Author Archives: Hue White

I originally ran across this in the Winter 2015-2016 print edition of American Archaeology, but the article, a book review, doesn’t appear to be online.  A little search online turned up The Ancient Earthworks Project to confirm:

The Adena and Hopewell aligned many of their earthworks to celestial events such as solstices. They also built many earthworks in geometric shapes and used standard units of measurement (Hively and Horn 1982; Romain 2000). One of these units of measurement is equal to 1,054 feet. For convenience, we can call this the Hopewell Measurement Unit, or HMU. Thus 1 HMU = 1,054 feet. This unit of length is based on the diameter of the Newark Observatory Circle (Thomas 1894:16). This unit of length or its sub-multiples (e.g., 527 ft., 263.5 ft., 131.7 ft.) are found in the dimensions of every Hopewell earthwork assessed thus far, as well as most Adena earthworks. – William F. Romain, Ph.D.

Links added by myself.

So there you have it.  The Hopewell Measurement Unit is 1054 feet.

Often pop-sci articles will talk about machine learning, particularly in the context of Big Data, as well as genetic algorithms, which are algorithms generated by creating a set of algorithms, testing them for solving some problem, and cross-breeding the most successful algorithms to create new, hopefully better algorithms.  (I don’t understand how to structure algorithms so they can be crossed, but that’s neither here nor there.)  But something not mentioned – perhaps because it’s too obscure – is the reward system.  Not survival as a reward, but simply the reward for getting something right: resources.

So when the D-brief blog on Discover Magazine pointed me at Pigeons working as pathologists, my first reaction was how cool is this?

To train pigeon pathologists, a team led by Richard Levenson from the University of California Davis Medical Center and Edward Wasserman from the University of Iowa placed pigeons in a conditioning chamber fitted with a touch-screen monitor. Eight pigeons were shown 144 images of benign or malignant tissue samples at three levels of magnification, at different orientations and at different brightness levels. The birds made a diagnosis by pecking on a blue or yellow rectangle on the screen, and they received a tasty treat for each tissue sample they correctly identified.

And then I wondered.  Do we reward algorithms when they get something right?  And take the anti-thesis – suppose we have some N algorithms competing to get a “right answer”, and some M, less than N, get it right and are so rewarded – are the losing algorithms given the knowledge that they failed?  Are these algorithms – and we might as well call them entities at this point – aware of this failure and begin to employ more scarce resources to secure proper resources?  And do the winners do the computer thing and immediately deploy the resources, or do they conserve them for later use?  How do you conserve computer resources?

Just how much do we emulate Nature?  And, to the extent that we don’t emulate Nature, what are we losing in our computerized emulations of Nature?  Is it important to understand that an organism which succeeds at some test is then not pressured to develop a new way to solve the puzzle, unlike the loser that survives long enough for try #2?

I think I’ve done little more here than expose my ignorance of artificial intelligence and/or biological simulations.

Is it wrong to categorize pigeons with algorithms?

A user remarks upon snoods:

Also a type of hair net. There are snoods for beards, too

Apparently for use in professional situations.  With a little promotion, though, I wonder if they could become a fashion accoutrement. Especially for beards…

From NewScientist (28 November 2015, paywall):

The pendulous flesh hanging down over a male [wild turkey]’s beak is called a snood.

Following a near-death experience for the various subspecies of American wild turkeys, a program for protection and return to their normal range was formulated.  Initial failures taught the researchers that entire flocks had to be relocated – en masse.

By 1960, most wild turkey breeding had been ditched. Instead, wildlife agencies used spring-loaded rocket nets to capture whole flocks and relocate them to a suitable turkey-free habitat. Bingo! Turkeys began spreading like wildfire. Able to adapt to new settings before potential predators had learned to hunt them, they enjoyed a honeymoon period in many places that enabled populations to establish and thrive, says Hughes.

Sure would like to see the netting of an entire flock like that.

As other Minnesotans know, this is an unusual winter in these parts: nary a particle of snow on the ground, unreasonably warm sentiments expressed to each other as the warm weather makes us all sunny, irradiating each other with good cheer and all that rot.  The barren ground presents little barrier to the winds, and little matter what direction said winds howl from: they are cold, and while I may have referenced warm weather a moment ago, the close reader will realize that a relative description will still mean the temperature outside is such that a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood is replaced by driving the car, instead, slowly as we admire the Christmas travesties; but the lack of precipitation means I am not spending time shoveling snow from walk and ‘way.

This is by way of excusing what may seem like an avalanche of Belated Movie Reviews: too cold to do anything outside but shovel snow, and a paucity of same means we either go out to shopping malls or stay inside and watch movies.  So, to the latter we devolve, and last night we saw PLATINUM BLONDE (1931), starring Robert Williams and Jean Harlow, a movie full of non-doctrinaire dialog from the lead character, a newspaper reporter who falls for his subject, a lady of a supremely rich family (we don’t know why) (and that applies to both statements).  Alas, being from different social strata, soon strains appear in the marriage, the lust wears off, and a party running wild, populated by characters from the news world, come together to spark the lead’s literary ambitions, not to mention his feelings for an old pal.

The dialog is snappy and interesting, the lead both self-aware and, yet, helpless in the face of his emotional urges, and while the newspaperfolks surrounding him can be quite amusing, those characters most responsible for supporting him are somewhat flat and depressing.  And the title could easily have been something else: Bird in a Cage, Ignoring the Blindingly Obvious, Who’s Chumping Who? are just a few that come to mind.

It’s a good midnight movie if you have insomnia and don’t have a reason to get up early the next morning.  Some of it will make you laugh, a little will make you cringe.

Prior to the recent Paris summit on climate change, NewScientist (28 November 2015, paywall) covered the topic from the optimist and pessimist viewpoints.  So, despite the positive publicity generated by the closing of the talks last week, here’s the pessimist viewpoint:

Global temperatures could rise 4 °C even if the Paris Protocol is wildly successful

By failing to cut emissions, we are taking a huge gamble. Even if we somehow stick to the target budget of 1000 gigatonnes of CO₂, computer models suggest the resulting warming in 2100 could range from 1.3 °C to 3.9 °C – and keep climbing to 6 °C by 2200 in the worst case. And the models could be underestimating the range of outcomes because they do not fully factor in all the sources of feedback that could cause warming.

So when you read about limiting warming to 2 °C, remember this is far from guaranteed: it is just the most likely out of a range of possible outcomes. Worse still, it now seems certain that we will bust the carbon budget, and many scientists think plan B – sucking lots of CO₂ out of the atmosphere – will prove impossible. Maybe we’ll get lucky, but some very scary scenarios cannot be ruled out.

It’s certainly a little sobering.  Even more sobering has been the drop in car fuel prices over the last year as the United States and Saudi Arabia pump more fuel oil, possibly as a means to attack enemies (USA vs Russia, Saudi Arabia vs Venezuela):

(Courtesy AAA)

And how much of greenhouse gas emissions are from vehicles?  In the U.S., back in 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said 27%:

I worry that lower gas prices lessens demand for electric vehicles, hybrids, and bicycles.  It will be interesting to get the travel report for this season’s holiday traveling.  New records?

The unexpected subtleties of VICKI (1953) graced the screen tonight.  This noir-tinged film concerning the machinations surrounding the death of newly discovered glamour girl Vicki Lane (Jean Peters), as her promotion man, Christopher, is accused of her murder.  It could easily have been gauche and vulgar, but instead plays with the sensibilities of the players, leaving the promotional man incredulous, then motivated to discover the true killer.  Yet, in the end, it’s surprisingly less about the killer, who deserves little notice, but another who heedlessly complicates the entire scheme to satisfy his own little fetishes.

Will the promotions man survive the contretemps?  Will Vicki’s sister ever learn to respect Vicki’s ambitions?

Ketogenic is a new word for me, as NewScientist‘s Clare Wilson explains (28 November 2015, paywall):

But the high-fat “ketogenic” diet can be an effective last resort method of reducing seizures in people with epilepsy that doesn’t respond to drugs, and may even help a range of other brain conditions. Now researchers may have figured out how it works — and how to make the method more palatable. …

Two-thirds of those who try it see their number of seizures fall by half or more. In some cases, as happened for Matthew, children can later be weaned off the diet without their epilepsy becoming worse again.

Until now, the mechanism behind these effects had been a mystery. Now researchers have discovered that one of the breakdown products of fat binds to molecules on the surface of brain cells, calming the storm of electrical activity that can cause epileptic seizures.

The critical component may be decanoic acid:

Now laboratory tests using frog cells have shown that decanoic acid directly binds to a molecule that is found on the surface of brain cells and is known to be involved in spreading electrical impulses between different neurons. When decanoic acid binds to it, it reduces the flow of electrical current into the cell via this molecule. “It reduces the chance of a neuron firing,” says Robin Williams of Royal Holloway, University of London.

Given this effect that a high fat diet can have on the brain, I have to wonder about other cognitive effects – and how the long running recommendations for a diet low in fat has affected cognitive function.  EurekAlert! (ugh) recently published an article on how fats in the diet affect rats:

High-fat feeding can cause impairments in the functioning of the mesolimbic dopamine system, says Stephanie Fulton of the University of Montreal and the CHUM Research Centre (CRCHUM.) This system is a critical brain pathway controlling motivation. Fulton’s findings, published today in Neuropsychopharmacology, may have great health implications. “Our research shows that independent of weight gain and obesity, high-fat feeding can cause impairments in the functioning of the brain circuitry profoundly implicated in mood disorders, drug addiction, and overeating – several states and pathologies that impinge on motivation and hedonia,” Fulton explained. Hedonia relates to a mental state of wellbeing. “Another key finding is that the effects of prolonged high-fat feeding to dampen the sensitivity of this brain reward system are specific to saturated fats – palm oil used in this study – but not monounsaturated fat such as the olive oil used in this study.”

An interesting finding, if it holds.  Of course, animal model translation to human models is always a little tricky.  In a related finding from the University of Oxford, high fat diets may also lower overall body performance.  The summary?

High-fat diet consumption also increased subjects’ simple reaction times (P<0.01) and decreased power of attention (P<0.01). Thus, we have shown that a high-fat diet blunts whole-body efficiency and cognition in sedentary men. We suggest that this effect may be due to increased respiratory uncoupling.

Power of attention?  Something akin to ADD, perhaps.  Although the ADHD (ADD + Hyperactivity) lady I once dated was quite slender…. perhaps burning off the fat through her hyperactivity.  But as I recall, she was not a big eater.

In this ongoing series inquiring into the recognition of the division of human (or at least American) society into sectors and the impact that the reality of these divisions, defined by their goals, have on the practices indigenous to that society, I’d now like to discuss the related problem of import of technical terms.

A technical term can range from a Latin name for a life form to a simple word connoting a practice common to a sector.  By importing a technical term, I mean using a technical term, common in one sector, in another sector’s purview.  I am interested in how this practice can confuse the operationality and confound the goals of a sector.

The example I have in mind is the idea that an education can be bought.  The idea of buying and selling is indigenous to the private sector, where things are made and traded for other things (at its most basic; often currency is used to facilitate transactions, among other purposes).  The point is to make a living by providing things and services of use to other people, who in turn are willing to provide other things to you.

The educational sector is about imparting an education to students, the overwhelming majority of which are children.  Children are the future of society, and general opinion holds that highly knowledgeable and creative citizens are a keystone to a successful society.

It has recently been suggested that students are clients of the educational institutes.  Clients are, again, a private sector technical term: the person who is buying a thing or service from another.  The importation of this term into the educational establishment has an interesting effect on the expectations of the student: That something, an education, will be delivered to them.

But those of us who’ve successfully conquered the education mountain, whether it’s just surviving high school, or acquiring the right to place Ph.D. after their name, is well aware of a simple fact: unlike a car, which you can pay for and drive off the car lot with only the effort necessary to acquire the money desired by the car salesman, an education, for most of us, requires hours of effort and study, the acquisition of mental models which systematize knowledge and make it amenable to use for calculation and prediction, and many other facets which need not be mentioned here.

In other words, the educator does not present an “education” in gift wrapped box to the student who has dutifully put down a pile of currency on the educators desk.  There is neither thing nor service bought.

An educator, to my mind, is a guide into the knowledge and processes of the field in which the educator professes to hold some expertise.  They open the door and give advice, but the student must also contribute: native intelligence, a motivation to master the material, the resources to do the work necessary for mastering the material, and a payment sufficient to the educator’s time.

In these terms, the differences between the educational sector and the private sector are stark, and not to be glossed over.  The educational sector presents knowledge, of facts and processes, as available to the avid learner, requiring their attention and energy in order to acquire them; the customer in the private sector must provide the currency or other product desired by the seller, but may otherwise be relatively indifferent to the transaction, perhaps even neglecting maintenance and matters of that sort.  In these differences lie the heart of the argument that sectors are not only different in goals, but in practices, and this differentiation in practices is key when analyzing problems plaguing the educational sector.

The intrusion of private sector technical terms into the educational establishment has contributed in some small part, I suspect, to the problem of grade inflation.  The demands of student who’ve paid full freight and not received the grades they believed they deserved will cause vociferous complaints, and for those educators, be they front line or administrative, who do not fully understand the implications of the operationality of the educational sector, these complaints will indeed move those educators to attempt to placate their tormentors, however ill-advised this may be.  Thus the sector loses its traction in its Sisyphean (and I do mean never-ending) task of educating those who are ignorant and must be made less so.

Another symptom is losing the focus on the long-held, hard learned lessons of education in favor of the latest fashion.  From this post concerning North Carolina’s educational establishment, desperately struggling against a political system dead-set against public education, comes this:

“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”

– Steven Long, member of the Board of Governors for the University of North Carolina system.  He identifies not as an educator, but as a member of the private sector, and, that being his provincial experience, attempts to manage education as if it’s a private business.  It’s not difficult to predict disaster for the educational establishment and accomplishment of its goal, which is to increase the knowledge and ability of the citizenry for the benefit of society – not just the benefit of the private sector.  The concept of the well-rounded citizen dates back millenia, a fact that seems to have escaped Mr. Long.

Over the last thirty years we’ve seen various experiments with the privatization of education.  Private universities have always been a part of the American educational establishment, often with great success.  It’s beyond my expertise to comment on how a private institute corresponds to the private sector (an unfortunate correspondence of words without guarantee of any inherent relationship); many private institutes are of a religious, rather than private sector, nature, while others are uncertain in my experience.

But we do know there are two recent types of intrusion of private sector into educational sector in the form of institutes: charter schools and for-profit universities.  Both are coming under a shadow.  Charter schools were the subject of a study by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado.  Rather than quote the report, as I’m in a hurry here, I’ll quote from an associated blog, Curmuducation by Peter Greene:

1) Much of the money intended for educating children never makes it to the classroom. Instead, somebody is making money.

Charters can only make more money by increasing revenue or cutting costs. Revenue enhancement techniques include private donations and in-kind “donations” from parents. Revenue can also be enhanced by paying special attention to enrollment and watching things like enrolling students who are labeled special needs, but whose needs are not that large (aka costly to take care of). Chester Upland in PA is a great example of a school that actually earned negative state support because charters were draining them with large payments for low-cost students with special needs. Baker and Miron also note that one reason not to take new students in January is that students added mid-year don’t count toward the money the charter gets from the state.

Charters can cut costs by hiring low-cost inexperienced teachers and not keeping them long.

But all that money the charter “finds” doesn’t end up in classrooms. Instead, charters pump the money into big administrative costs, including hiring both personnel and services. Charters also invest heavily in capital assets. And all of this expense is hugely inefficient as it duplicates work. IOW, when ten charter students leave a hundred-student public school, we end up with two principals and two buildings where one was previously enough.

This is just one of his points culled from the report.  I do intend to read the report; my purpose here is to point out that charter schools are coming under increasing scrutiny, and not holding up well.  Unfortunately, studies like this are not the sort that hit proponents (or detractors) in the nose with their results.  The for-profit university scene, on the other hand, has had some recent results that do.  Consider, for example, now-bankrupt Corinthian College, Inc.  Daily Kos diarist Walter Einenkel has a lovely incendiary post on the matter:

Over the past 10 years it has come to light—through numerous lawsuits and state and federal investigations—that untold billions of dollars has been swindled out of student and taxpayers’ pockets by this private educational company. Earlier this year the Obama administration forgave almost half a billion dollars in federal student loans that were fraudulently acquired and today it’s being reported that further cancelations of federal student loans are coming.

Money is often mistaken as the primary goal in the private sector.  While swindle and fraud is not unknown in the educational sector, a criminal act of this magnitude would be very difficult to pull off.  Walter also helpfully points at another prosecution:

The criticisms of the administration are far from unwarranted as just last month another private educational organization, Educational Management Corporation, settled with the Justice Department for a reported $95.5 million dollars—a far cry from the billions they ripped off.

But enrollment is falling as students discover for-profit institutions do not deliver the same value as traditional institutions.  Inside Higher Ed has the facts from the National Center for Education Statistics:

The data show that postsecondary enrollment over all dropped by 4.2 percent over two years, with undergraduate enrollment falling by 4.8 percent and graduate enrollment by 1.6 percent.

The overall numbers were skewed heavily by declines in the for-profit sector, at all degree levels, and by a 7.5 percent drop in community college enrollment from 2011-12 to 2013-14, as seen in the table below.

I will skip copying the table, as it wasn’t amenable – but private enrollment dropped 16% for four year colleges.  With anecdotal reports of students finding their education from for-profit institutes not receiving the same respect as traditional institutes, this is not unexplainable.  The New Yorker reported in November 2015 that

Enrollment at the University of Phoenix has fallen by more than half since 2010; a few weeks ago, the Department of Defense said that it wouldn’t fund troops who enrolled there. Other institutions have experienced similar declines.

Although U.S News & World Report reported in Feb 2015 that

What’s startling is that for-profit universities have halted their enrollment declines. They’re both recruiting more new students and hanging on to more of the ones they have. According to the same National Student Clearinghouse data, the number of enrolled students at for-profits dropped only 0.4 percent in the fall of 2014, compared to a year earlier. That’s a dramatic improvement from the previous year’s decline of 9.7 percent.

Perhaps the signal from students is not unequivocal, but I think, based on the insights from categorization, I would expect a jagged line in terms of a signal from students as they are enticed to use the for-profit schools as the lower-income students search for a usable education, and then discover the practices optimized for the private sector are not suitable for use in the educational sector.  For example, Mr. Greene’s report, cited above, that charter schools often cut costs by utilizing only inexperienced teachers is really an indictment of this entire approach to education, as one would expect an experienced teacher to be more effective at guiding the student to properly absorbing the desired education.  This should starkly illuminate the paradox at the heart of the matter – the purpose of many in the private sector is to make money, while the purpose of the educational sector is to produce knowledgeable citizens.  These goals are at odds with each other, and for this reason the practices of the private sector are inappropriate to the educational sector.

The first post in this series is here.

Discover Magazine‘s Neuroskeptic blog reports on another failure on the front of psychology studies:

There have been many published studies of romantic priming (43 experiments across 15 papers, according to Shanks et al.) and the vast majority have found statistically significant effects. The effect would appear to be reproducible! But in the new paper, Shanks et al. report that they tried to replicate these effects in eight experiments, with a total of over 1600 participants, and they came up with nothing. Romantic priming had no effect.

Apparently the urge to find something has led to optimistic evaluation of the results:

Shanks et al. say that this is evidence of the existence of “either p-hacking in previously published studies or selective publication of results (or both).” These two forms of bias go hand in hand, so the answer is probably both. Publication bias is the tendency of scientists (including peer reviewers and editors) to prefer positive results over negative ones. P-hacking is a process by which scientists can maximize their chances of finding positive results.

Tonight, almost by accident, we saw the entirety of THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1933), with Barbara Stanwick as the earnest young missionary faced with the horrors of the Chinese Civil War and Nils Asther as warlord General Yen.  This was an interesting movie, not only for its subject matter, but also for the reactions it elicited in me – is this an accurate movie?  Are these really the morals followed by the Chinese?  I don’t know Confucianism, but they don’t really seem to be that way; they’re more machiavellian.  And when Stanwick shouts “yellow swine”, it really gives a bit of a shock to see some racism lit up in lights…

And yet, in her dreams, she fantasizes being saved from a stereotypical ‘yellow devil’ by a man wearing a Western business suit – and General Yen’s face.  So there’s more subtlety to this movie than, perhaps, you’d think from a simple-minded summary such as mine.  Yet, given the lack of idealism implied by Yen’s speech concerning the loyalty of his troops, I wonder at the duplicity of his servant – her position being so dangerous, why would she betray him?  Simply love over the other hostage, a Captain Li who is the only son of a rich family?  Loyalty to her people?  Perhaps an implication that the Chinese of the period were not all alike, that some believed in ideals?  And, yet, with Stanwick’s life in her hands, she happily betrays her as well to what could easily be Stanwick’s death.

So the movie is more than it seems.  Even as the stereotypes come flooding in the front door, nuance and thoughtfulness beckon from the parlor.  Contemporary audiences thought little of the movie, unfortunately.  From Wikipedia:

Barbara Stanwyck blamed its poor box-office showing on racist backlash. Miscegenation, so soon to become taboo in Hollywood, is made palatable and attractive as a natural outcome of passions molded by tumultuous times. McBride quotes her as saying, “The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it … I was so shocked. [Such a reaction] never occurred to me, and I don’t think it occurred to Mr. Capra when we were doing it.”^[

Lawfare‘s Andrew Keane Woods worries about the legal future of what is basically an extra-legal entity:

States are increasingly asserting territorial control over the Internet—often because doing so is the only way to get access to data in which the state has a legitimate interest—and this has a number of troubling consequences.  For example, if law enforcement in one country cannot get access to criminal evidence held by American Internet companies, they might: 1) demand that data be held on local servers, where it can more easily be accessed (and surveilled); 2) deploy covert surveillance efforts to access the data (and perhaps demand a way around the service provider’s encryption); and/or 3) assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over the foreign-held data, throwing Internet companies in an unfortunate conflict of laws. …

In my view, privacy advocates and Internet companies should be pushing hard — much harder then they are currently pushing – to address this larger crisis. States must be allowed to exercise local regulatory control over the Internet in ways that are consistent with their legitimate government interests – like getting access to data critical to a criminal investigation – but without compromising the Internet’s ability to act as a global platform for communication, commerce, and speech.

Jurisdiction is key, of course, and jurisdiction depends on physicality – that is, the tangible location of some chunk of data key to an investigation.  If a crime is committed in one country and the key chunk of data is in another, well, alacrity is not a populous member of this literary landscape.  From Woods’ New York Times editorial piece:

This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.

This leads to some alarming trends, again from Woods:

I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.¹

This aside, though, there’s a hidden assumption – that data is atomic.  It’s not.  It’s often treated that way, of course, even when it’s replicated for such things as Internet management.  Data can be distributed, such that any particular chunk is not usable, but only in combination with the rest does it become useful.  A careful, intelligent criminal could partition critical data and save it in 100 countries – if he knew the server physical locations.  And then the police would have a nightmarish administrative problem.

I’m not familiar with the dark net, so it’s certainly possible that just such a service already exists, just like sales of credit cards and other critical data.  And while I doubt the technical expertise of most criminals, the Internet means it only takes one morally challenged programmer …

¹ As an aside, SF author Jack Vance described, purely as background, an analogous situation having to do with the essence of outer space and how travel times would affect policing efforts, resulting in the creation of the Interworld Police Coordinating Company (IPCC), an entity not necessarily under the control of any local government, almost a private entity

University of Minnesota researchers add the ingredient of humans think to models of crowd behavior … and get this unearthly image.

WorldPress.org‘s Alaina Navarez reports on the wealth gap in Latin America:

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, inequality has increased sevenfold, and the average income of the richest 10 percent of the population is now nine times the average of the poorest. The richest 1 percent of the population in Latin America already own 41 percent of the region’s wealth. By 2022, the top 1 percent are projected to have more wealth than the remaining 99 percent. If this trend continues, will recent progress slip away? The labor market, education, healthcare and technology help shed light on the issue.

While the point here is that most of the population is being left behind, I’m projecting a little larger to the competition between nations.  Today, the wealth of a nation isn’t its gold or equivalent, or most anything else – but the intelligence of the citizenry, gender and ethnic background be damned.  That’s why ethnic cleansing is the mark of a failed country.

And in the competition of nations, the country with the highest average productive training is the country who will “win”, while those who permit the greed of the top percentile to run rampant – they risk being left far behind, as usual, at the very least; violence is always a possibility if those countrymen being left behind perceive they have been treated unfairly and the government is unwilling to step in.

Of course, competition between nations is an interesting topic.  What does winning mean?  We used to fight wars almost as a matter of course, but amongst First World countries we now avoid it, only venting our violence on smaller countries which then adapt new strategies to strike back.  Now we persist in measuring countries against each other, with the unspoken subtext: We’re better than them.  From life expectancy to the distribution of wealth, we strive to be the best.

And why?

Because that’s what we’ve always done.  We can call it an old evolutionary strategy, but it’s still a vibrant part of our lives, and so we strive to be better, by some measure, than the guy across the street, the city across the river, the country over in Europe.

And these days, we talk about technological progress and how that betters our lives.  It’s more civilized; the fruits of one country can be easily shared to others; they may or may not find it psychologically oppressive even as they use their smartphones just as we do.  So it does leave me to wonder – if the bread & circuses are provided in sufficient quantity, will it really matter that some 1% control more wealth than the 99%?  Will the control that the 1% can buy with that wealth so offend the 99% that rioting will break out?

Or will the callousness of the rich be such that the bread & circuses will not be provided until it’s too late to mollify the 99%?

Wondering about building tall with wood?  Lloyd Alter @ Treehugger.com has some answers as readers at The Guardian have negative reactions to a news story:

You can’t replace trees as fast as they are being cut down, so the argument that they will grow back is not an acceptable excuse for cutting down the forest. Do your research before you spout off about things you don’t know. Deforestation is one of THE leading contributors to climate change. PERIOD! We need MORE trees on the planet, not fewer!

The harvesting of trees in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada is not the deforestation that is contributing to climate change; that is the tropical deforestation where forests are cleared for farmland and palm oil plantations. In fact, thanks to the mountain pine beetle infestation that is killing so many trees, cutting them while still alive and turning them into CLT would be a very good thing for the climate; we should be harvesting more, not less. The wood is sustainably harvested and trees are replanted which have a net positive effect on sequestering carbon, and leads to more trees, not fewer.

We’ve been hearing about El Niño, the band of warm Pacific water that can affect weather patterns – but what of the sibling, La Niña?  NewScientist (paywall) relays a warning for Australia:

Queensland could face devastating floods rivalling those seen in 2010-11 in just a year’s time, as the effects of climate change and an impending La Niña weather event combine.

La Niña brings warm water to the ocean around Queensland, and with it comes rain. Fresh research now shows that the effects of climate change made the flood-causing rains three times more likely that year. …

Queensland might not have to wait to get a taste of this future. The world is in the grip of one of the strongest El Niños on record. And extreme El Niños usually flip within a year to become their opposites, La Niñas – which are then often extreme themselves.

“I would predict an extreme La Niña developing by next year this time,” says [Wenju] Cai [of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra, Australia]. “It is highly likely that January 2017 could see floods similar to those in 2011.”

[Caroline] Ummenhofer [of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts] says that predicting La Niña is difficult, but agrees it’s a worrying possibility that one might happen next year and bring a repeat of the devastating floods.

La Niña is, according to the Wikipedia article,

During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3–5 °C.

According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, rainfall was a little slow in 2014:

Queensland experienced its equal-third-warmest year on record in 2014, with below-average rainfall recorded across the southeast, southwest and parts of the northern interior of the State.

Downpours are rarely usful, however. Just for fun, here’s a map Australian rainfall:

Following a good meal at the Mediterranean Cruise Cafe, my Arts Editor and I attended a performance of Turn of the Screw, a play by Jeffrey Hatcher based on a story by Henry James, as performed by The Chameleon Theatre Circle at the Ames Center in Burnsville, MN.  This is an excellent production featuring, as specified in the script, two performers and a minimal stage, although one might argue that the lighting designer might be due a performing credit because of how well lighting enhances the performance of the actors.

The story concerns a governess, in 1870s England, hired to manage two children, the niece and nephew of the governess’ employer.  Who is he?  Why does he wish to have no interactions?  What happened to previous employees?

And why are madhouses reputed to be populated by … governesses?

The gentleman actor, Mark L. Mattison, plays the mysterious employer, his nephew, and the cook with equal facility, allowing our imaginations out of their pens; but this is not to belittle the efforts of the lady,Laura Hoover,  who while only playing the single role of the governess, has a presence equal to that of Mr. Mattison.  They play off each other through the medley of relationships with a fine fettle, more or less successfully diverting our attention, like any fine magician, from the inevitable plot holes and questionable omissions that exist in every … ghost story.

And how do I know it was fine?  Because I began to make up one of my own …

Once again, Republican pollster Frank Luntz is investigating the Trump phenomenon:

Over three hours Wednesday in Alexandria, Luntz lobbed dozens of Trump-seeking missiles. All 29 in the group had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. All either supported Trump or had supported him earlier in the year. To Luntz’s amazement, hearing negative information about the candidate made the voters, only a few of whom gave their full names to the press, hug the candidate tighter.

“Normally, if I did this for a campaign, I’d have destroyed the candidate by this point,” Luntz told a group of reporters when the session ended. “After three hours of showing that stuff?”

With only two exceptions, the three hours of messaging, venting and friendly arguments revealed the roots of Trump’s support. Participants derided the mainstream media, accusing reporters of covering snippets of Trump quotes when the full context would have validated him. They cited news sources they trusted — Breitbart News was one example — to refute what they were being told.

“You know what Trump does?” said Teresa Collier, a 65-year-old retiree. “He says something completely crazy, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Then he dials back and starts explaining it and saying how he’d do it, and it makes sense.”

And Trump continues to lead:

Beating back the competition using an array of supporters who prefer to believe in their preconceptions to the point of disbelieving standard sources of information.  He appears to have a hard core of supporters who are best described as fringe occupants.

But, unlike Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, his lead is only relatively commanding against his melange of challengers.  The current polling numbers in Iowa are a somewhat different story, as a Monmouth University poll reveals likely GOP voters in Iowa favor Cruz, 24% to 19% for Trump.

So we’ve watched as the Republican rivals, with two exceptions, have remained in the race despite highly disappointing numbers.  Steve Benen, commenting on the Luntz story, may have stumbled across the reason why they’ve stuck around despite the hurdles they’ve yet to traverse:

Collect enough voters who’ve lost their favorite, and you catch up with Trump.  The successful strategy will, of course, involve money, along with the preservation of capital until a sizable number of your rivals have dropped out and then you try to collect them.  In the meantime, you must be their second or third choice, emphasizing your qualifications, while you hold your breath and suck up to your sponsors donors.  Communication skills will be critical, in some cases to clarify your achievements, and in others to obscure your lack of qualifications.  In the former camp might be governors Bush and Christie, while in the latter camp might be Cruz and Rubio, neither of which have achievements, merely ideology.  It is my personal belief that ideology is not the same as achievements or competency.  Whether that’s true for GOP voters is unclear.

In other news, both Trump and Carson have insinuated that they may leave the GOP if any ‘dirty tricks’ keep them from winning the nomination.  Does the GOP risk losing perhaps 30% of their base as they realize the leadership will do what’s necessary to save the party from a bad nominee?  Is the GOP in a no-win position?  They may be better served by letting the nomination process go its natural route and endorsing the winner – and thus their candidates for other offices will stand a good chance of winning.  But if 30% of their base stays home out of despair at the treason of the leadership, it could lead to quite the trouncing of the Republicans.

Last weekend we watched ZOOLANDER (2001), a movie reminiscent of the cult favorite THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984), which spoofed rock and roll with a rock group which existed only to be be a rock group.  In Zoolander, Ben Stiller and his proud papa, as well as a number of other famous comedians and members of the fashion industry bring to the screen the life of Derek Zoolander, he of the perfect facial structure and amazing walk, not to mention a level of narcissism not seen since, well, since Metamorphoses .  He and Owen Wilson bring their spoofs to near perfection even as they try to understand the motivations of a mysterious designer and why Derek doesn’t remember his week at the man’s spa.

It is incredibly trite, and that is part of the charm.  You don’t watch this movie to learn how to navigate the ways of celebrity, or fashion, or for that matter how to be a father to the perfect boy.  You simply watch it to see how Ben & Co will next ridicule an industry which, quite likely, was ripe for ridicule in any case.  They saw the grapes, and sensed they were good; out came the scythe, and the harvesting, all so important, began.  It’s worth a gander, especially if you’re inclined towards pairing a fine wine with your movies.  This might be worthy of a Reisling: bright and sunny, with many fruity flavors.  A darker red might bring too much gravitas to a movie too flighty and ridiculous to credibly sustain it.

Being an American.  It’s more than simply existing at a location, or a set of parents, a collection of advantages, or even hatreds for received insults.  It’s a concept, an experiment, and a revulsion at the old ways of governing and conducting the entire business of running a society.  It’s a responsibility for understanding, honoring, and implementing our underlying principles.

The most important of those principles is mutual respect for diversity of religion.  We may have strong opinions on matters concerning the divine, but we should remember that which led to the formation of this Nation, the incredibly strong emotions evidenced in France, in Spain, and, most importantly for this nation, in England¹, in the matters of which version of Christianity should be followed.  We need to remember the mistrust, the terrible hatreds, the killings, the burnings – all between nominally Christian people.

When our forefathers came together to design the new government and society, one of their gravest concerns was to avoid such abhorrent disturbances in civil society, and to that end they designed a government which insensitive to the delicate matters of religion: a secular government, not permitted to favor or despise any particular sect.

It was a new path to follow, and it has served us well – when we’ve honored it.  But as a principle, it’s also a test of us – are we good Americans?  Do we understand the hows and whys of this wonderful principle?

Tonight, in the wake of the grim tragedy in San Bernardino, CA, I will name three people who are alike in their abject failure to pass this test, their lack of understanding of the importance of this principle in our success – and how this has created failure at the most fundamental parts of their lives.  Two have cemented their failure, their unworthiness, beyond all redemption, by committing final atrocities against their fellows: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.  They, like white supremacists, slavers, and various others who hate their fellow man for trivial reasons, condemn themselves.  Little more need to be said for these criminals.

But such accusations need not be leveled at out and out criminals, and in that vein, I believe Donald Trump also fails this most basic tests of being an American.  He calls for suspicion of Americans, born and naturalized, of a certain flavor of religiosity, his words inflame the opinions of those who listen him to unjust, intemperate actions, and then he tries to defend himself with mere implications, not facts. For a citizen who wishes to lay claim to the lead position in the Nation, he needs to be an embodiment of the principles we enshrine and follow in hopes of a peaceful, successful society; his abandonment of this principle, thrust aside as if it were some superfluous undershirt, unnecessary as he digs that ditch, very much clarifies his unworthiness to assume the Presidency.

This American test.  It’s a hard one.  Thrusting away the distrust, the fear, it’s quite against fundamental nature to hug that neighbor from across the street, across the cultural divide, across the divine abyss.  Yet, that’s what Americans, at their best, do.  And it’s something Mr. Trump has yet to learn to do.

¹See In God We Trust vs. E Pluribus Unum.

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog steps up to explain that the ACA is not costing 2 million jobs – it’s just enabling worker mobility:

Nearly two years ago, the CBO initially found that, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, in the coming years, many Americans will be able to leave their full-time jobs – by choice – because of the available benefits.

Much of the media interpreted this as evidence of the ACA hurting job creation and causing mass layoffs, but that isn’t what the findings said at all. In fact, this was good news for the reform law, not bad – we’re talking about a feature, not a bug.

One of the purposes of “Obamacare” is to help end something called “job lock.” The phrase describes a dynamic in which many Americans would like to leave their current jobs – to retire, to start a new business, whatever – but can’t because they and their families need the health benefits tied to their current job.

He notes that the GOP lawmakers are using this as evidence of the vast disruption ACA is causing the economy.  Well, in a sense, they’re right – when a worker leaves a job, that means the employer has to hire and, possibly, train a new worker.  The company is disrupted.

But, in the end, it’s a good thing as this also enables some folks to retire early – thus opening up jobs for those on the hunt.  It just all depends on who you are – an employer, an employee – or a government worker tasked with getting that pesky unemployment rate down.

Steve’s source is The Hill, which I take to be deliberately misrepresenting the truth.  Here’s the relevant outtake:

ObamaCare will force a reduction in American work hours — the equivalent of 2 million jobs over the next decade, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper said Monday.

The total workforce will shrink by just under 1 percent as a result of changes in worker participation because of the new coverage expansions, mandates and changes in tax rates, according to a 22-page report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The first paragraph explicitly claims ACA will enforce a reduction in work hours, while the second, while sounding like an elucidation, is actually quite different – it cleverly tries to make voluntary, desirable activities enabled by ACA seem like an inevitable, awful consequence.  As Steve notes, workers will retire earlier, with more stability and confidence in their future, or they will change jobs, following such urges as fewer hours, more risk, or whatever else will motivate them – and thus making room for other workers in the ranks.  One paragraph references total work hours, while the other references the size of the work force.

It’s a semantic shell game designed to suck in the uncareful reader.

Finland is reportedly considering taking a step towards UBI.  From CNN/Money:

The Finnish government, elected earlier this year, is planning to introduce a tax-free monthly payment of 800 euros ($865) to all adult Finns, regardless of income, wealth or employment status. The payment would replace most other state benefits.

The government thinks that the move will actually save money. Finland’s welfare system is very complex and expensive to run, and the government hopes that simplifying it could reduce costly bureaucracy.

It also argues that the change may encourage more people to look for work. About 9.5% of Finns are currently out of work — the highest rate in more than a decade — and the government believes some people are deterred from working because they’re better off on unemployment benefit than accepting a minimum wage job.

Tim Worstall at Forbes.com approves:

From the right it gets rid of the thing we worry most about welfare: the immense tax and benefit withdrawal rate that makes poor people not desire (because they are rational in the face of 60 and 70% tax rates) to increase their incomes. And from the left it actually increases workers’ bargaining power without, of course, needing those potentially self-interested unions standing in the middle. If you can live, just, without working, then the boss’ power over you is vastly reduced. Another way of putting this is that reservation wages rise–the amount you have to be offered to go to work rises.

This will, of course, reduce inequality. The big problem has always been that while in theory it works no one has ever really tried it. Now someone is: the Finns. So, we all get to see whether it really is the deus ex machina that theory states it is.

My best guess is that it is and that we should all be adopting it. But given that someone else is doing it, perhaps not just yet. Let’s actually be scientists about this, observe what happens and only if it works, as I’m sure it will, do we adopt it.

Abolish the entire welfare system in its totality and just give every citizen just enough to scrape by each month. Why not? We’re a rich country, we can do this. After someone else has proven that it works of course.

Dylan Matthews @ vox.com may have a more comprehensive look:

Ideally, Kangas told me, he’d like to take several different kinds of samples. In the scientifically ideal research setting, there would be a national lottery so he gets a representative random sample of Finns across the country who’ll receive a basic income. But he also wants to do regional lotteries that are regionally representative, and then lotteries confined to large towns. He also wants there to be some smaller municipalities that have a large portion of their populations (30 percent, say) get checks. In the PowerPoint, he suggests that in a couple of districts 100 percent of households could get checks.

The idea is to see what happens to a community under a basic income, rather than just to individual people. Having a whole town get benefits could have cascading effects as households escape poverty, as some people use the income guarantee as insurance so they can take risks and form companies, as universities see increased enrollment from people better able to afford supplies, etc. “If people in a smaller area are getting the benefits, their behavior vis-a-vis other people will change, employers and employees will change their behavior, encounters between clients and their street-level bureaucrats (social workers, employment offices, etc.) will change, and the interplay between different bureaucracies will change,” Kangas says.

There is a basic tension between the American tradition of everyone taking care of themselves, and the older societal imperative of sticking together and taking care of all the members, sick and healthy, young and old.  It’ll be interesting to see how the basic American suspicion that everyone is on the take plays out if Finland’s trial is considered a success and they decide go all in.

While listening to a Minnesota Public Radio discussion today on anti-bacterial drugs (no link available, but it was the Kerri Miller show) (the bad news: new antibiotics are not under development) (the badder news: antibiotics of last resort are becoming ineffective against drug-resistant bugs), it occurred to me that the invasion of private sector practices into the health sector has somewhat twisted the purpose of the health sector.

To an extent, it’s inevitable, because the health sector has a dependency on two elements: process, the procedures used by medical personnel to diagnose and treat patients; and things, such as drugs, surgical tools, and the like.  The latter class could be supplied by entities entirely within the health sector, but they are not.  This is a mixed bag: entities not subject to market forces are not forced to develop efficient procedures with respect, and for those talented individuals motivated by wealth might not choose to provide their talents to such an entity, to the communal loss of the patients.  But the impingement and, perhaps more accurately, dominance of private sector practices with respect to the development and delivery of medicine has its well known deleterious effects: the sudden hiking of the price for Daraprim, and the lack of interest in developing new antibiotics are two of the most obvious problems; less salient, yet perhaps more important, is the perception of a sizable portion of non-medical personnel that the medical community really only exists to parasitize the citizenry while the citizens are blind to a cornucopia of simple cures for all sorts of problems, from carrot juice to acupuncture.  This latter point induces ill persons to waste critical time on homeopathy and other failed approaches, all the while convinced the people most able to help them really only wish to relieve them of their cash.  Such is the bane of a culture dominated by the superstition and ignorance.

But there is worse news descending from this dilution of the medical sector’s operationalities: the marketing of drugs to the general citizenry, the suggestion that drugs are necessary even for minor ailments, is exerting an evolutionary pressure on the pathogens, and they are responding by becoming immune to the drugs of the day – and, as noted, because it’s not profitable to develop antibiotics, we do not have a new generation in the pipeline.

Because we are a social species (or so I’m told), communicable illness doesn’t affect just the guy across town, or the kid in Altoona – but all of us, potentially.  We’re not islands, nor can we control the communications medium of pathogens all that easily in many cases – and even those we think we have under control can prove slippery.  But the activities of the private sector ignore or even contradict these realities of the medical sector – each person’s individuality is sought out, their separateness from others, and their capacity to spend the fruits of their labors on the things produced by the private sector.

In contexts where these assumptions are true, the private sector does an admirable job of fulfilling its function.  But when it dominates an area where these assumptions are not true, then we see tension.  Pollution control is a common example; the examples from the medical sector are not as familiar, to which we may need to adjust – perhaps by rescinding the FDA decision permitting direct to consumer advertising (DTCA)¹ by drug companies.  No doubt more compromises and/or approaches will be necessary, as we explore how to make these two sectors work together to efficiently treat the citizens’ health.

Because, without recognizing these differences, we will continue to see the supply of drugs become uneven and, possibly, dangerous to our very health.  Private sector advocates will claim the demand for these drugs will result in their supply, yet the reality contradicts them; nor are they simply widgets to be built, but the results of research (which reminds me of yet another tension, wherein business people want reliable schedules, while folks who are actively researching, whether it be biomedical or, in my case, just developing new software, can find it difficult to hit a schedule while maintaining quality).  Yet, this is not to advocate that the medical industry take over development of drugs and devices on some sort of non-profit basis.  It’s not clear to me how to crack this nut.

¹ See this publication from Milbank Quarterly for a scholarly look at the issue.  The suggestion of a difference between patients and consumers highlight the problems of using a sector’s terminology in another sector, as it brings expectations that are not necessarily appropriate.  A similar discussion of the difference between students and consumers has been on my mind of late.

Lloyd Alter @ Treehugger.com writes approvingly of an out of date idea – the window tax:

Writing in the Financial Times, Tim Harford, AKA “the Undercover Economist” describes the English tax, introduced in 1696 and lasting until 1851, that was charged on the number of windows in a home, unlike the property taxes of today that are based on value of the property.

The details of the tax varied across the centuries but with the broad theme that the more windows your house had, the more tax you had to pay. At first glance, the tax seems clever, even brilliant. Rich people had larger houses, and so paid more tax. Windows are easy to count from outside the premises, so the tax was easy to assess. Poor people didn’t own large houses, so they weren’t affected by the tax. And the number of windows in a house doesn’t change, so the tax was impossible to avoid.

And it is brilliant. Dare I say that like the windows, it is totally transparent- everyone can see it, if you have a window (which is a big energy hole in the wall) you pay the tax. But Harford says it was “wrong, wrong, wrong” because people adapted their houses accordingly reducing their tax.

There are a couple of problems here:

1. Humans are not nocturnal – we need sunlight in order to be healthy, and while it may be convenient to suggest we should all be outside as much as possible, that’s not going to cut it in the real world.  Those of us with SAD are in particular trouble, and using special UV lighting when a window could bring in the same light without the associated electric bill seems … ungreen.
2. Using the taxation system for social engineering has a long history of going awry and engendering resentment in the populace.
3. The taxation system exists to provide funding to the government sector, and a predictable fund flow is important for planning purposes.  As Harford notes, folks adapted – and the flow of funds dried up.
4. Such a blunt taxation instrument ignores, and even discourages, innovation that could render windows much less of an energy drain.  For example, this solar advance [add link] might prove to render the energy cost of windows trivial, or even negative.

As a historical note, it’s in the same class as taxing closets – an interesting look into the minds of folks from centuries ago.  But I find the argument to return it to be unconvincing.