Social on Alkahest

Ramadan

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:19:02 +0000

My local paper kindly reminds me that tomorrow’s moon rise begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and that the associated fasting and prayers begin on Wednesday.

Recently, I was talking to my neighbor, the very kind, interesting and extremely conservative Glenn Beck viewer. While we were talking, he brought up Muslims and his fear that they were trying to take over the country (apparently, religious appropriation of a country is only okay if it’s Christian - but that’s another story). According to my neighbor, no religious Muslim could ever possibly be up to any good. I don’t explicitly recall him calling Islam a false religion, but he very much believed that you couldn’t trust “them,” that they were all radicalized and out to destroy “our” way of life.

What, ahem, WTF is wrong with Arizona?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:35:40 +0000

Presumably, most people have now heard that Arizona has passed a new law respecting immigration enforcement. Reactions, as one might expect, are mixed depending on one’s thoughts on immigration, and more specifically, the potential for illegal immigration. Mexico has issued a travel warning for its citizens, advising them not to visit the state. Various AZ mayors have decried the law. Some right wingers love it, while others hate it, and of course George Will is still an asshole. And finally, even though the law doesn’t go into effect for another three months or so, we can already see what the future will be like for Hispanics in Arizona.

Crap... I'm the pig

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:30:00 +0000

Old bit of folk wisdom that has served me well over the years: never wrestle a pig; you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. Keeping that in mind has kept me out of all sorts of trouble over the years. The only problem? I’m apparently the pig in debates about the new health reform law 🙂

Turn about and all that

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:38:53 +0000

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left. It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC. Two examples:

One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill. Maybe for his work on voodootinkle on trickle down economics? Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use. Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe. Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots. Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill. What about Madison? The dude practically wrote the Constitution. Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him?
And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity. Sure, I was bussed in elementary school. It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school. Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students. That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus.

Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances. They seem to capture the mood.

Seriously, W... T... F?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:15:08 +0000

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left. The latest? Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia. No really. It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according to the sheriff’s press release is an allusion to the biblical Book of Exodus. I’m not certain if that worries me or makes me happy that it’s not a reference to secession. I think I’ll go with worry since it’s a biblical reference to secession.

Heathcare reform: a Festivus miracle!

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:03:16 +0000

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store!

Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow. FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected. The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town. So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning.

gop hcr doa

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:02:31 +0000

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform. Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population in the U.S. by 2019 and will reduce the deficit by $104 billion over the same ten years. Of course, the republican plan was going to be “much better.” And was it? Not so much. Under the republican plan, coverage will increase from, wait for it, drum roll please 83% to a whopping, um, 83% by 2019. Well, hey, at least it’ll do more to improve the deficit, right? Well, not exactly. According to the CBO’s initial analysis, there would be a $68 billion dollar reduction in the deficit over the next ten years.

Communication and learning styles

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:58:03 +0000

A while back I mentioned that K, some associates and I had started up a new non-profit. Things are going reasonably well. People have been more supportive than I had thought. We’ve had about 70 patients so far and we’ve got the systems set up so that patients entered into the database post up to Twitter, along with any Facebook updates.

One thing that I have noticed in working with the others on the non-profit is that learning styles and communication styles seem to be closely related. You can divide learning styles (among other ways) into verbal vs visual learners. Verbal learners prefer to hear things explained to them. whereas visual learners prefer things to be written down. Based on some of our recent experiences, I think that this plays into communication styles. And it’s communication styles which are (occasionally) biting us.

So, this is important

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:14:27 +0000

I’m not a big baseball fan. For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me. But, this is important. If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball. The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to this, but there has been an ongoing legal dispute over that search and how it was conducted.

DDoS-ing good policy

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:08:48 +0000

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers. Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and are following the commands of the attacker. Such computers are usually called “zombies.”

There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme. The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service. But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request. Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down. The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies. The zombies win.

Chatham tea party

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:32:07 +0000

Tomorrow is April 15th, tax day. And in case you’ve missed it, republicans, flat taxers, gold fetishists, racists, defense nuts and other extreme conservatives are planning to host tea parties tomorrow. Tea parties? Yep. Protests, harkening back to the days of the Boston Tea Party when proto-American patriots dumped tea into Boston harbor to protest taxation without representation. Tomorrow’s tea parties appear to be a bit less principaled. Some protestors are objecting to the Bush tax cuts on the top 2% expiring in 2010… as they were scheduled to do by republican law makers. Some protestors seem to object to having lost the election in 2008. Others object to bailouts of home owners… or is it bailouts of banks… or is it bailouts that don’t help their bottom line? Some seem to object to having a black president. Others are Ron Paulites who seek to restore the gold standard?!

Recessions don't have hidden virtues

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:25:09 +0000

I wasn’t originally going to write about the Michael Gerson piece from the other week where he talks about the “hidden virtues” of a recession. Leaving aside the irony of a relatively well off speech writer for George W. Bush telling us how the recession caused by his boss’s policies will be good for us, I just assumed that the idea of a virtuous recession was self-obviously wrong and wouldn’t be taken seriously. But since then, I’ve heard other people, even more liberal people, make the same arguments. In several of those cases, the argument is that a recession will help (force?) Americans to lead simpler lives, to save more and to focus on what is really important. I’m offended by that sentiment because, while I have often thought, and said, that people need to focus on what’s important and that they should save more, there is a huge difference between doing so as a choice and being forced into it due to scarcity.

Rant

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:42:36 +0000

Can anyone please explain to me, what the hell is John Boener doing on my TV and in my newspapers talking about the stimulus plan? For 8 years, we liberal types were told that “elections had consequences” and that we should STFU and clap louder. Fine, now that republicans have been repudiated in a full election cycle, suffering major losses in both 2006 and 2008 after running on the same policies that they now advocate will save us from the mess that their policies got us into, will they please STFU?

Blaming the pushers?

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 06:45:11 +0000

Okay, commenting on global finance is really not my usual shtick, but I’ve got to agree with Barry Ritholtz that there’s something odd in this NY Times article on China’s role in the U.S. housing bubble. The article describes Ben Bernanke’s 2005 theory that a savings “glut” is driving up the demand for American to borrow from foreign countries. The article extends the theory to suggest that the financial mess that we are currently in the middle of was, essentially, caused by the Chinese.

A simple suggestion

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:40:04 +0000

I wonder if the N&O would print this?

Dear Editors,

I have read with some alarm your recent stories describing a dramatic change to our way of life. Specifically, I refer to those stories of our poor benighted multi-millionaires and billionaires who are having to downgrade their lifestyle in response to the crash of the financial markets and the banking industry.

As we all know, what has made America great over the past 30 years is the increasing increasing income inequality whereby those at the top of the income ladder make an ever increasing amount of money while the median income has stagnated. Without these top income earners, all motivation and striving goes out of our populous; leaving us a nation of whiners. And yet, every day, we hear stories of high powered financiers, who had been making millions each year, now contemplating the need to sell that third vacation home in order to make ends meet.

A real threat to marriage

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:28:23 +0000

Two weeks ago as Obama won a resounding victory both in the country as a whole and even more decisively in California, Californians also passed Proposition 8. Prop 8 was an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. With the passage of Prop 8, 18,000 couples had their legal marriages dissolved.

Supporters of Proposition 8 claim that the act was necessary to help defend the traditional institution of marriage. Specifically, they looked to the Bible and its condemnation of homosexuality. They claimed that recognizing homosexual marriage undermined the biblical concept of marriage.

Blue NC

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:09:11 +0000

Still not official from the Election Board, but the AP has canvased all of the counties and found that there aren’t enough provisional ballots for McCain to overcome Obama’s 13000+ vote lead.

President Obama and race

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:17:11 +0000

My mother tells a story about my first day in first grade (and sadly, I’m more likely to remember stories of my childhood than the actual childhood). I go off to school, probably all 70s style - plaid pants, mop haircut, etc., and when I come home she asks me about school. In particular, how did I like my new teacher (Mrs. Smith?)? I told my mom that she would like the teacher, that Mrs. Smith was just like her.

President Obama

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:13:02 +0000

Polls just closed on the West coast. With that, everyone calls Washington, Oregon and California for Obama - Obama wins! And I’m heading to bed. I would still like to see who wins NC. It looks like it’ll be close, but we should know in the morning. If I’m doing really good, I might stay up for a McCain concession. We’ll see.

Go vote!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:56:45 +0000

I headed over to the polling place to vote this morning. As of 8:30am or so, there were no lines at our precinct. But then, that’s not too surprising for a small precinct in a non-populous county. Chronological observations:

There were a fair number of cars parked at the polling place. I took one of only about 4 or 5 free spots
The Obama people were prepared for the rain - they had decent sized open sided tents set up to stand under while handing out literature and talking to voters
There were about 10-15 people voting when I arrived
The elections officials were prepared for crowds. Instead of the usual split of the alphabet into 3 or 4 lines, I think there were 6. They also seemed to have extra help on hand, including some high school students.
The folks handing out the ballots mentioned that polling had been steady so far.
When I left around 8:45/8:50, I was only the 161st voter :-)

I suspect that across NC, things will be similar. We had such a huge number of people cast ballots early (some 35-40% of all registered voters) that I would imagine we won’t have too many problems with lines, etc.

Brief political interlude

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:19:39 +0000

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. Nothing too terrible is going on for me personally, but I’m concerned about the U.S. financial situation, I’m concerned about how that will affect me and my company (if at all) and I’m concerned about the current political happenings in part since I think that they will have the biggest affect on the first two issues. I’ve been obsessing over politics and polls for the past few months when I would probably be better off “drink[ing] herb tea and play[ing] with [my] screensavers.” At this point, I’m fairly confident that Obama will win (yay!), but watching the McCain campaign’s negative attacks is annoying - in particular since the negative ads are aimed at Obama personally and not his policies (as opposed to Obama’s negative ads which appear to be aimed at McCain’s policies).

Idle bailout thoughts

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:30:56 +0000

Okay, this is probably the last of the foreseeable posts on the Wallstreet bailout – and probably the most serious.

I spend the last week extremely pissed off about the bailout. Here were a bunch of idiots absurdly inflating the price of housing, with other idiots actually loaning them money to do so, more idiots treating the bad loans as assets and still more idiots insuring them against loss under ridiculous assumptions. It’s not really a surprise that the whole thing blew up. The only surprise is that it took as long as it did. Hell – 5 years ago in late 2003 when K and I bought our current place, we were worried that there was a housing bubble inflating prices beyond what the properties were really worth. And this was in North Carolina which didn’t have the hottest housing market.

Public service announcement

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:14:59 +0000

As a public service announcement, I am hereby warning the people I know that in light of the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the entire freaking banking system, all of which will cost tax payers about $1 trillion, the next person that tells me that deregulating markets will provide a solution to anything will be asked to STFU.

thank you and good night

Happy 4th of July

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:41:33 +0000

I hope everyone’s having a great 4th of July (at least those of us in the States, folks from other countries can be forgiven for not thinking too much of it).

July 4th, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favourite holidays. That may surprise some folks. It’s not like the house is decorated in red, white and blue. I’m not wearing a flag pin, the Pledge of Allegiance makes me uncomfortable and I’m not that into fireworks. But external trappings aside, I consider myself to be a very patriotic person. I just don’t define patriotism as being synonymous with “flag waving.

Telecom immunity passes the House. sigh . . .

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:09:42 +0000

Louisiana, setting the standard in science education . . .

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:58:53 +0000

It’s things like this that embarrass me when I tell someone I’m from Louisiana. The Louisiana House has voted overwhelmingly to pass the Louisiana Science Education Act which allows science teachers to use supplemental materials when teaching controversial subjects. For those who haven’t been there, in Louisiana, controversial subjects include: evolution, global warming, Keplerian astronomy and the round earth theory. Okay, I made the last one up – at least 85% of Louisiana households do believe that the earth is round.

Genetic discrimination

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:11:42 +0000

Oh, and an ironic follow-up to the republican filibuster of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: apparently, the senate unanimously voted for a bill barring genetic discrimination in hiring and insurance. I wonder if anyone’s told them that your gender is based on your genes. Not that I would accuse senate republicans of being misogynistic in their concern over discrimination. Well, okay, yes I would.

Workplace discrimination

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:06:30 +0000

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate took up the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which the House had already passed. The act was pretty reasonable. It essentially clarified the 1964 civil rights act to say that if you are being discriminated in terms of salary equity, you have 180 days from the date of each paycheck to file a claim. So, essentially it defines the act of discrimination as occurring with each short changed paycheck and not just with the initial salary setting.

Web 2.0 and trusting the users

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:31:47 +0000

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control.

Trust me, I can relate. We’re currently contracting with a part of the government that wants to do something similar. They want to make use of the knowledge of a number of experts to produce an encyclopedia of a given technology. Of course, this has been dubbed the FOOpedia (where FOO is the technology).

Digital Amway

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:22:52 +0000

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting in subtle ways. Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical. In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both are interesting – but it can make it a little hard to know what I’m really thinking. So take it with a grain of salt that I just read an interesting article in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer on how to turn music lovers (particularly teenagers) into music distributors.

Beat up the economists

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:19:41 +0000

It’s apparently “beat up the economists week and no one thought to tell me in advance. Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies posts about Greg Mankiw’s recent NY Times editorial and suggests that the reason economists are so patronizing is bitterness over being stuck in a low paying academic job whose sole purpose is to justify the inequities in a capitalist system.

In Scientific American, we have Rober Nadeau’s editorial on the problems with the views of economists. Nadeau notes that economics is a social science that tried to pattern itself after physics. Unfortunately, a) it used 19th century physics and never updated itself as the physics changed; and b) economists never realized that they can’t treat people as elemental particles. Nadeau goes on to note some of the basic assumptions made in economics that don’t stand up.

Power company balanced bill plans - banned

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:43:04 +0000

As mentioned last month, the North Carolina Utilities Commission has banned the expansion of Progress Energy’s Balanced Billing Plan and Duke Power’s Fixed Payment Plan. These are the plans that charge you roughly 11% in order to have a guaranteed power bill. Unfortunately, it’s not a full ban, it’s just a prohibition against enrolling any new participants. The reason for the ban? [drum roll please] The plans encourage participants to increase their power consumption.

Welcome to your crappy low-rent future

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:37:54 +0000

Last week I was having lunch with a colleague (of sorts) and we were on the topic of the economy, outsourcing of jobs, etc. I mentioned that we were living in, what I’ve taken to calling, a crappy low-rent future *. He pointed out, and I agree, that this is largely because corporations have broken the social contract. It turns out he had been reading Robert Reich’s “Super Capitalism while I had been reading “The Global Class War. In their own ways, each of these books tells the story of how corporations from the end of the WWII with the New Deal until the late 1970s were bound by something of a social contract. Corporations recognized that their customer base was their employee base and that while you might not want to pay your employees, not doing so would spiral out of control so that your own customers couldn’t afford your products. Corporations began to slip the social contract in the late 70s with the Regan Revolution. The trend continued in the 80s and 90s as companies began to achieve transnational status: i.e., their customer base and their employee base were no longer the same. NAFTA and the follow-up “free trade agreements accelerated this trend by allowing companies to shift labor and production to the places where it was cheapest without actually requiring labor or environmental standards that would level the playing field.

Who could have guessed?

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:27:36 +0000

Gee, nobody could have predicted this I suppose:

The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

Admittedly, Mueller goes on to say that the reports were prior to new policies being put into place, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better. It’s things like this that have always made me very nervous about partnerships between law enforcement and industry. I’ll try to post something about InfraGard one of these days. It’s a little scary in its own right.

FISA extension and telecom amnesty

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:10:27 +0000

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs
In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens.
Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC)
Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists.
The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for.
Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country.

I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed.

Power companies - update

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:19:14 +0000

Interesting. Shortly after posting about power companies, I received a comment from Progress Energy correcting me about the plans. It seems [pure speculation here] that Progress has some sort of “blog response team up in Maryland or northern Virginia. Anyway, I misnamed the program that I had been offered, as the comment says, it was indeed the “Balanced Bill payment plan where you wind up spending some 11% more over the course of the year for the privilege of knowing that your bill will be 1/12th of a fixed amount. There is (apparently) a different equal payment plan which is comparable to what we had with Duke Power. However, it’s not the money maker that the Balanced Bill program is and so it is not heavily advertised. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find details of the plan online. The closest I can get is here, which seems to be lacking in specifics.

Power companies

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 02:08:40 +0000

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use.

CO2 emissions and compact fluorescent bulbs (updated)

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:37:08 +0000

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up! “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it. “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t do anything about it. “What, we can? Well it’ll destroy our economy. “You mean it won’t? Well, you must be French.

K wins!

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:56:58 +0000

Okay, slight confession time. I’m something of a closet political junkie. Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing. If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack.

Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries. K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male. I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical. 🙂

I call BS

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:58:24 +0000

I missed on Sunday, but under the theory of better late than never…

Donald Kerr is the principal deputy director of national intelligence, so presumably he speaks with some authority regarding the government’s view of privacy. In a recent Associated Press article he made several remarks which I find exceedingly scary, misleading or both. First up:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

I'll take a doll, some jacks and a dose of lead poisoning, please

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:59:41 +0000

In the wake of the most recent recall of toys from China due to lead paint, we find that the administration has been fighting the regulation of lead in imports. According to McClatchy,

Consumer advocates say the Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.

Duke LAX

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:48:07 +0000

I never planned to comment on the Duke Lacrosse rape case, but one observation keeps running through my head and it’s probably best to get it out.

Back when I was in high school, I remember being told that, in a Shakespearean sense, tragedies were uplifting and comedies were depressing. That struck me as backwards for a while until I had watched/read more plays and understood that the tragedies, where the protagonist dies, often display the best elements of human character. There is nobility or love or honor in the characters as they face a universe that is, not hostile, but merely indifferent to the concerns of mankind. On the other hand, a comedy, where the main characters survive the play, often shows the pettiness of people: the bitterness, the backstabbing, the prejudice, the lying, etc.

Copyright infringement on campus

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:33:05 +0000

I can’t turn around anymore without hearing something new about how colleges and universities are public enemy number 1 with the copyright industry. In early February, the Recording Industry Association of America released a top 25 list of the schools to which they have sent notices of alleged copyright infringement. Right after that, they started announced that they would start suing students and that they were going to send “pre-subpoena and “settlement notices to campuses.

The FBI's national security letters

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:55:19 +0000

Sometime in late September or early October of 2001, I received a call from an individual identifying himself as an agent of the FBI and asking for information about the owner of an email account from the place I worked. He stated that he believed the account was relevant to a terrorist investigation. Of course, this was in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and everyone had security concerns, but I was also certain that I didn’t want to give away information to someone who shouldn’t have it. Following a fairly standard procedure, I requested his phone number, badge number and locale so that I could contact the FBI to confirm his identity. The agent gave me a lot of grief about this, noted that I was putting lives at risk by not immediately complying, etc., but I assured him that I would call right back.

immigration update

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 02:39:58 +0000

Back in August, I wrote a brief summary of a conversation I had with my mother on immigration as well as a longer summary of a great NY Times article on immigration. In general, I don’t have a problem with immigrants. I think that they add a lot to the country and they don’t cause nearly the harm to wages that people attribute to them. While I wouldn’t accuse anyone of racism, it wouldn’t surprise me if xenophobia is behind most of the opposition to immigrants. Interestingly, as this LA Times article discusses, two new California studies indicate a) that immigrants boost the wages of native born citizens by an average of 4%; and b) that immigrants have significantly lower incarceration rates than native born citizens.

I know he's a professor of economics, but...

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:49:21 +0000

I know he’s a professor of economics, but does that mean Russell Roberts gets to lie in nearly every paragraph of his editorial, “ Workers are fine with fewer unions? I guess it does. Okay, in fairness, he may not be lying, but an editorial this bad means it’s either that or the author is incompetent.

I’m not going to tackle every single incorrect statement here, but there are a few that really stand out:

"Strapped"

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:28:05 +0000

Last summer, while visiting my grandfather for his 80th birthday, I got into a discussion with my father about the state of the economy and the structural changes that had taken place which served to increase the gap between rich and poor. I noted that statistical measures of income inequality, such as the gini coefficient, were higher in the U.S. than in other industrialized countries; and that the there is less inter-generational class mobility now than there used to be. My father countered that there were several counter examples to that at the table where we were sitting – that all of his children were doing better than he had at our ages. That is true, but a cluster of data points does not make for a valid statistic and the facts are that mine is the first generation that is not likely to be significantly better off than its parents.

The limits of education

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:57:05 +0000

There’s a saying about education (I would call it a joke, but it hits too close to home for that), the process of education is learning more and more about less and less until finally, you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. This is pretty close to the truth. For a period of time in the 90s, I was one of the world’s foremost expert on the subject of using artificial neural networks for image and video compression – talk about your niche subjects. If you read the titles of dissertations, they are all extremely specific. For the most part, PhDs are specialists and generalists are few and far between. In fact, I was once approached to interview at Sandia National Labs because I was one of the few PhDs they had a resume for who was a generalist (I turned down the interview since I had just started in my current position).

more like this please...

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:23:15 +0000

I mentioned several months ago how academic journals were mostly a scam perpetrate by the publishers on universities. One of the things that I briefly discussed was how the entire editorial staff of the journal Topology had announced their resignation. Well, 2006 wrapped up and the former editors of Topology have announced that they will create a new journal called the Journal of Topology (not very creative, but what do you want, they’re mathematicians, not writers).

Regulation vs Legislation

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:12:23 +0000

Last week, the president signed an executive order that changes the way that regulations are made. The order establishes a new standard for creating regulations: the agency must show that the market has failed to correct the problem. Most consumer advocates are upset by the move which will make it harder to regulate business that harm the public.

I agree that the order will end up harming the public; however, I also think that the president does have the right to issue the order. Our government is divided into three branches, two are relevant here: congress (the legislative branch) and the presidency (the executive branch). The executive is the only branch with a single outlook – that of the president. All of the executive agencies report to him through the cabinet.

Memo to the world...

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:27:35 +0000

A memo to the world…

I don’t care about your hierarchical BS. I know that hierarchy seems to be important to people because we have kept it around from the time we roamed as east African plains apes (h/t Brad DeLong) to today’s corporations, but frankly, I don’t care. The fact that a person occupies a higher position in the hierarchy does not mean that they are necessarily better, smarter or more deserving of respect than anyone else. Hierarchies may seem like a good idea if you want to keep people in their place; but they are based on intimidation and are undemocratic and destructive. If you feel differently, and are concerned, then it might be best if I was kept away from people you worry might take offense to my treating them like I treat everyone else. That is all.

SOTU

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:03:39 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, mostly because, for the first time in 5+ years, I’ve gotten somewhat addicted to a video game. Some friends are leaving for CA soon and they were giving away things they didn’t want to bring. This included a handful of games. I grabbed “Neverwinter Nights since I knew it would run under linux. Since I installed it, I’ve been spending way too much time playing (to K’s annoyance, I’m sure).

Copyright advocacy

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:49:15 +0000

I had lunch yesterday with our scholarly communications officer – basically, copyright guru. We were meeting because I (and apparently a few other people in IT) had commented that we were looking for the scholarly communications officer to take the lead in positioning the university on different copyright issues. He thought that was interesting because that’s what he thought he had been doing.

We discussed a number of issues, only a few of which he had been working on. From memory, the following are the copyright concerns that I have and that I would like the university to take a position on:

another example of not getting by in America

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:56:32 +0000

If you’ve read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, it’ll be pretty obvious why Walmart’s continued quest for efficiency is bad for employees and workers. The latest example? High-tech scheduling software designed to dynamically tune employee schedules to meet real-time fluctuations in the number of customers. The result will be low wage workers on-call to meet customer surges and the possibility of being asked to go home during lulls. This will make paychecks even less stable. Add to that, dynamic checks on whether an employee is reaching full-time status or overtime so that their schedule can be scaled back, and you have the makings of an increasingly unfair workplace – regardless of value of the minimum wage.

From the department of "the more things change, the more they stay the same"

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 02:57:47 +0000

I’m reading the collected writings of Ben Franklin from the Library of America (yes, all 1600 or so pages of it), and I ran across the following passage:

It is remarkable that soldiers by profession, men truly and unquestionably brave, seldom advise war but in cases of extream [sic] necessity. While mere rhetoricians, tongue-pads and scribes, timid by nature, or from their little bodily exercise deficient in those spirits that give real courage, are ever bawling for war on the most trifling occasions, and seem the most blood-thirsty of mankind.

New books

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 22:56:11 +0000

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another:

National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already.

follow-up to "cyber monday"

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:10:54 +0000

It’s nice to have one’s predictions shown to be right.

But perhaps the scariest paragraph stated:

Overall, the study concluded that 37% of consumers were shopping in stores on Black Friday – and 41% of those were out between midnight and 8 am. 80% mentioned special as their motivation to go on a shopping tour, while 28% said that the “tradition of Black Friday was a factor in their decision to spend money that day. Despite long lines, 64% indicated that they enjoyed their Black Friday experience and said they would do it again next year.

Poindexter

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:55:40 +0000

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I once asked my father if he would ever pursue becoming a general in the army. He told me that he was hoping to make full colonel (he later retired as a lt. colonel), but that becoming a general required a literal act of congress and that you needed to become a politician. I would assume the same thing is the case with an admiral and doubly so in the case of Poindexter who managed to become the highest ranking geek in government. All of which is to say take my impressions with a grain of salt.

why i love the internet - reason 768

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 02:38:28 +0000

The Disney illustrated Communist Manifesto…

p.s. fwiw, some of this is Warner Bros. and Hannah Barbara (but who’s keeping score)

Admiral John Poindexter to speak at Duke University

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:06:24 +0000

In case you are looking for something interesting to do next week, go to Love Auditorium at Duke University on November 15th at 5pm. Admiral John Poindexter will be giving a talk: “ A Vision for Countering Terrorism Through Information and Privacy Protection Technologies for the 21st Century. It should be an interesting and thought provoking discussion of where Poindexter draws the line between security and privacy.

I’ll be meeting with Poindexter and a small group at 3pm – quite the birthday present.

why only two political parties

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:16:48 +0000

The votes are cast, the results are coming in. There’s not much more to do on the political front, other than wait for the final results. While I’m waiting for that to happen, a few remarks on a conversation that I recently saw too late to comment on.

The question was why is it so hard to get third party candidates on the ballot (e.g., libertarians, greens, etc.)? One person noted that even the Iraqis and Afghanis have more choices than we do in the U.S. where you have to decide between the Democratic and Republican parties.

and speaking of population statistics

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:00:25 +0000

last week saw the 300 millionth American. I happened to be online about that time and saw the U.S. census office’s population clock hit 3×10^8:

I don’t have too much to say about hitting 300 million people. It seems like something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, population growth helps increase the level productivity in the economy. On the other hand, it already seems like we’ve got too many people, particularly at the U.S. level of per capita consumption.

Separation of church and state (updated below ~4:30pm)

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:31:02 +0000

I’ve never understood why the separation of church and state is still debated in this country. I have an even harder time understanding why people would try to undermine the separation of church and state, but as this article in the New York Times shows, they do.

Keeping religion out of politics and politics out of religion has a long history in this country. Our first amendment has a clause which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This clearly states that congress may not create a national religion. But, may congress write laws with respect to a religion? Can congress financially support or encourage a religion? Supporters of the separation of church and state say, “no, while many religious advocates say “yes.

Identity vs. Equality of Opportunity

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:43:42 +0000

Brad DeLong discussing why we like diversity and identitity notes that in addition to prefering to discuss diversity because it is easier than tackling the hard problem of a lack of equality in opportunity, we like identity and diversity because they are inherently a good thing:

Now normally–in my usual mind–I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels’s central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard.

Dr. Strange-Opinions: or how I stopped thinking and learned to attack the straw

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:53:03 +0000

You can bet that any article written by a conservative that starts with “Liberals don’t value a college education? will be full of crap. The only relevant question is “what kind of crap will it be full of? In the September 22nd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Chronicle Review, Anthony P. Carnevale writes an opinion piece titled “ Discounting Education’s Value. The first couple of paragraphs give you a flavor of his arguments:

i apparently picked the wrong profession

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 17:51:03 +0000

As I read the newspaper this morning, I came across Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece on how Iran is in the crosshairs of a U.S. decision. In the opinion piece, he lays out the costs of action and the costs of inaction and concludes that the U.S. has less than a year to decide how to handle Iran.

Leave aside the callousness of someone whose costs do not include tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. The thing that struck me most is why do we let this man write a column at all?! He been wrong about everything he’s written in the past five years. He’s been wrong about how to fight terrorism, he’s been wrong about the war in Iraq. He hasn’t gotten a thing right in all the years I’ve seen him in the paper.

i am such a nerd...

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 02:58:56 +0000

Okay, I’m a bigger nerd than I thought. The latest book that I’m dying to get when it comes out on Monday… “The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute. 350+ pages of analysis on wages, health care, wealth and productivity in America. How can you resist.

If that doesn’t sound appealing, at least read the executive summary. It’s only 14 pages, it’s online, and it’s free.

Dropping SAT Scores

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:43:04 +0000

Matt Yglesias sees the recent Washington Post article describing the fall in SAT scores after the most recent test changes and asks what’s the big deal. On the face of it, Matt makes some good points. Scores are only down 7 points (5 in reading and 2 in math) and for any given student, that really isn’t a big deal. The Washington Post article, while suggesting that there may be some underlying causes (e.g. the test changes or students not learning enough) also notes that it could be a one year blip.

"Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity"

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:17:25 +0000

An article today in the New York Times titled “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity takes a look at how wages have risen, or more to the point failed to rise, during the most recent economic expansion. At a time when productivity (the monetary value of an hour of labor) has risen dramatically, increasing corporate profits, employee wages are basically falling. If you include benefits such as health insurance, they are rising – but nowhere near as fast as productivity.

It's official - the government does consider evolutionary biology to be a science

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:08:38 +0000

Last week there was a minor uproar in the academic world when the government presented the list of majors that qualified for money under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant program. The problem was that evolutionary biology was left off of the list. The feds claim that this was an oversight and on Friday added evolutionary biology back to the list of qualifying majors.

So, even I am not so paranoid as to think that this was a conspiracy to keep students from studying evolution. But at the same time, I am not so dumb as to think this was accidental. The list of majors comes straight from the Classification of Instructional Programs codes. In the biology section, there are ten biology related programs. Of those ten, only one was missing – evolutionary biology.

The social life of the a Duke undergraduate (as seen in the press)

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:17:15 +0000

The Dallas Morning News recently published an editorial by Thomas Hibbs entitled “ College Kids Get Brain, No Soul. In the editorial, Hibbs references the exceedingly disturbing article in Rolling Stone called “ Sex & Scandal at Duke.

The Rolling Stone article discusses the social scene at Duke where “work hard, play hard has always been a motto. According to the article, in recent years, the “work hard portion has morphed into an obsessive desire to please faculty, working to produce high quality papers which will be accepted by professors in order to get good grades, graduate with honors and get a good job. The “play hard portion of the motto has turned into an obsession with alcohol and casual sex, bleeding back into “working hard to maintain the perfect body, social connections, etc.

Update on the Ohio University plagiarism

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 01:20:12 +0000

In reference to my previous comments on the plagiarism scandal in the school of engineering at Ohio Universtity, yesterday the university announced a set of “ comprehensive strategies to address academic honesty. Among the steps being taken is to examine 55 theses for signs of plagiarism. From these, they have found 35 incidents that will require a hearing. Punishments handed out could include the revocation of the former student’s degree. Furthermore, the two professors whom have been implicated have been relieved of their advising duties.

"The Body Hunters" by Sonia Shah

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:22:46 +0000

There’s nothing I love more than a good book, unless it’s a free good book. Last week I was sent “The Body Hunters by Sonia Shah. I’ve been sent free books based on my job before (either as a research professor or as security officer), but I’ve never been sent a book on the ethics of the pharmacutical industry before. It took me a bit to figure out, then I realized that I’m presenting at a Human Subjects conference. I’m sure they sent the book to all of the presenters.

racial profiling for terrorism

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:53:26 +0000

I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists. The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist:

young muslim male
young muslim female
asian male or female
caucasian male or female
black male or female
hispanic male or female

If you said that 1 and 2 have been terrorists and therefore we should profile them, you are partially right. However, what about all of the asian terrorists (e.g. Fillipinos)? Caucasians? Hmm, the IRA, David Koresh, Timmothy McVeigh, etc. As near as I can guess, the only racial groups that shouldn’t be profiled would be blacks and hispanics. This can’t work.

a sign of the apocalypse?

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 16:29:40 +0000

Hmm, someone should go check the “ rapture index, I’m about to link to an article at Cato Unbound – the Cato Institute’s Blog. Richard Rodriguez write’s a beautiful article regarding Mexican Immigrants, their coming to America and what the clash of cultures means to second and third generation Mexican-American immigrants.

The response article by Victor Davis Hanson, restores my belief in the general silliness of the Cato Institute. For example, Hanson notes:

Only six out of ten second-generation Mexican Americans on average graduate from high school in four years; and less than ten percent have a BA degree—the legacy not of racism or America’s “cold heart,?? but of millions arriving from Mexico without English, education, and legality.

frustrations (social security, not work)

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 03:16:01 +0000

Some days, I just can’t write about work frustrations. Not that I don’t want to or that I don’t think they’re interesting, just that it’s part and parcel of the whole confidentiality thing.

On days like today, it’s important to write about other frustrations (trust me on this). Today’s topic: scare tactics in government funded letters. I received my social security statement the other day and it has a lovely section on the front page entitled “About Social Security’s future…

Plagiarism in engineering

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:03:18 +0000

There’s an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the link is behind the subscription firewall), about a mechanical engineering graduate student at Ohio University. After being invited to stay on after his masters and persue a Ph.D., he started having difficulty with his advisor. To help resolve his difficulties, he went to speak with the university ombudsman who advised him to examine disertations in the university library so that he might see where he was going wrong and what his advisor might want.

homework on the question of immigration

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:18:39 +0000

About a month ago, I was in Des Moines and talking with my mother. She asked me what I thought about immigration and I noted that I didn’t consider it a particular problem because immigration is natural and pretty much unstoppable. Due to my poor recollection, I can’t recall if I also noted that the U.S. has historically had a fairly decent view of immigration, much better than the proposals being floated around in congress. These proposals, ironically, are similar to the policies in Europe that recently led to rioting in France.

A few weeks after I got back, the NY Times published a lengthy article on the economics of immigration which fairly summarized my views and even brought up some great information I hadn’t heard before. I sent it to my mother, and being the former English teacher that she is, she asked me to summarize it (aka, write a book report). So, here we go – a bit out of order from the original in order to better present the material, but basically a summary of “The Immigration Equation by Roger Lowenstein.