Diversion: NPR Fired Juan Williams

Mostly funny (plus a FOX commentator asking "is NPR an agent somehow of a jihadist inquisition") ...

From NPR Staffing Decision 2010, October 25, 2010, at The Daily Show.

Security: Iran Restricts Social Sciences Seen as 'Western'

Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.

The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran's conservative leadership — women's studies and human rights.

"The content of the current courses in the 12 subjects is not in harmony with religious fundamentals and they are based on Western schools of thought," senior education official Abolfazl Hassani told state radio.

Some two million out of 3.5 million Iranian university students are studying social sciences and humanities, according to government statistics.

For more, see Iran Restricts Social Sciences Seen as 'Western' by Nassar Karimi, October 24, 2010 at Time.

Politics: We Rate the 2010 Campaign Barely True

The more propaganda we hear, the less we know ...

After rating hundreds of claims in the 2010 election -- from TV ads, debates, interviews and mailings -- we're giving an overall Truth-O-Meter rating to the campaign.

We rate it Barely True.

In a majority of claims checked this fall by PolitiFact and our eight state partners, we found a grain of truth, but it was exaggerated, twisted or distorted. (We define Barely True as a statement containing some element of truth, but it "ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.")

Lately, a growing number of claims haven't even risen to the level of Barely True. In the past two weeks, we've seen a surge of statements so wrong that they've earned False and Pants on Fire ratings.

For more, see We Rate the 2010 Campaign Barely True by Bill Adair, October 27, 2010 at PolitiFact.

Economics: Can't Keep a Bad Idea down

In 2005 our National Academies responded to a call from a bipartisan group of senators to recommend 10 actions the federal government could take to enhance science and technology so America could successfully compete in the 21st century. Their response was published in a study, spearheaded by the industrialist Norman Augustine, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”

Charles M. Vest, the former M.I.T. president, worked on the study and noted in a speech recently that Gathering Storm, together with work by the Council on Competitiveness, led to the America Competes Act of 2007, which increased funding for the basic science research that underlies our industrial economy. Other recommendations, like improving K-12 science education, were not substantively addressed.

So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5. The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,' says it all, noted Vest. The committee's conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.'

But I thought: We're number 1!

Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today, says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can't even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.

For much more, see Can't Keep a Bad Idea down by Thomas L. Friedman, October 26, 2010 at The New York Times.

Diversion: Tech Support

From Tech Support, October 16, 2010 at xkcd.

Politics: Meg Whitman Spending Hits $163m

Arnold Schwarzenegger won in 2006 after spending about $30 million.

California GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman spent almost $23 million in the first 16 days of October, bringing her total to $163 million, according to a campaign finance disclosure filed Thursday.

Whitman still trails Democrat Jerry Brown by 8 percentage points, according to a Public Policy Institute of California poll released earlier this week.

Brown spent $14.6 million during the first 16 days of the month, more than half of the $25.3 million his campaign has spent in total.

From Meg Whitman Spending Hits $163m by Andy Barr, October 22, 2010 at Politico.

Science: NELL, the Never-Ending Language Learning System

Trying to teach a machine how to learn by reading the internet seems like a great way to add the background knowledge needed for general artificial intelligence.

Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day.

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

For more, see Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself by Steve Lohr, October 4, 2010 at The New York Times. Thank you, Martha.

Economics: Managing the Federal Debt

Some tidbits from good, long article on out debt ...

The largest holders of Treasury securities by far are foreign institutions, which own nearly 50% of all Treasury securities outstanding (despite acquiring less than 20% at auction). The next largest holder of debt is the Federal Reserve, with 9.4% of all Treasury securities, followed by individual Americans, who own 9% of the total; mutual funds, which own 7.8%; and state and local governments, which own about 6.5%.

Foreigners hold about $4 trillion in Treasury securities today, and roughly $2.9 trillion of that amount is owned by so-called foreign official investors: central banks and finance ministries that build reserves of foreign currencies to support their exchange rates or monetary systems (as discussed below). Most of them use the U.S. dollar for this purpose, which makes it the global reserve currency of choice. At the end of 2009, the dollar accounted for 62% of declared official foreign-exchange reserves, up from 59% in 1995. It is striking to note that, even though the euro was introduced in 1999 to create a second global reserve currency, the euro share of foreign-exchange reserves at the end of 2009 — 27% — was roughly equal to the percentage of reserves in 1995 denominated in the old currencies of those European countries that eventually adopted the euro (such as the Deutschemark and French franc).

As of April, the largest foreign holders of Treasury securities were the People's Republic of China ($900 billion, or 11% of the entire Treasury market), Japan ($796 billion, or 9.5%), the combined OPEC nations ($239 billion, or 3.5%), Brazil ($164 billion, or 2%), and Russia ($113 billion, or 1.4%). In addition, a combined $474 billion (nearly 6% of Treasury securities outstanding) were held in accounts located in the United Kingdom and in Caribbean and other North American banking centers (the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Panama).

... discussions of the national debt too often overlook the fact that, in recent decades, private indebtedness in America has been growing as quickly as public indebtedness. Even as the federal debt reaches and exceeds post-war records as a share of the economy, it remains well within historical bounds as a share of the total U.S. credit market. An $8.3 trillion federal debt accounts for just 16% of the total value of all American credit-market obligations outstanding — that is, of all public and private debt in America. This is actually slightly less than the federal debt's average share of the combined stock of public and private debt since 1970 (16.2%).

The stability of this ratio in the face of burgeoning federal borrowing is a reflection of the dramatic increase in the private-sector debt-to-GDP ratio. In 1970, total non-federal debt outstanding in America was equal to 125% of GDP. Today, it is roughly 300% of GDP. The astonishing growth of household debt (from 44% to 93% of GDP) and financial-sector debt (from 12% to 103% of GDP) means that a much larger share of national income has already been pledged to service debt obligations than has generally been the case in American history.

In the first quarter of 2009, total economy-wide borrowing was negative — meaning more money was being repaid than borrowed — for the first time since the Federal Reserve began tracking such data in 1946. It has remained negative in the four quarters since.

This brings us back to the two different ways of reading today's economic data. In the past two years, the federal government has been able to sell its debt on extremely favorable terms (in part because commercial borrowing declined dramatically, leaving investors with fewer options and so making federal debt more attractive). But can its string of luck continue? The answer depends on one's understanding of what exactly is happening to our economy in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. This is why there has been such intense disagreement among experts about the future of the federal debt:

The data can accommodate two stories.

The first is that the American economy suffers from excess capacity resulting from a temporary decline in aggregate demand. In this view, the large private-sector financial surplus of the moment (that is, the fact that businesses are saving and repaying more than they are spending and borrowing) reflects a weakness in consumer spending and business investment in the real economy. Deficit-financed government spending — putting money into the hands of citizens to spur private consumption, or making direct government purchases — is all that is preventing the economy from falling into a deflationary spiral caused by the liquidation of assets (which is the necessary counterpart to the private sector's effort to reduce outstanding debt).

The second view is that the private-sector financial surplus is driven by consumer and producer expectations about the future tax implications of government borrowing. Named after the classical economist David Ricardo and popularized by Harvard economist Robert Barro, this "Ricardian" theory (in its various forms) argues that the private sector responds to increases in public-sector borrowing by increasing its estimates of future taxation, therefore lowering its estimates of future disposable income and reducing current spending. Under this theory, the private-sector surpluses come from the increased savings caused by these revised expectations. Indeed, if one is ever likely to see Ricardian effects manifest themselves, it would be in the wake of a sudden 50% increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. And, as with the first view, the data above fit this story perfectly.

This debate is also mirrored in the dispute about the impact of debt-financed stimulus over the past two years. If private-sector surpluses are a response not only to reduced demand, but also to public-sector debt growth, then borrowing huge sums of money to fund a stimulus bill could well end up making things worse, or at least fail to make them much better. The government's financial position could end up deteriorating without a corresponding boost to the economy.

Between 1936 and 1938, the government pursued a contractionary fiscal and monetary policy that closed a 5.4%-of-GDP budget deficit within two years. The result was a fall in output and a spike in unemployment — contributing to the Great Depression's "second dip." Today's policymakers certainly have reason to fear repeating this mistake.

But economists on the other side of the argument are motivated by concerns just as real. Their worry is not that the United States would default on its debt: The government borrows in a currency that it prints, and it is difficult to conceive of a situation in which it would be more advantageous for the United States to renounce obligations than to print whatever amount of dollars would be necessary to meet them. The real problem is that bond-market investors are not oblivious to this flexibility. When it appears likely that a country will print money to inflate away unsustainable debt burdens, interest rates rise to incorporate an inflation risk premium — thus increasing the burden on the government and on private borrowers. The danger, then, is that excessive borrowing will bring investors' hunger for Treasury securities to an end, causing a spike in interest rates that could crush the American economy and send it into a debt spiral we would find very difficult to escape.

For much more, see Managing the Federal Debt by Jason Thomas, Fall, 2010 at NationalAffairs.com.

Diversion: How Ink Is Made

A pretty, 9:00 video with a nice soundtrack ...

From How Ink Is Made by PrintingInkCompany, June 17, 2010 at YouTube.com. Thank you, Martha.

Taxes: Change California "Prop 13"

Prop. 13 was sold to California as a way to keep people in their homes, [Phil Ting] said in Santa Barbara last week. But today, what has happened is that its primary beneficiaries really aren't homeowners; they're commercial property owners and corporations.

Citing state revenue studies, Ting estimates that assessing commercial property at market rate, instead of older, Prop. 13-enabled values, would generate an additional $7.5 billion in tax revenue — a big chunk of recent budget shortfalls.

Before Prop. 13, commercial property owners in San Francisco paid about 60 percent of the city's property taxes, and homeowners about 40 percent; three decades later, the ratio has been reversed, a trend also seen elsewhere.

For more, see Third-Rail Man by Jerry Roberts, October 14, 2010 at The Santa Barbara Independent.

Security: Firesheep

Another reason to beware of using unencrypted wireless networks with private information ...

When logging into a website you usually start by submitting your username and password. The server then checks to see if an account matching this information exists and if so, replies back to you with a "cookie" which is used by your browser for all subsequent requests.

It's extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called "sidejacking") is when an attacker gets a hold of a user's cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.

This is a widely known problem that has been talked about to death, yet very popular websites continue to fail at protecting their users. The only effective fix for this problem is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL. Facebook is constantly rolling out new "privacy" features in an endless attempt to quell the screams of unhappy users, but what's the point when someone can just take over an account entirely? Twitter forced all third party developers to use OAuth then immediately released (and promoted) a new version of their insecure website. When it comes to user privacy, SSL is the elephant in the room.

Today at Toorcon 12 I announced the release of Firesheep, a Firefox extension designed to demonstrate just how serious this problem is.

[Emphasis added].

For more, see Firesheep by Eric Butler, October, 2010 at {codebutler}.

Diversion: The Economic Argument

From The Economic Argument October 21, 2010 at xkcd.

Politics: Dole-Ford Era Offers Model for Obama-GOP Cooperation

Regarding the relationship of Obama and the Republicans if they do well in the election ...

From my seat, I was looking directly at the large photo mural of former senator Dole and his frequent partner, Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan, the House minority leader.

One of them -- Ford -- achieved the presidency only briefly, when Richard Nixon was forced to resign. The other -- Dole -- failed each time he ran. But no one regards them as political failures, because they realized that victory is counted in more than vote totals. They won the ultimate tests of character for two reasons. They did not sacrifice their political principles. And they acknowledged that they shared the responsibility for making this system of government work.

It helped that they came to Washington as young military veterans, survivors of a war against an implacable enemy. They knew the difference between the Nazis, who were truly evil, and the Democrats, who were simply fellow Americans with different political beliefs.

For Obama and the Republicans to establish a productive post-election atmosphere, it may require nothing more than the recapture of that wisdom of their political forebears. Behave as if you are veterans, and today's political disputes will recede to their proper size.

For more, see Dole-Ford Era Offers Model for Obama-GOP Cooperation by David S. Broder, October 21, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Politics: Race-Baiting Resurrected: The GOP's Southern Strategy Rises Again

Rachael Maddow lists some of the many unremarked upon, bigoted statements by candidates on the campaign trail this year starting at 5:30 in this 14:50 video ...

From Race-Baiting Resurrected: The GOP's Southern Strategy Rises Again (Part 1) and (Part 2), October 20, 2010 at YouTube ,

Mind: Shouts Banish Doubts

Newly published research confirms and expands upon an insight first revealed in the 1950s: If confidence in one's core tenets becomes shaky, a common response is to proselytize all the more vigorously.

The apparent reason, according to Northwestern University researchers David Gal and Derek Rucker, is that advocacy on behalf of one's beliefs helps banish any uncomfortable lack of certainty.

Although it is natural to assume that a persistent and enthusiastic advocate of a belief is brimming with confidence, they write in the journal Psychological Science, the advocacy might in fact signal that the individual is boiling over with doubt.

For more, see Shouts Banish Doubts by Tom Jacobs, October 15, 2010 at Miller-McCune.

Politics: Obama Is a Demon

There are some pictures on the Drudge Report. I'm gonna hold them up here to the Dittocam. I've got too many things to do here, but, folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look. It is strange that these pictures would be released. Snerdley is looking at them and ... see what I'm talking about? It's very, very, very strange. An American president has never had facial expressions like this. At least we've never seen photos of an American president with facial expressions like this.

From Helpless Liberals Watch as Obama Switches from Messiah to Demon by Rush, October 18, 2010 at The Rush Limbaugh Show.

Mind: For Elderly, Conservative Beliefs Buffer Self-Esteem

Newly published research suggests senior citizens have a strong unconscious incentive to embrace culturally conservative values: Turning to the right apparently bolsters their self-esteem.

The researchers found growing older was associated with lower levels of self-esteem among those on the liberal side of the scale. But conservatives were spared that decline, leading them to conclude that conservatism buffers the negative effect of age on self-esteem.

Van Hiel and Brebels note this confirms the results of their 2009 study, which found that for the elderly, an authoritarian attitude appears to buffer the harsh effect of negative life events on mental distress.

Right-wing beliefs are good for old people, they write. Conservatism predicts healthy self-esteem above and beyond narcissism among the oldest.

Why would this be? Van Hiel and Brebels argue that old age is a time to take stock of your life and attempt to find meaning. For most, this means looking back at your experiences and accomplishments in the context of your social environment. A social-conservative belief system, which values your culture or society above others, would elevate your own personal status, thus propping up your self-esteem.

Ego-integrated individuals have a strong sense of being part of a given culture and tradition that is rooted in the past and should be preserved in the future, they write. Hence, adherence to culture and traditions might be considered a means of granting significance to oneself as a person.

The down side of this, of course, is that people favoring their own group tend to derogate out-groups and to reject everyone who threatens their world view, the researchers write. This results in higher levels of prejudice among the elderly — a phenomenon widely noted in the U.S., but usually ascribed to a reduced ability to repress implicit biases, including those acquired during their formative years in the pre-Civil Rights era.

For more, see For Elderly, Conservative Beliefs Buffer Self-Esteem by Tom Jacobs, October 7, 2010 at Miller-McCune.

Politics: Don't Follow the Money

The vast majority of campaign spending is done by candidates and political parties. Over the past year, the Democrats, most of whom are incumbents, have been raising and spending far more than the Republicans.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats in the most competitive House races have raised an average of 47 percent more than Republicans. They have spent 66 percent more, and have about 53 percent more in their war chests. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, between Sept. 1 and Oct. 7, Democrats running for the House and the Senate spent $1.50 on advertising for every $1 spent by Republicans.

The most alarmed coverage concerns the skyrocketing spending of independent groups. It is true that Republicans have an edge when it comes to outside expenditures. This year, for example, the United States Chamber of Commerce is spending $22 million for Republicans, while the Service Employees International Union is spending about $14 million for Democrats.

But independent spending is about only a tenth of spending by candidates and parties. Democrats have a healthy fear of Karl Rove, born out of experience, but there is no way the $13 million he influences through the group American Crossroads is going to reshape an election in which the two parties are spending something like $1.4 billion collectively.

Political scientists have tried to measure the effectiveness of campaign spending using a variety of methodologies. There is no consensus in the field. One large group of studies finds that spending by incumbents makes no difference whatsoever, but spending by challengers helps them get established. Another group finds that neither incumbent nor challenger spending makes a difference. Another group finds that both kinds of spending have some impact.

For more, see Don't Follow the Money by David Brooks, October 18, 2010 at The New York Times.

Economics: Wall Street Pay: A Record $144 Billion

Pay on Wall Street is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year, according to a study conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms—which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges—are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

The data showed that revenue was expected to rise at 29 of the 35 firms surveyed, but at a slower pace than pay. Wall Street revenue is expected to rise 3%, to $448 billion from $433 billion, despite a slowdown in some high-profile activities like stock and bond trading.

Overall, Wall Street is expected to pay 32.1% of its revenue to employees, the same as last year, but below the 36% in 2007. Profits, which were depressed by losses in the past two years, have bounced back from the 2008 crisis. But the estimated 2010 profit of $61.3 billion for the firms surveyed still falls about 20% short from the record $82 billion in 2006. Over that same period, compensation across the firms in the survey increased 23%.

For more, see Wall Street Pay: A Record $144 Billion by Liz Rappaport, Aaron Lucchetti and Stephen Grocer, October 11, 2010 at The Wall Street Journal.

Politics: Deep Cover

From Deep Cover by Tim Eagan, October 7, 2010 at GoComics.