all four members of the court’s liberal wing were on one side and all four of its conservatives were on the other.The Roberts Court, Tipped by KennedyAnd in between them was Justice Kennedy, the most powerful jurist in America. He joined the liberals 5 times and the conservatives 11. That was a significant shift to the right: in the previous term, Justice Kennedy voted four times each with the liberals and the conservatives in cases divided along the traditional ideological fault line.
None of the inference discussed above is persuasive. We don't know what the natural variation in the ideological make-up of cases they can select. For all we know this is a perfectly natural level of variation and the cases were suited to policy and legal areas appealing to his conservative preferences. Sure, Roberts might have persuaded Kennedy to move a bit to the right, but we can't know if that explanation is required or natural variation is enough.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:08 PM | Comments (0)
Are we 98% chimpanzee? Does it Matter?
Taylor is particularly scathing on the subject of primate rights. "I don't understand why conservation of the great apes has become synonymous with human rights and their similarity to us, whereas conservation of wetlands or a million other species doesn't carry any such conflations," he says. In this he echoes the Telegraph columnist Steve Jones, who has argued that it is a mistake to apply a human concept, such as rights, to an animal: "Chimpanzees share about 98 per cent of our DNA, but bananas share about 50 per cent, and we are not 98 per cent chimp or 50 per cent banana. We are entirely human and unique." ... Over the past five years, he points out, our understanding of genetics has become much more sophisticated. While there might only be a 1.6 per cent difference in the genome itself, the way it shapes our minds and bodies is radically different. "The key thing for me," says Taylor, "is that when you compare chimps and great apes with humans you notice how much more gene expression there is in humans."Are human beings impossible to ape?Gene expression is when certain genes damp down or speed up chemical processes. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed that in human brains, there is a five-fold increase in the rate of gene expression. Other research has shown that more than 90 per cent of the genes in human brains have been "up-regulated" – that is, they have higher levels of gene expression. Most of these genes are associated with the speed of transmission of nerve impulses or energy production to fuel the brain. As Taylor says, "Bigger, faster, greedier, longer-living – that's the evolutionary story of the human brain."
Another genetic difference between us and chimps is "copy number variation". This is where a gene becomes copied, inserted into another part of the genome and yet still works. For instance, GLUD2 is a gene that governs an enzyme involved in nerve signalling in the brain. It is common to all the great apes, including humans – but with us, the gene has been copied, which makes the enzyme work faster. The resulting neurological intensity, says Taylor, "is like swapping a Lee-Enfield rifle for a machine gun".
Along with other genetic innovations, such as inversions, where whole chromosomes are flipped over, and gene splicing (in which one gene controls up to 50 proteins), the gulf between human and chimpanzee brains starts to widen dramatically. "If you add all this up," says Taylor, "the genetic similarity between humans and chimps drops to 87 per cent."
We don't need them to be our equals to decide that they are worthy of treatment better than mere things. That's sufficient but hardly necessary.
I've often wondered how we would persuade a vastly more powerful, long lived, and intelligent species to value our lives above those of farm animals. I'd like to think that creatures meeting a minimum standard of brain power and emotional complexity would earn the limited respect of a more powerful race. That's the frame of mind that gives me special respect for the dignity, happiness, and suffering of animals like wolves (and dogs), horses, elephants, whales, dolphins, and the great apes. Which reminds me of two science fiction stories. In The Uplift Saga there are special punishments for killing members of those sorts of animals, proto-sentient races that are capable (with genetic tinkering) of making it to full sentience. In Accelerando a character makes the case that how we treat emerging artificial intelligences will become important because it will dictate how they will treat us when they inevitably eclipse us in power and intellect.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:43 PM | Comments (0)
Causes of poverty
Ballard considered this childhood ordinary. “People who read Empire of the Sun have often said to me, ‘What a strange life, how unusual,’” he told the BBC World Service in 2002. “And I say to them, actually, the life I led in Shanghai before and during the Second World War was not strange; it wasn’t unusual. The majority of the people on this planet today and for most of this century and previous centuries have always lived lives much closer to the way I lived than to, say, the comfortable suburbs of Western Europe and North America. It is here where I live today that is very strange by the world’s standards. Civil war, famine, flood, drought, poverty, disease are the norms of human experience.”Death of a Dystopian
Another voice sharing the opinion that it is wealth and not poverty that has causes.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
File under misleading
Today, the U.S. ranks next to last among the 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in total federal revenue as a share of GDP. Our federal revenues represent 18% of national output, down from 20% just 10 years ago. That makes the mismatch between our spending and our revenue very large, producing the huge deficits we face.We'll Need to Raise Taxes Soon America has an unusually high level of government decentralization under its federalist system. As a result we also have fairly high local taxes. The total tax burden is actually fairly high. As for the best way to cut the deficit, you can plug a budget deficit with dollars from cutting spending just as well as those from raising taxes. Both create knock on effects. Me, I'll take my chances with the Keynesian multipliers and choose to costs and benefits of cutting spending rather than raising taxes.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:45 AM | Comments (0)
Comparing alcohol and drug prohibition
I'm reading the fantastic The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, and in one of the stories, a ethical and talented lawyer helps defend a speak-easy operator during alcohol prohibition. The police bust in and arrest her. The law is openly mocked, and she isn't in much trouble for that, even though she's in possession of between 15-20 gallons of illegal booze. Compare that with today.
A typical marijuana cigarette ("joint") contains between 0.5 and 1.5 grams of marijuana.. Most states that I know of have some sort of possession with intent to deal rule, like this one in Indiana kicking in at 30 grams. In contrast, there are 33.8 oz in a 1 liter bottle of liquor. Take a look at your liquor cabinet. I'm probably safe in guessing you have no intent to distribute alcohol for money, yet any one of your unopened bottles would be enough to upgrade you from misdemeanor to felony if it were an equivalent number of psychotropic doses of marijuana. Where as once prohibition laws treated even the equivalent of a corner bodega's worth of booze as a minor crime, today we consider far less than a household's booze for private consumption a major felony.
I also thought it was interesting that the upstanding, anti-corruption lawyer in the story is shown drinking in a another illegal drinking environment, and that includes at least 5 drinks. It is hard to imagine a story like that today. This suggests to me that drug prohibition will not end soon. The level of public contempt of the drug laws by good men has not reached the appropriate level.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2009
The fear of the NY Times and my hope
Powerful voices on the court, including Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion on Monday, began to call for something close to a zero-tolerance policy when it came to government counting its citizens by race for any purpose. And the court became skeptical of Congress’s making its own legislative judgments in ways that threatened to expand the boundaries of the court’s own narrowing constitutional vision.The Court Changes the Game
Surely this is better than nonsense like this:
Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s “four-fifths rule,” a test that one racial group passed at less than 80 percent the rate of another group would place an employer in presumptive violation of Title VII.Which reminds me a bit of the Three-fifths compromise.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
Antique ivory, entertainment, and morality
TheBlueEyedGirl and I enjoy playing dominoes. One of my friends got us an antique eboy and ivory set. It is a work of art. Now though we eat meat, we regard elephants as animals worthy of special moral consideration due to their intelligence. We certainly we wouldn't buy any elephant meat or ivory that came from a elephant today. So last night when we played a few rounds we wondered if continuing to play a gamemade from the teeth of a sentient animal was cruel. On the one had, I can see us as honoring the elephant by continuing to use the dominoes. It doesn't do anyone any good to throw them away. We cannot undue the suffering caused to the animal and by using them and admiring their beauty I could see us as adding dignity to its death. On the other hand, let's say that someone had a Nazi or Cambodian genocide horror that made a set of dominoes from human bone.Would anyone get behind the argument above? That by using them I somehow honor the dead? I don't think anyone would accept that argument there. I cannot put my finger on the difference, but I sense there is one.If I decide that I need to bury the elephant teeth with dignity, I'm not sure how to do that. I can't exactly fly to an elephant graveyard in Africa. Further, I've seen the fossils of our ancestors in natural history museums, and there doesn't seem to be a big ethical problem there. So what is it about human dice that summons our digust instinct that isn't troubled by museams with staged skeletons of astralopithicus? Where do elephant dominoes belong on that scale? I'm at a loss.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:12 PM | Comments (2)
An interesting categorization system
I'm into role playing games. Yes, I know that is somewhat odd for a grown man, but it is fun. I came across this categorization system for non-player characters (NPC) for dramatic purposes.
There are four sorts of non-player character: spear carriers, informants, patrons, and trouble-makers. Spear carriers (called extras in the movies) serve to provide atmosphere, needed skills the players might not have, or cannon fodder (in case a referee wants to show what great danger the players are in by killing someone but does not want to do in one of the players). Informants serve to give the players information, and are ideal for those situations in which the referee needs to give false data, but does not feel like lying to the players outright. Informants may be experts the players consult (such as a university professor or scholar) may be passengers or crew of a starship which the players are on, or may be people that the players casually meet in the course of seeking rumors or employment. A patron is a NPC who has a job offer for one or more of the players. The patron provides some of the information the players will need to carry out the job (rarely will all information be provided; the players must find some things out for themselves), and will offer a reward of some sort. ... Trouble-makers are specifically intended to cause problems for the characters. Trouble-makers include police, customs, tax, and immigration officials, other government red-tapers, thugs, ruffians, hi-jackers, thieves, con-men, and characters who strut around in opera capes and samurai helmets talking like James Earl Jones.
Traveller - Books 0-8: The Classic Books
I like these categories. Though certainly people move between these categories, especially moving from spear carriers, informants, and patrons into trouble-makers. In my own games, spear carriers are the rarest categories and trouble makers are the most common. I see extras as a fifth category distinct from spear carriers. A spear carrier is an extra with lines or a name. A real extra is someone in the background who you never talk to, or interact with physically, verbally, or socially beyond perhaps holding a door open for them, accidentally spilling your coffee on them, or being an anonymous hostage.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:28 PM | Comments (0)
Universal Cell phone Charger
I read on The Consumerist that the E.U. Agrees To Universal Standard For Phone Chargers. Many critique the current variety of charging systems as profit maximizing waste. That is, cell phone manufacturers create needless variety to raise the price of accessories to ensure healthy profits. Defenders say that different electronics, battery, and form factor (size) specifications necessitate different adapters. In any case, there now exists generic hardware requiring only simple adapter plugs when upgrading your phone. See for example the Igo system. It is also true that within a single manufacturer there are often few different chargers required. When the BlueEyedGirl upgraded to her new phone she was able to keep the same charger because she moved from a Razor to a Krazor and they used the same adapter. That was one reason why she picked it. Those desiring to retain the same accessories can easily choose from a few updated models that will continue to use them. However, a generic charging system probably will differ from the current ones, necessitating that everyone buy new equipment, including that small group that actually wanted to avoid buying new accessories.
Let's recap. Many people won't care, and will have possibly sub-optimal generic accessories. Some people will care, but they will have to buy new accessories because phones using their old systems won't be available. Economies of scale and competition will probably reduce prices on accessories, though I've been buying cheap (well below retail) accessories on Ebay for years, so I'm skeptical of the savings here.
I'm curious what will happen in the US market. I'd say we can judge the effectiveness of this regulation by its consequences outside the region. If there really are big savings from additional standardization and competition, one would expect that phones offered in the US will conform to the EU standard. However, the world's best selling phone, the Nokia's 1100 handset has sold over 200 million units, so I'm skeptical that there are additional scale economies. Additionally, manufacturers must already make somewhat different charging system for the varying power systems around the world, and there is some variation within product lines, so it can't be too expensive to have differing hardware by region. We shall see.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)
I don't think this qualifies as a coup
Coup d'état, a sudden and decisive action in politics, esp. one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force.
According to the WSJ:
That Mr. Zelaya (Honduran President) acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.
Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.
The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.
Honduras Defends Its Democracy Fidel Castro and Hillary Clinton object.
The NY Times essentially agrees with these facts, and yet gives the headline Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup. If the congress impeaches the president and he won't go and so they have to call in the military, would they call that a coup? I doubt it. But when the supreme court does the same thing the NY Times seems to think that is a coup.
Reminds me of the famous quote of Andrew Jackson about the Supreme Court's holding that the state of Georgia could not impose its state laws upon Cherokee tribal lands, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." Was that a coup too?
Mr. Zelaya is surely naive if he believes this:
“They are creating a monster they will not be able to contain,” he told a local television station in San José. “A usurper government, that emerges by force, cannot be accepted, will not be accepted by any country.”
There are quite a few governments, including our own that are usurpers emerging by force.
PS
I think David Bernstein at Volokh agrees.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:46 AM | Comments (1)
A man owns himself
"We want to celebrate this black man,” Mr. Foxx said of Michael Jackson. “He belongs to us and we shared him with everybody else."
In Jackson’s Death, Black Ambivalence Fades
A man owes nothing to other members of his race simply by virtue of a few shared genes. Michael Jackson was born free, but in many ways lived an unhappy life trying to serve the needs of others. His life may end up serving as testament to the power over attitude of means. Richer than virtually every man on earth, one-time sex symbol, famous, and a decent family, yet he couldn't find happiness. I can't help imagining a world where he never made it as a solo- artist and ended up a much happier background singer/dancer as an adult. It really does seem as though some performer children's lives are forever ruined in childhood. It just leads to a cascade of bad choices. Is it a lack of social capital from being a child when all adults are sycophants and defendants? Is it having a concentrated skill portfolio lacking teamwork, compromise, and a tolerance for mild suffering? Is it an unnaturally high set point for consumption? Does it do something to our risk tolerances or discount rate? I don't know.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:06 AM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2009
Found religious icons look like more than Jesus and mary
Source: The Pearl of Allah: Largest Pearl in The World. It bears that name because it looks like a man wearing a turban. Unlike most of the pearls you've seen this one formed as a burr attached to the clam's shell, not a free floating bit inside. An interesting write-up of the pearl's discovery over at natural history magazine from back in 1939: The Pearl of Allah
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2009
Astonishing fact
“The temporal resolution of our vision,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University, “is an order of magnitude slower than what our auditory system can cope with.”When an Ear Witness Decides the Case
On the other hand, if vision didn't work this way, movies would require 10 times as much film and 10 times faster cameras and projectors. This would mean vastly brighter lighting on film, faster film emulsions, and wider aperture lenses. All of these factors may have prevented motion picture technology from being invented or delayed or prohibited its commercial adaption. Same deal for computer monitors. Imagine if CRT needed 600htz refresh rates instead of 60htz to avoid users noticing flickering. That would have severely impeded the adoption of graphical user interfaces for computers.
I'm used to thinking of my vision as my best sense. Deeper reflection suggests that it is only the best in distinguishing certain kinds of information. The superior ability of hearing to distinguish speed, smell to evoke memory, touch to provide unidirectional information suggests that there really isn't a best sense.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:27 PM | Comments (0)
The law of unintended consequences
How is the following for an unintended consequence, when the police cracked down on liquor law and organized crime at the Stonewall Bar, they ended up unleashing the gay rights movement:
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.The Real Mob at Stonewall
...
Another myth is that the police raid on the Stonewall was part of a broader crackdown on gay bars in the summer of 1969, a mayoral election year. In fact, the Stonewall operation was the work of a Police Department deputy inspector, Seymour Pine, and officers from the morals unit, and they carried it out without the knowledge of the officers of the local police precinct, whom they suspected of taking payoffs from the Stonewall and other Mafia-run gay bars in the Village.Deputy Inspector Pine had two stated reasons for the raid: the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license, which it was, and it was being used by a Mafia blackmail ring that was setting up gay patrons who worked on Wall Street, which also seems likely.
The owner of the Stonewall, Tony Lauria, was reputed to be a front man for Matty Ianniello (known as “Matty the Horse”), a capo in the Genovese crime family who oversaw a string of clubs in the city. New York’s gay-bar scene at the time was a corrupt system apparently designed to benefit mobster owners, who served watered-down drinks at inflated prices, often made with ill-gotten liquor from truck hijackings.
It is interesting to think that without licensing requirements to serve alcohol, they might never have been a gay rights movement. The unintended consequences of public policies are so large that one could easily despair at any hope of improving them by design. Another vindication for Hayek.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2009
Careful with that external validity
In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.Ancient warfare: Fighting for the greater good
This is tricky. We know that many cultures have special honors for those dying in battle. We don't know if those dying a violent death were singled out for special burial resulting in their skeletons lasting into the present day. If they were, then examining the burial evidence doesn't tell us how violent these societies were.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
Does multiple intelligence exist?
But Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.Not Every Child Is Secretly a GeniusBriefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.
...
The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks. To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not.
...
The theory of multiple intelligences fundamentally conflates intelligence and motivation. It's a fatal flaw. Motivation is certainly important, and it works alongside intelligence to produce results. However, having the raw biological machinery of intelligence is simply irreplaceable.
I look at the eight categories and I too see their seduction. When I learned about multiple intelligences I accepted it as one of those obviously true things. Now looking at it it seems more like horoscopes, a flattering scatter-shot that appeals to our vanity.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2009
What to read
I just finished reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. They are the stories (4 among the two books) of a mid twenties man working for the UK government as an anti-occult agent. The world is one in which the H P Lovecraft / Cthulhu stuff works and that some sorts of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science are fully function sanity eating magic, but the vast majority of us don't believe the world is any different from our own. Though he says in an appendix that he'd never heard of Delta Green, the series reads like a series of Delta Green stories set in a better world where these horrors aren't quite as threatening, the government isn't quite as bad or incompetent, and magic and horrors don't as rapidly consume your sanity.
The first book (The Atrocity Archives) was great. It was dark, dangerous, interesting, and exciting without being anything like a bond movie. The world had some eldritch horrors in it, but not so many dark gods, black magic, and zombies that you wondered how the rest of the world didn't know about it. A horrible (in the other sense) and wonderful story.
The second story (The Jennifer Morgue) was more like a sloppy parody of the first book. The first book wasn't the most well written science fiction book, but a good read. The second is a sloppier mess, with shifting vantage points, dream sequences, way more magical elements (making you wonder how anyone could keep that stuff under wraps), and tons of chatty footnotes (a la Terry Pratchett but they don't work nearly as well here), all indicating the author couldn't tell this second book int he tight, organized the way he told the first one. The second book has way more Bond-like stuff in it. Which is great in James Bond movies but sloppy here, even with the geas-driven plot driving some of it, this reader just didn't care for it.
I don't believe that Stross has written sequels to any of his other books, so I wonder if he rushed it to market for commercial reasons. I'd strongly recommend reading The Atrocity Archives, but you can take or leave The Jennifer Morgue.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:19 AM | Comments (1)
June 19, 2009
Keeping one's head in a crisis
The blue eyed girl and I went on a nice long, hot hike today. On the way down our feet hurt and we took off our shoes to allow our feet to cool. As we were relaxing, a large rattle snake slithered within a foot of us. I noticed it and she did not. I got her attention, we stood upon the long on which we had been sitting and moved as far away as our bare feel allowed. The snake passed by us without looking much at us or rattling even once. Though intellectually I knew that the absence of a rattle meant that we were in no danger, the emotional part of my mind experienced enough fear that I lacked the presence of mind to snap a picture.
I was a hot day but a very nice hike of about 1700 feet of elevation gain and 7.5 miles of trail. Strangers can be stunningly nice. We walked back through some camp grounds. I found a nice couple and I asked for some directions to ensure I was on the right track. Not only did they help me but they offered me a delicious ice cold beer.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:33 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2009
Astounding
Some dogs learn to understand an impressive number of words, as well. A gifted border collie, Rico, mastered the names of more than 200 objects using a technique called fast-tracking that small children also employ, Juliane Kaminski, also of M.P.I. Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues reported in 2004 in Science. The researchers introduced a novel item into Rico's mix of toys then asked him to retrieve it. He did so by associating the unfamiliar name with the unfamiliar object. He even remembered the name of the toy a month later.Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can Talk
That's amazing. Two hundred sign language words. I've heard that people can teach their dogs 300 spoken words, but I could see that as both exaggerated and / or including a lot of compound words. I once saw a guy at summer camp tell his dog (by name) to go pick a baseball mitt up off the field and bring it to him and it did, all without looking at the mitt, the field, or the dog.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:10 AM | Comments (1)
June 16, 2009
Lousy animal rights reporting
From The Economist:
Some 12m animals are used in scientific procedures each year in Europe. Most are mice and rats.
Suffering for science
For sure this is wrong. Fish, worms, and flies are all animals and are vastly more numerous in use as animal test subjects. They probably mean mammals or animals requiring IRB clearance and not animals. I would imagine that an average fly lab has well over one million flies at any one time and they only live a couple of weeks.
The European Commission said in November 2008 that it wanted to update the rules to better protect laboratory animals throughout Europe. ...
In particular, the politicians decided against an outright ban on the use of great apes. Instead they voted to allow such experiments only when they are intended to conserve the number of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans, or when using these species becomes essential to tackling a disease that threatens people. In practice, no great apes have been used in Europe for years and there are no breeding colonies from which to take them.
I'm surprised this doesn't get more coverage. When Americans wanted to protect human suffering by restricting stem cells, they were mocked by many for over-weighting some abstract sense of suffering over obvious human suffering. The high standards of these European IRB must cause good research to be left undone, or to be done sub-optimally. That means more money wasted and more people suffering than necessary.
Sharing information freely should help to reduce the number of animals scientists use. Today they usually publish the results of their research only if they are positive, but if there is more data about negative results, scientists are less likely to repeat experiments needlessly.
Or it could do the opposite. No one is talking about reducing the number of scientists. By reducing duplication of effort and keeping the number of scientists constant, it raises the likelihood that the research is fruitful. More fruitful research means more funding and more interesting experiments, leading to more animals being experimented upon. Alternatively, greater information sharing means that there is increased pressure not to be scooped, leading to even more duplicated experiments as scientists race to be first.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2009
A hopeful story of growing old
All-Night Care for Dementia’s Restless Minds is the wonderful story of a "night camp" for higher functioning old folks going senile. Everyone in the story lives with their families, but bizarre night behavior put them on the verge of entering nursing homes. Instead they found The Hebrew Home at Riverdale, a place where they can spend the evening having fun safely.
This is one of the most dignified and pleasant depictions of the end of life experience I've even seen. Since most people can't afford to have 24-hour live in care, this may be the best we can hope for. I'm glad what we can hope for is pretty good.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2009
Different learning curves
Among skilled practitioners, who would you guess is faster, Morse code operators or text messengers?
Morse Code-Leno - Awesome video clips here
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2009
A solution for the rich world too
Across much of the developing world, buying medicine amounts to a crapshoot. Consumers in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia face at least a one-in-four chance of paying good money for fake pharmaceuticals, according to World Health Organization estimates.mPedigree: Putting Safety into Consumers' HandsHere’s how their method works: mPedigree [the new solution to the problem] provides pharmaceutical manufacturers with specially coded labels, which are affixed to individually packaged medicines. At the drugstore counter, the purchaser scratches off a label to reveal a unique code, which he or she texts to a four-digit number. An automated service looks up the code in a database. On the spot, the consumer gets a reply message indicating whether the drug is genuine or fake.
The idea puts drug authentication into the hands of consumers, “who are the ones with the most to lose,” Gogo points out.
Internet pharmacies are used in rich countries to save money on drugs and medical advice, protect patient privacy, and for off label and recreational uses. However, fake drugs plague the industry for corresponding reasons.
The extent of Britain's online pill habit was exposed in a survey commissioned by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which warned that millions of Britons could be playing Russian roulette with their health because up to 50% of all drugs seized prove to be counterfeit.
Warning over fake drugs on the internet (though for sure this is not a selective sample and likely to overstate the rake of counterfeiting)
Anonymity means that suppliers face fewer consequences for fake drugs, off label uses make it difficult to check if drugs are working, and the desire for privacy may be a symptom of an embarrassing condition or illegal habit that makes pursuing a remedy difficult even if the malfeasance is detected.
This system developed for the third world would be perfect for internet pharmacy users. No need to trust them, all you need is your cell phone to verify if the drugs are real. If adopted by internet pharmacists I expect this will significantly decrease fakes in the industry. This is a triumph for self-regulation. No need for the government to force this into law because the market provides an incentive.
Hat Tip: Service helps Africans spot fake drugs
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:11 AM | Comments (0)
How to read the news
Overall, according to a study published in Lancet Oncology last year, five-year cancer survival rates are higher in the U.S. than those in Canada.Canada's ObamaCare Precedent
America has better diagnostic equipment than Canada and shorter wait lists to use it. Therefore, on average cancer is caught earlier in America. Catching it earlier means that even if there were no difference in the quality of treatments between countries then a patient would be more likely to live five years after detection in America. Therefore, since early detection without better treatment is worth little, the differences in survival rates overstate the differences in the quality of care.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 9, 2009
How not to save money
In the past, companies calculated that building their own offshore office could save them from paying the 15% to 20% margin that outsourcers typically charge. That sent Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Bank of America Corp. and others into India with their own centers.Now as many companies cut costs, the benefits of managing their own facilities don't appear as substantial as once thought. Turnover at offshore offices is typically high and workers in India often receive annual raises, meaning the cost structure of such centers can escalate rapidly. In all, it costs about 25% more to operate a captive center than to have an outside company provide the same services, according to Forrester Research.
Firms Shed India Centers to Cut Costs in Recession
The headline is misleading. Firms appear to be selling off their India offices, but contracting to continue to use their services. It is of little surprise that specialized firms owned and operated by natives with significant linguistic and cultural expertise are able to outperform US based business conducting business from afar and in English. If you want to control costs you can take advantage of the more efficient native firms by taking an equity investment in an Indian firm as part of the long term service contract.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:31 AM | Comments (0)
June 8, 2009
I am amused
In a pre-election story datelined Beirut, the New York Times noted that if Hezbollah won, "there will be concern in Washington and Tel Aviv." Huh? Presumably the Times is using the standard journalistic synecdoche of referring to a country's government by the name of its capital--but Tel Aviv isn't the capital of Israel. Jerusalem is.Synecdoche, Tel Aviv?True, the Ministry of Defense has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, so maybe the Times means to refer to the concerns of Israel's military establishment. But the U.S. Defense Department is also located outside the national capital, so in that case the reference should have been to "Arlington and Tel Aviv."
A search of the NY Times archives of the paper's opinions didn't offer much on the subject of the "capital of israel". I saw Thomas Friedman Jerusalem will remain the unified capital of Israel, and many letters saying as much, but the editorial board itself had little to say on the matter. I attribute this more to incompotence than a change in (or revelation of) the paper's policy on the matter.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:11 PM | Comments (0)
Stock market regulations often have the wrong focus
Eliot Spitzer rattled Wall Street when he forced major brokerages to spend $460 million on independent stock research for their Main Street clients. Turns out that many investors couldn't have cared less.Stock-Research Reform to Die?Since Mr. Spitzer's landmark settlement in 2003, annual reports show that few individual, or "retail," investors took advantage of the offering. During one recent year at Credit Suisse Group, for instance, just 16 retail clients had retrieved reports from the bank's Web site.
We would have better functioning financial markets if regulations focused on making sure that financial professionals had accurate and timely information on assets while retail investors had simple and clear information on asset classes. Instead we labor under the illusion of the small time investors studying financial statements in basements. Rather than pretend that retail investors are misled by CEO's puffing up their stock (S.E.C. Accuses Countrywide’s Ex-Chief of Fraud) we should instead say that we expect people who invest in assets to be grownups and know the risk of what they are buying.
You don't need to understand very much to hold a mutual fund of bonds, even though the underlying bonds may have all sorts of complicated clauses, covenants, and options. To protect mom and pop, tell them that they should not own basic securities like individual bonds, stocks, or (most) derivatives. It is far better for them to hold asset classes in the form of mutual funds, ETF, pensions, annuities (in some cases) and insurance and leave the pricing and trading of individual securities for those with the time and experience to understand them properly. Focus on getting the right mix of seven or so asset classes (with decent tax advice and low fees) and you will do much better than the average investor does today.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:52 PM | Comments (0)
Selling legal rights
Investing in Lawsuits, for a Share of the Awards is an article from last week's NT Times on a few funds that invest in lawsuits. This allows harmed parties who need cash now or lack the means to vigorously pursue their legal rights the opportunity to benefit from outside investors. The investors share in both the risks and rewards of such a suit. Such investments are a legal and ethical minefield.
For example, if both sides can get investment in the legal outcome, the net result may be huge increases in legal spending. Legal arms races in expectation benefit neither party. To the extent that they interfere with the normal legal settlement process, which avoids costly, risky, and time consuming court cases, it again chews up resources and further slows justice. If it encourages solicitation of legal clients (a bar ethics violation) because lawyers know that cases with good financial are likely to gather external funding then increasing social justice may come at the direct cost to the corruption of the legal profession.
But that's just thinking about the supply of lawsuits. Perhaps knowing that lawsuits against the weak will be more common will generate more interest in binding mediation / arbitration. That is, as the court system becomes more expensive those in commerce will opt out to the extent possible, instead entering into less expensive, simpler, and faster negotiation set ups. Since they could do that now and don't, I infer that many powerful people believe that they can push around the weak in court and so have little need to resort to arbitration.
Investment in lawsuits might cause a short term increase in suits but a long term reduction in them as the norm evolves into simpler and less costly methods of dispute resolution. We used to have norms and leaders who could pull feuding interests together for an equitable solution motivated by shared culture, religion, location, and norms. Now we mostly use lawyers, who author Robert Putnam calls manufacturers of synthetic trust. Making sure that everyone with a good case has access to the financing they need to wage it could push us into developing less costly and more equitable methods of dispute resolution. That would be good.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:09 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2009
Why blog under a pseudonym?
Although not an exhaustive list of reasons, blogging under a pseudonym allows me several privileges.
One, it allows me to explore ideas. Committing yourself in writing to an unpopular, strange, or odd idea with your given name attacked in some sense backs you into holding it forever. I may not believe those ideas, but allowing The One Eyed Man may try them on for a while to see how they fit makes my life of the mind much richer.
In my real persona, I have a reputation that might not always be well served by having a casual Internet search reveal my real or trial opinions on the sixteen hundred or so matters that I've commented on over the last seven years.
This separation provides a second and third benefit. The second is that I prefer to keep business out of my personal mental life. It is much better for my bosses, corporate communications departments, clients, and hiring and tenure committees to think of me as a polite and nice young man who does good work without them having to worry about whether working with me is an endorsement of my fairly radical libertarian ideas. Hire me because my work is good or don't because it is not. Don't make doing so a referendum on my private beliefs.
The third benefit arrives because bosses and advisors think that they own your life. In some ways they do. They ask you for things and you do them. If that means working late, very well then. But if they don't ask, then your time is your own. Allowing them the full run of your personal life is to allow them to decide after the fact if you are busy enough. I know that most bosses would not stoop so low, but many would. If I do everything you ask and it allows me the time to keep this blog, that is my business. It is no fair deciding that because I have a blog I must have too much free time and then asking me to do more work. A pseudonym removes that temptation from management.
Fourth, a pseudonym is easily adopted, quickly shed, and then never regained. I may not have thought through all the good reasons for having a pseudonym, but I enjoy many of those benefits nevertheless. If at any point it becomes more trouble than it is worth then I will likely give it up. If I started under my real name I could never change my mind. Options have value.
I have been thinking about all these reasons because recently a moderately high profile academic blogger was outed in the course of a fiery debate (Another Blogging Pseudonym Bites the Dust). I enjoy my relative privacy. I would be upset if someone outed me and so I sympathize with the outed man who's name I won't repeat. But like him, that the privacy invasion of my privacy upsets me doesn't mean that I am entitled that privacy as a matter of moral right. I can entertain the idea that the world would be a better (more thoughtful and civil) place without anonymous blogging. Nevertheless, unilateral disarmament on my part would seem to have little impact.
I try hard to be civil here. I will not let Belligerati be my Ring of Gyges. I hope it shows that I endeavor to make this a serious and polite place for discussing ideas. My pseudonymous policy mostly serves that end. I do not want it to exists as a way of protecting a marauding forked tongue from the consequences of his words.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:46 PM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2009
Why are insurance forms non-standardized
Back in 1993, the political strategist (and former Times columnist) William Kristol, in a now-famous memo, urged Republican members of Congress to oppose any significant health care reform. But even he acknowledged that some things needed fixing, calling for, among other things, “a simplified, uniform insurance form.”Keeping Them HonestFast forward to the present. A few days ago, major players in the health industry laid out what they intend to do to slow the growth in health care costs. Topping the list of AHIP’s proposals was “administrative simplification.” Providers, the lobby conceded, face “administrative challenges” because of the fact that each insurer has its own distinct telephone numbers, fax numbers, codes, claim forms and administrative procedures. “Standardizing administrative transactions,” AHIP asserted, “will be a watershed event.”
Think about it. The insurance industry’s idea of a cutting-edge, cost-saving reform is to do what William Kristol — William Kristol! — thought it should have done 15 years ago.
How could the industry spend 15 years failing to make even the most obvious reforms? The answer is simple: Americans seeking health coverage had nowhere else to go. And the purpose of the public option is to make sure that the industry doesn’t waste another 15 years — by giving Americans an alternative if private insurers fall down on the job.
If standardizing these forms is an obvious win for customers, why would the insurers have avoided it for as long as they did? It could be that such policies were expensive. It might be that customers don't actually care about standardized forms. Certainly it doesn't bother me much, but maybe medical staff would strongly benefit, and they aren't in a position to negotiate with insurers on protocols. Another possibility is that anti-trust policies have made it difficult for firms to coordinate actions.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:17 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2009
Fact of the day
The history of the rules of the NYSE:
The eighth of a dollar on the NYSE dates back to October 13, 1915, when the NYSE switched from quoting prices as a percentage of par value to quoting in dollars. Prior to that, the minimum price variation had been one-eighth of a percent, which dates back at least as far as 1817, when NYSE trading was formalized, and probably much further.3 Although street lore claims that trading in eighths goes back to the Spanish "pieces of eight" coins that were chopped into eight pieces for use as change in the colonies, a search for historical documents to support this claim has proved fruitless to date. The earliest NYSE stock price records are actually in predecimal British currency units, which means that the currency conversion to Spanish dollars would have created noninteger prices that eliminated any convenience from using the "pieces of eight." It is likely that trading in eighths arose naturally-just as the use of fractions has arisen naturally in other markets and measurement systems. Fractions arise from subdividing each difference by two, perhaps as traders split the difference between their positions(3) The NYSE (1817) archives contain a resolution dated November 1, 1817 stating "that no offer under 1/8 pr (sic) be accepted at this board."
# Tick Size, Share Prices, and Stock Splits by James J. Angel
Starting with a pilot program in 2000, the NYSE began trading a few stocks in decimals and by February 200 all firms listed on the NYSE were traded in decimals. That's 86 years for the last system and at least 98 for the one before that. The mind boggles at trying to imagine the system that the NYSE or its decedents will use in another 90 or so years. Perhaps fractions of a penny will be permitted in a world where electronic money frees us from the shackles of pennies. .
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:51 PM | Comments (0)
Another great rule of reading
Fortunately, we didn't have to! Reuters confirmed our suspicion in the next paragraph of this very dispatch:Does Obama Scare Osama?For some, al Qaeda's concerted attempt to upstage Obama is a propaganda own goal that shows its normally media-savvy operatives in disarray following the departure of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush. They found Bush easy to stereotype as a belligerent, Muslim-hating cowboy.This is a good opportunity to remind readers of one of Taranto's Laws of Journalism: When it appears in a news story, the word some is a first-person pronoun.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)
June 3, 2009
A truth and reconciliation commission for a time of lies
The UK may be marching down the road to petty tyranny, but our cousins on the other side of the pond have a few good ideas left in them. The WSJ reports:
Mobilized by distressingly low levels of public trust in official statistics, the U.K. government is embarking on a daring, and possibly unique, experiment. With broad support, Parliament in 2007 approved the formation of the U.K. Statistics Authority, a group with the budget, authority and independence to question other government agencies on the numbers they release to the public. [...] The agency's task is a delicate one. If it uncovers reams of faulty data that might have been used in crafting public policy, Britons' fraying faith in public institutions could be further eroded.This U.K. Sheriff Cites Officials for Serious Statistical Violations
I wish we would adopt such a policy. I'd like to say that such a committee would work and therefore would be adopted by other democracies, but I'm cynical. I'd be more confident to see such a government-regulatory body spread if it failed in its mission. I compare it with the toothless ombudsmen found in our nations newspapers.
Hat Tip: Statistics police?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:27 PM | Comments (0)
June 2, 2009
A measure of progress
In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.The End of the Affair
It is difficult to wrap one's mind around the tremendous material progress that separates us from the past. The kings of Europe in centuries past couldn't buy today's trinkets for all their fortunes. Viewed that way, buying Manhattan for mere beads seems almost reasonable.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)
What is déjà vu?
I once heard that déjà vu is a brain short circuit where your sensory information is routed directly into your long term memory without hitting your short term memory first. I read about simulating déjà vu in the lab, and now I'm inclined to believe that that explanation is more than a simple scientific folk theorem. Of course, it could just be glitches in the matrix, and the experiments simply cue the same mechanism. Causality is difficult to establish in experimental neurology.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:20 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2009
This may be the best thing I've ever read about abortion
The War on The War on Abortion
Please read it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)