Author: Jonathan

Sold your soul lately?

Via Danny Yee.

7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls

A computer game retailer revealed that it legally owns the souls of thousands of online shoppers, thanks to a clause in the terms and conditions agreed to by online shoppers.

The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul.

“By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.” …

Did financial illiteracy contribute to subprime crisis?

Ezra Klein.

Did financial illiteracy contribute to subprime crisis?

It makes intuitive sense that complicated mortgage products would pose the most danger the borrowers who were least able to understand them. But did that intuition bear out in the real world? Sadly, yes. According to a new paper by Kristopher Gerardi, Lorenz Goette and Stephan Meier, “foreclosure starts are approximately two-thirds lower in the group with the highest measured level of numerical ability compared with the group with the lowest measured level. The result is robust to controlling for a broad set of sociodemographic variables and not driven by other aspects of cognitive ability or the characteristics of the mortgage contracts.”

To translate that back into English, borrowers with the most financial literacy were two-thirds less likely to be in foreclosure than borrowers with the least financial literacy. That result remained even after controlling for demographic characteristics such as education and income and the specific mortgages both groups signed. Bottom line: “Twenty percent of the borrowers in the bottom quartile of our financial literacy index have experienced foreclosure, compared to only 5 percent of those in the top quartile. Furthermore, borrowers in the bottom quartile of the index are behind on their mortgage payments 25 percent of the time, while those in the top quartile are behind approximately 10 percent of the time.”

What seems to be happening here is not that folks who are financially illiterate choose worse mortgages so much as folks who are financially illiterate make more financial mistakes once they have their mortgages. Either way, it’s a reminder of the extraordinary asymmetry of information that stands between borrowers and lenders. You can download the full paper here (pdf).

Java as COBOL

I don’t really know why I keep an eye on /., but from time to time … this seems just about right.

The Struggle To Keep Java Relevant

snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister questions Oracle’s ability to revive interest in Java in the wake of Oracle VP Jeet Kaul’s announcement at EclipseCon that he would ‘like to see people with piercings doing Java programming.’ ‘If Kaul is hoping Java will once again attract youthful, cutting-edge developers, as it did when it debuted in 1995, [Kaul] may be in for a long wait,’ McAllister writes. ‘Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol.’ And, as McAllister sees it, ‘Nothing screams “get off my lawn” like a language controlled by Oracle, the world’s largest enterprise software vendor. The chances that Java can attract the mohawks-and-tattoos set today seem slimmer than ever.'”

Which two Californias?

Traditionally, calls to split California in two have called for a north-south split, generally putting the SF Bay Area and Sacramento in the north, and LA in, well, Southern California along with its neighbors. (Though the proposed state of Jefferson would start roughly at Redding.)

Politically, though, it’s another matter altogether. It can be seen in the red-blue maps after statewide elections, and it can be seen in this map from the Sacramento Bee of how California’s representatives voted on the health-care reform bill.
California Split

Authors reading their books

From time to time I remind you to listen to Michael Chabon reading his Summerland. This would be a good time to do it again, what with pitchers & catchers & all, but that’s not (entirely) why I’m writing.

graveyardbookcover.gifI just finished listening to Neil Gaiman reading his own The Graveyard Book. I won’t say a lot about the book itself. You can follow the link, or if you know Gaiman already, you’ll know it’s worth a read.

But, like Chabon and Summerland, Gaiman does his own reading on the audiobook version of Graveyard, and the result is just as wonderful. Obviously he knows the material, but he’s simply an excellent reader, with a collection of character voices that are just plain fun to hear.

While I’m on the subject of audiobooks, I’ve been meaning to mention that Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole (Booker shortlist) is a fine novel and exceptionally well read, not by Toltz but by two readers, Colin McPhillamy and Craig Baldwin, who are respectively the voices of a father and son, Martin and Jasper Dean, in more or less alternating chapters. Baldwin/Jasper starts off, and I was taken with the reading. When McPhillamy/Martin took over my first reaction was hey, I want more Jasper, but McPhillamy and Martin stole the show.

It’s one of the pleasures of audiobooks, the extra contribution that a really good reader brings to the party.

The Dollar, the Deficit, and Accounting Identities

And the second.

The Dollar, the Deficit, and Accounting Identities

It would be great if people who reported on the budget deficit for major news outlets could be required to know the basic accounting identities that get taught in every introductory economics class. The key one that almost none of them seem to know is that the trade deficit (X–M) is equal to the sum of public and private savings (T–G)+(S–I). This identity means that if the United States is running a trade deficit, then the sum of public and private savings must also be negative. That has to be true — it is an identity. It’s just like 2 + 2 = 4. It is always true.

This matters for all the nutty deficit hysteria because no one every asks the deficit hawks how they would like to see the identity met. The U.S. has a large trade deficit because of the value of the dollar. At a given level of GDP, the main determinant of the trade deficit is the value of the dollar. Politicians and even many economists like to hyperventilate about “competitiveness” and talk about how we’re going to improve our trade situation by getting a better trained and educated work force, rebuilding the infrastructure, or fixing the tax code. But even if you gave any of these characters everything they wanted in whichever direction, there is no plausible story where their policy of choice would have even half the impact on competitiveness and trade as a 10 percent reduction in the value of the dollar — and even then we would only see the impact after many years.

So, the trade deficit is determined by the value of the dollar for all practical purposes. But, most of the deficit hawks see a fall in the value of the dollar as the worst possible outcome. This is their horror story. People will worry about whether the U.S. can pay its debts and then the dollar would fall, the horror, the horror!

Okay, so the deficit hawks want the U.S. to run a large trade deficit. Then the next question is what the rest of the equation should look like. Since they want a balanced or near balanced budget, the deficit hawks must want very low private savings. Again, we can hope to get the identity met by having high levels of private investment, but neither they, nor anyone else, has anything in their bag of tricks that will appreciable raise the level of private investment.

This means that Peter Peterson, David Walker and the rest of the deficit hawk crew want workers to have very low private savings, so that they will have nothing to live on in retirement when we cut their Social Security and Medicare. They may not say this, and it’s possible that they don’t even understand it themselves, but that is the logical conclusion of their position.

That may make Peter Peterson look bad, but accounting identities are even more powerful than rich Wall Street investment bankers with a billion dollars to buy newspapers, reporters, and economists.

—Dean Baker

How to think about the national debt

It’s quiet. Too quiet. So let’s see if Dean Baker has something to say. Heres the first:

NYT Joins Efforts to Scare Public About the Size of Government Debt

Peter Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street investment banker, is devoting more than $1 billion to a campaign to whip up fears about budget deficits in order to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare. It almost looks as though the NYT has joined the effort.

It printed an article today that uses a measure of government debt that is explicitly designed to be misleading. The article reports on the debt of Greece, but then adds in a discussion of the debts of other countries, including the United States.

The calculations are misleading because they compare future obligations over many decades to the current year’s GDP. The honest way to do this calculation is to compare future obligations to projected GDP over the time horizon in which these obligations will be met. However, this calculation would produce a much lower ratio. (The debt in the case of the U.S. would be around 6 percent of GDP.)

It is also worth noting that in the case of the United States, the vast majority of the projected deficit is due to exploding health care costs. If the country fixed its health care system it would instead have large surpluses.

—Dean Baker

The Democratic Party’s deceitful game

Glenn Greenwald:

The Democratic Party’s deceitful game

… Basically, this is how things have progressed:

Progressives:  We want a public option! Democrats/WH:  We agree with you totally!  Unfortunately, while we have 50 votes for it, we just don’t have 60, so we can’t have it.  Gosh darn that filibuster rule.   Progressives:  But you can use reconciliation like Bush did so often, and then you only need 50 votes. Filibuster reform advocates/Obama loyalists:  Hey progressives, don’t be stupid!  Be pragmatic.  It’s not realistic or Serious to use reconciliation to pass health care reform.  None of this their fault.  It’s the fault of the filibuster.  The White House wishes so badly that it could pass all these great progressive bills, but they’re powerless, and they just can’t get 60 votes to do it.   [Month later] Progressives:  Hey, great!  Now that you’re going to pass the bill through reconciliation after all, you can include the public option that both you and we love, because you only need 50 votes, and you’ve said all year you have that! Democrats/WH:  No.  We don’t have 50 votes for that (look at Jay Rockefeller).  Besides, it’s not the right time for the public option.  The public option only polls at 65%, so it might make our health care bill — which polls at 35% — unpopular.  Also, the public option and reconciliation are too partisan, so we’re going to go ahead and pass our industry-approved bill instead … on a strict party line vote.

This is why, although I basically agree with filibuster reform advocates, I am extremely skeptical that it would change much, because Democrats would then just concoct ways to lack 50 votes rather than 60 votes — just like they did here. …

via Glenn Greenwald

Digression

Has it occurred to you that Listerine is named after Joseph Lister, who we learned (when? junior-high biology?) was the inventor of antisepsis. Listerine was named in 1879, when Lister was still alive and working, so the association was presumably livelier than it is today.

The -ine in Listerine has the sense, from chemistry, of “forming names of alkaloids, halogens, amines, amino acids, and other substances” (Oxford American), and we see it around quite a lot—chlorine, for example, from khlōros, green, and -ine (likewise iodine is ‘violet-colored’).

Cocaine, then, is coca-ine, relating to the alkaloid from the coca leaf. It looks like it should be (and is) pronounced co-caine, though. And co-caine in turn influenced the likes of procaine and novocaine, synthetic anesthetics that replaced the earlier use of cocaine for the purpose.

And let’s not forget caffeine, from the French, café-ine.

Five long years (and class-size reduction)

I note, somewhat belatedly, that I’ve been blogging here since January 2005 (or November 2004, if you want to count a first experimental WordPress post).

My first substantive post, BBC: Small-class pupils ‘do no better’, began:

New British research suggests that there “is no evidence that children in smaller primary classes do better in maths or English”.

Anniversaries aside, I bring up that post because it’s still a live subject. In December, a local editor opined (emphasis mine),

School officials are considering “eliminating class size reductions” in kindergarten through third grade. That means that instead of one teacher for every 20 students there may be half again as many students crowded into the classroom. Superintendent Rob Gaskill says there may soon be as many as 32 young scholars in a classroom. There is universal agreement that such a change would have profound implications for the education of young students.

…and our local school board, pushing for a local parcel tax, ranked class-size reduction near the bottom of a list of potential cost-cutting measures.

Class-size reduction (CSR) is popular in California, especially with parents and teachers, but there’s no good evidence that it leads to better educational outcomes, at least not the way it’s implemented here. CSR in California typically means reducing K–3 classes from about 30 to 20 students. What sketchy evidence that exists for CSR benefits is limited to class sizes in the 12–15 range. That, and unsupported claims that it “stands to reason” that CSR is beneficial.

CSR is expensive, and needs better justification than we’ve seen to date.

Archdruid Eileen: On Voting Systems

As you may know, I have an interest in elections and voting, and follow the literature more than casually. I’m delighted to pass on this excellent paper, On Voting Systems, by Archdruid Eileen of the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley.

It’s a brief paper, but contains a fairly comprehensive review of portal, hydraulic and feline balloting systems, along with the single most compelling argument I’ve come across for electronic voting.

I won’t quote any of the paper here, so as to encourage you to read the whole damned thing.

The World According to Howard Zinn

The World According to Howard Zinn

From his 2002 autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train:

howardzinn.jpgTo be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

via James Ridgeway

Teach to the back of the envelope

(I have a draft post on “teaching to the test” rattling around somewhere, hence the title of this one.)

RCA AirnergyThe gadget shown here was displayed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Cnet reported:

The device, called the Airnergy, uses an antenna and circuitry to harvest the energy and an internal battery to store the electrical charge. A company representative told OhGizmo that they were able to charge a BlackBerry from 30 percent to full charge in about 90 minutes using the ambient Wi-Fi signal at CES, although the charge time varies depending on how close the battery is to the original signal.

Now, this doesn’t really pass the sniff test, but, after all, it’s RCA, and they “demonstrated” it, so what the hell? The point of this post is that a judgement like this can be informed by a little back-of-the-envelope calculating, and that this is an example of the kind of skill that I’ll argue elsewhere, eventually, ought to be possessed by any graduate of a high school physics class.

We need some basic facts first. Wikipedia tells us that wifi base stations are limited by the FCC to 4 watts output. My cellphone battery is labeled: 3.7VDC 1150mAH. Assuming 100% charging efficiency, that’s 4.255 watt-hours required for a full charge. I’ll guess from the picture that the receiving antenna is 100 cm2 and that we put it a meter from the transmitter. How much power does the charger “see”?

We know (or can easily look up) that the surface of sphere is 4πr2, so the surface of a sphere with a radius of a meter is about 12m2, or 120,000cm2. Our 100cm2 antenna represents 100/120,000 or 1/1200 of the sphere, which is 4mW.

So at a distance of a meter, we’re looking at 1000 hours to fully charge my Palm Centro battery.

Notice that we’ve erred on the side of generosity to the RCA device. Neither the antenna nor the charger nor the battery charging system is going to be 100% efficient, and the device itself looks to be smaller than 10x10cm. And we’re not going to be within a meter of the wifi box at our local Starbucks.

It’s apparent that, to the extent that the device actually works, it does so only by being in very close proximity to the wifi transmitter.

Now, I suppose there’s a test question here that we could (and should) teach to. Quote the Cnet article and ask, “Is this device practical? Justify your conclusion.” Trouble is, that question requires the kind of answer that’s impossible to grade automatically, and in general, it seems to me that the same thing is true whenever we test practical skills—knowing how, rather than knowing that.

More Real Soon Now.

Addendum: If I were grading the answers to that question, here are some of the elements I’d be looking for.

  • We’re interested in how much power is available from the wifi transmitter, and how much energy (power times time) is required.
  • We’re interested in the area of the surface of a sphere, and the notion that the power available to the device drops with the square of the distance from the transmitter.
  • Assumptions ought to be conservative. If the answer claims that the device is practical, then it should make conservative assumptions about efficiency and size; if not, then (as above) the conservative assumptions go the other way, giving the device the benefit of the doubt.
  • If the answer concludes that the device is not practical, it would be a plus to suggest what RCA is up to, and how it might have been “demonstrated”.

We are not going to be second to none

This morning on NPR we heard from a fellow name of Rob Atkinson, president of something called the “Information Technology and Innovation Foundation” (where do these think tanks come from, anyway?). He was riffing on Obama’s SOTU line, “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”

Mr Atkinson helpfully points out that “the Japanese, Mexicans or Indians … can do the things that are easy to do; they have low-wage labor; they can’t do the things that are harder and more complex and require more knowledge, more skills, more technology, more brainpower—that’s what we can and should be good at, and if we don’t do that then we are in real trouble.”

Any pushback from the interviewer (Liane Hansen)? Naw.

“We are not going to be second to none,” says Atkinson. If he has anything to say about it, we are in real trouble.

For Less Voting

Matthew Yglesias makes the case that we (in the US) vote too much. Heretical, of course, but it has the ring of common sense.

For Less Voting

Ezra Klein saw the same Larry Lessig presentation I was at yesterday. His take is more skeptical than I would be about the pernicious influence of money in politics. If I disagree with Lessig about anything in this regard it’s that I think the focus on the precise modalities with which special interests are allowed to offer bribes to members of congress is too narrow. I certainly support things like “clean elections” laws, but I think we ought to also look at broader reforms.

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely. That creates more scope for corruption. What’s more since campaign money has diminishing marginal returns, the proliferation of elected makes money matter more than it otherwise would.

A big country like the United States is never going to have public officials who are as well-monitored as the ones in a place like Denmark. But we make the situation much, much worse by proliferating the quantity of elected officials to the point where most people have no idea what’s happening. How many people can name their state senator? How many people know what things their school board has authority over and what things their mayor decides? And this is all without considering the absolutely insane practice of electing judges.

Incandescent lights forever

edison_light_bulb.jpgAs I was listening to a friend discuss the early days of digital computer design, and how much things had changed, it struck me that there is one common technology of similar age that would be instantly recognizable to its inventor: the Edison incandescent light bulb.

Edison was only one of many, of course, but he’ll serve our purposes. Edison built the bulb on the right around 1880, give or take. What I find interesting is that, while we’ve all got CFLs and LEDs around the house these days, most likely we’ve also got copper wire bringing electricity into our house and through the walls, mechanical-contact switches, and glass bulbs with white-hot glowing filaments. Edison would be completely familiar with the entire technology (using a tungsten filament and filling the envelope with an inert gas were incremental improvements that Edison would have been familiar with, and didn’t fundamentally change things).

The panoply of other technological inventions from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries (automobile engines, computers, flying machines, etc) have evolved to the point where their inventors would be lost trying to explain them. Otto would understand the principle of my Honda Civic’s engine, of course, but it lives in a nest of high tech that’s well beyond his time.

Not so the lighting system that illuminates me as I type. It’s instantly recognizable in all respects by any techie from 100 years ago. And for longer than we might care to think, I’m guessing.

R.I.P. Howard Zinn

From his hometown paper:

zinn.jpgHoward Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as “A People’s History of the United States,” inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

“He’s made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. “He’s changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can’t think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect.”

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn’s writings “simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

…

via Balloon Juice