Social

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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 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: ...

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. ...

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). ...

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). ...

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. ...