Weekly reading
November 13, 2011
Here are more recent links from hecker.tumblr.com. This week (actually, more like two weeks) was somewhat random, to say the least.
Race Against the Machine. This is a must-read. The basic argument is that exponential advances in software technology threaten to automate all jobs involving low-to-mid-level relatively routine intellectual work, and even threaten what we would consider relatively high-end work (e.g., medical diagnosis). You should read this instead of reading yet another superficial pro- or anti-OWS article. (Plus it’s a smashing bargain as a $3.99 ebook.)
“What if middle-class jobs disappear“. This is an interesting analysis of potential structural changes in the economy, aligned with the arguments in Race Against the Machine. The final paragraphs (e.g., “I believe that a scenario in which many people have dignified jobs and enjoyable lifestyles is more likely to emerge in an environment with decentralized voluntary charities than one with concentrated, coercive government.”) strike me as libertarian wishful thinking in the absence of any real evidence for the likelihood of this outcome.
“Howard County Register of Wills Election Returns, 1851-present“. Byron Macfarlane, the current Howard County Register of Wills, worked with the Maryland State Archives to put this page together. It would be great if we had a similar online resource for the results of all Howard County local elections from the founding of the county forward (and even greater if we had results down to the precinct level). The usual places (Howard County Board of Elections, Maryland State Board of Elections, Maryland State Archives) seem not to have any information prior to the 1980s or 1990s.
“Adaptive Evolution of Cooperation through Darwinian Dynamics in Public Goods Games“. This paper is pretty technical, and I’d have to read it more closely in order to fully follow the math, but it seems to be an interesting result if the simulations therein reflect reality. The basic idea appears to be as follows, if I’m reading it right: In an evolutionary scenario cooperation can take hold and persist if the returns from cooperation initially increase relatively more rapidly than the number of cooperators. If returns from cooperation do not kick in until the number of cooperators reaches a certain threshold, or if returns increase only proportionately to the number of cooperators, then cooperation cannot arise and persist in the population.
“The Shadow Superpower“. This article discusses the unregulated economy (aka “System D”), its size worldwide, and how it’s increasing in importance in developed countries: “after the financial crisis of 2008-09, System D was revealed to be an important financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank … suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated — in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D — fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations. … By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D.” In an interesting hitting-close-to-home twist, the article ends with a quote from Joanne Saltzberg of the nonprofit group Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore.
“The Growth Ponzi Scheme“. TJ Mayotte’s post “A Strong Howard County” alerted me to this interesting article (actually a series of articles). The basic thesis is that suburban growth does not generate sufficient tax revenue to cover long-term maintenance of its associated infrastructure. A couple of key quotes: “If you want a simple explanation for why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted, it is this: Our places do not create wealth, they destroy wealth. Our development pattern — the American style of building our places — is simply not productive enough to sustain itself. … We need to wring more value out of our places and that is only going to happen if we understand how to create value in the first place.” [emphasis in the original]
Test posts with quotes
November 10, 2011
This post is for the WordPress.com support staff, to try to demonstrate a problem with their new Minileven theme for mobile devices; everyone else can ignore it. This post was composed using the HTML panel of the Add New Post page.
Using the HTML <q> tag:
Hi there
, he said, are you a
blogger
?
Using traditional ASCII double and single quotation marks:
“Hi there”, he said, “are you a ‘blogger’?”
Using curling quotation marks expressed as HTML numeric character entities (8220 and 8221 for double quotation marks, 8216 and 8217 for single quotation marks):
“Hi there”, he said, “are you a ‘blogger’?”
Using curling quotation marks expressed as HTML character entities (ldquo and rdquo for double quotation marks, lsquo and rsquo for single quotation marks):
“Hi there”, he said, “are you a ‘blogger’?”
Using curling quotation marks entered directly as Unicode characters on my Mac (option-[ and option-shift-[ for left and right double quotation marks, and option-] and option-shift-] for left and right single quotation marks):
“Hi there”, he said, “are you a ‘blogger’?”
Changing my (blog) name, plus Plus
October 30, 2011
For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name.
A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it.
When I first started a blog I hosted it at hecker.org using custom blogging software. I later got tired of the management hassles involved, and moved my blog to WordPress.com, using the subdomain blog.hecker.org because I was still hosting other things at hecker.org and couldn’t afford to dedicate the entire domain just to my blog. Since then though the blog has assumed more importance as my public face to the world, and I regretted having a somewhat unusual domain name for it. I’ve therefore decided to adopt the conventional approach and use frankhecker.com as my primary blog name. (As noted above the old name of blog.hecker.org will continue to work, thanks to the magic of HTTP redirects.)
Note that my primary personal email address remains hecker@hecker.org; I have no plans to change that. However I can also receive email at frankhecker.com, so for example sending email to frank@frankhecker.com will get to the same inbox as hecker@hecker.org. I may switch over completely to frankhecker.com for all uses in future, but in the meantime there’s no need to update your address book.
In other news, I’m now on Google Plus so you can add me to one of your circles if you’d like. I’ve been meaning to try Google Plus out before now, but I use Google Apps for my email and related services, and Google Plus wasn’t added to Google Apps until this week. I’ll publish notices of new blog posts to Google Plus, and maybe some other stuff from time to time.
Weekly reading
October 30, 2011
For some time now I’ve been posting links I find interesting at hecker.tumblr.com. This is mainly for personal reference, but I thought it might be useful to collect those every week or two in case anyone else is interested. Some of these inspire blog posts, others I use as reference for various projects. This week was a political philosophy week.
Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality
This is an interesting riff on John Rawls and the veil of ignorance
, starting with the following assumption that [absent] a policy of income redistribution, capitalism plus stability leads to income disparities
. I wrote a blog post based on this.
Key quote: Faced with a knowledge of their current state, the people can design a political system that is unstable, thus giving them [a] shot at the lottery in the future. Or they can move toward one that maintains stability, and in doing so establish the rich more securely. For the people to choose the latter route and participate in a government that entrenches the rich, they will demand an egalitarian structure similar to what they would under the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
(via Paul Kedrosky)
Occupy Wall Street and the deradicalized Rawls
I think this Will Wilkinson piece makes a good point about John Rawls and his Theory of Justice: The freedom to buy and sell, to enter into contracts, to start a business, to hire and be hired, to save and invest, to trade freely across borders — none of these are among the basic liberties to be established under [Rawls’s] first principles. … But why? I think it’s as uncomplicated as this: Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t get the answer he was looking for.
Choice of axioms is key, and choosing the axioms one likes seems a pretty common practice in political philosophy. One good question is: What would a Rawlsian theory of justice look like if economic liberties were included in the basic liberties?
Income Inequality Is Hobbling the Middle Class
This is a fairly typical discussion of issues related to income inequality, but is noteworthy for pointing to a paper with a technical discussion of inter-generational mobility. (via Andrew Sullivan, as is the next one.)
What kind of mobility matters?
This is a companion piece to the previous one, focusing on the idea of absolute mobility
, i.e., where people have rising real incomes (both within their own lives and relative to their parents) even though their position relative to others does not change. The claim is essentially that the problem is not rising income inequality as such but rather the lack of absolute mobility.
Weight loss update, month 5
August 17, 2011
It’s now been five months since I started the Newt Gingrich weight loss program, and I’m overdue for another report. (I forgot and didn’t post the month 4 update in time, and by the time I remembered to do so it was far enough past the due date that I decided just to skip month 4 and do the month 5 post instead.) Unfortunately at the moment I’m doing about as well as Newt’s campaign, which is to say not that well: I weighed in this morning at 70.8 kg, which is 0.8 kg over my final goal weight of 70.0 kg. So I screwed up my courage just now and went to Newt’s site to make a donation; if you’re the sort of person who likes to read FEC reports then you’ll see my name there in future.
This month’s thought:
It’s hard to break through a barrier. I seem to have hit a plateau in terms of weight loss somewhere between 70 and 71kg; I’m not really gaining weight, but I’m not losing it either. I suspect the key to further weight loss is going to be to increase my level of physical activity; fortunately my knee (which had been giving me a little bit of trouble) seems to be better now, so I should be able to increase the amount of walking I do and possibly even do some light jogging.
On the plus side, I did get my BMI below 25, which was another goal of mine. There’s of course nothing magic about being just below 25 BMI versus being just above it, but at least I can now officially claim that I’m at normal weight
and not overweight
per the generally-used BMI categories.
I now begin the next phase of the program, in which my goal is to stay at or under goal weight. If I’m not under goal weight at the end of the next five months then I’ll be visiting Newt’s donation page once more.
A personal milestone in math blogging
August 12, 2011
A continuation of my history of Howard County Council redistricting series is coming soon (I promise! really!), but after an evening at the HoCo Blogtail party I’m not in any shape to do any serious historical blogging (even one blogtail will do that to you). I thought I’d use the opportunity instead to plug my other blog math.hecker.org, on which I publish worked out exercises from my attempt to relearn various branches of mathematics. I’m starting with linear algebra, a field of study that isn’t as well known as calculus but in some ways is even more important as a basis for a lot of real-life applications.
I recently worked my way through all the exercises of the first chapter of the linear algebra text I’m using, as noted in a celebratory post yesterday. At the rate I’m going I’ll be a long time in finishing it, but since this is a personal hobby there’s no great rush. My math blog is even more niche-y than this blog, if that’s possible; a typical post gets 10-15 views at most. So why should you care?
Believe it or not, there are some points of connection with the non-math stuff I blog about, including some Howard County points of connection. First, Maryland in general, and I presume Howard County in particular, is actually fairly well-populated with mathematicians as these things go. According to the relevant Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there are almost three thousand people in the U.S. in the job category mathematician
(defined as those who [conduct] research in fundamental mathematics or in application of mathematical techniques to science, management, and other fields
), of which over a third work for the Federal government.
What are these mathematicians doing? Well, a lot of them work for the National Security Agency. NSA aggressively recruits mathematicians and traditionally it was one of the major career possibilities for mathematicians not going into academia. (Those who’ve seen the movie Good Will Hunting may remember the rather self-righteous rant delivered by Matt Damon’s character when an NSA recruiter comes to call.) More recently NSA has been in serious competition with private industry as a career choice for newly-minted math PhDs, although (as noted in a BusinessWeek story on the subject),
[In addition to patriotism] there’s also a lifestyle lure. NSA officials say a good number of mathematicians prefer a suburban Maryland life and a government job with predictable hours to the more frantic pace and market gyrations of an Internet company. This is especially true of women. In general, they’re underrepresented in mathematics, but far less so at the NSA.
Ah, that suburban Maryland life
—we know what they’re talking about. The upshot is that Maryland has the highest concentration of mathematicians of any state in the U.S. (over seven times the national average), with the highest average wage for mathematicians as well.
A couple of other points of connection: First, I’m both taking advantage of and contributing to the trend of people using the Internet for online learning as an alternative to traditional formal education. Interested in learning about linear algebra directly from the MIT professor who wrote the textbook I’m using? No problem, here are his lectures and other course material online for all to enjoy. Need to start your online math education at a slightly lower level? Check out the videos and other material published by the Khan Academy, starting with basic addition. This trend might even come to Howard County public schools some day; Khan Academy is doing a pilot with the Los Altos school district to explore ways to blend online and in-classroom learning. Would this be worth doing in Howard County? I don’t know, but I’m sure it would be a more interesting and productive conversation than talking about the latest Allen Dyer happenings.
Finally, doing mathematics has taught me a personal lesson when it comes to discussing other areas of life, politics in particular. Some people try to take the methods of mathematics and the hard sciences and wholeheartedly apply them elsewhere; for example, a lot of libertarians seem to think that we can deduce from first principles the correct answer to any political question. I think this is misguided. The lesson I take away from doing my math homework is that even in a formal mathematical exercise it’s not trivial at all to rigorously prove a conclusion; in doing my posts I’ve several times found places where I’ve missed key points, assumed things which needed to be proved, and otherwise made a hash of my argument. All the more difficult to be sure of one’s reasoning and conclusions when it comes to areas like politics where there’s disagreement and dispute even about the basic values that we should hold and our basic premises about how the world works. More than a little modesty in one’s pronouncements seems to be called for.
And with that it’s back to non-math blogging for this particular blog. But if you ever need help with your linear algebra homework you now know where to turn.
Weight loss update, month 3
June 17, 2011
I’m now at the three month mark in the Newt Gingrich weight loss program, and it’s time for another progress report. Just as Newt feels liberated
by the resignation of many of his campaign staffers, I myself again feel liberated from having to carry around excess weight: I weighed in this morning at 70.0 kg, 1.6 kg less than my weight a month ago, 5.0 kg below my official starting weight of 75.0 kg, and right at my goal weight. That’s one more month I can spend $10 on myself and not on Newt.
This month’s thought:
Food can be addictive. David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating has a good discussion of the way the modern diet, especially the modern eat-out or take-out diet, is designed to encourage us to eat more, chiefly via adding salt, sugar, and fat in various enticing combinations. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is to resist particular foods that I tended to compulsively overeat, for example tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants. I’ve found that I have to swear off such foods pretty much entirely and resist the temptation to eat even a little bit. Eventually the craving goes away, at least partially, though I’ve backslid occasionally.
As I discussed in a previous weight-loss update, even though I’ve achieved my goal two months ahead of schedule (having hit my goal weight in three months instead of five) I’ll continue to try to lose at least 1 kg a month. My goal for a month from now (July 17) is therefore to be at 69.0 kg or below. I think this is going to be a bit tougher to do, but I take heart from Newt’s determination to soldier on.
Weight loss update, month 2
May 18, 2011
It’s now two months since I started the Newt Gingrich weight loss program, and time for another progress report. The stakes are higher now that Gingrich has officially announced he’s running for president. Fortunately I was able to meet this month’s goal, as I weighed in this morning1 at 71.6 kg, 1.3 kg less than my weight a month ago, 3.4 kg below my official starting weight of 75.0 kg, and 1.6 kg away from my goal weight of 70.0 kg. Once again I can keep $10 in my pocket and out of Newt’s.
This month’s thought:
Eternal vigilance is the price of weight loss. Losing weight was harder this month: I started getting tired of eating sensibly, and had at least one big splurge. The key to success was weighing myself every day (or at least trying to: a couple of days I was out of town on a business trip, and a couple of other days I got busy and forgot). That allowed me to detect times when I was backsliding and renew my efforts; as it was I got concerned the last week or so about coming in too close under the wire, but thankfully had enough margin in the end for random weight fluctuation not to spoil my efforts.
As I discussed in my last weight-loss update, even though I’m a month ahead of schedule (having lost more than 3 kg in two months) I’ll continue to try to lose at least 1 kg a month. My goal for a month from now (June 17) is therefore to be at 70.6 kg or below. Wish me luck (unless you’re Newt Gingrich)!
1. That is, the morning of May 17. I date my blog posts using UTC time, which is why this post is dated May 18 even though it’s not yet midnight local time.
My tumblr
May 14, 2011
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, so here it is: If for some odd reason you want to read more from me than my occasional blog posts, note that I do maintain a microblog (or tumblr
, as the cognoscenti call it, after the underlying service) at hecker.tumblr.com where I record short thoughts, including links to articles I thought interesting. Some if not all of these posts I could publish on my main blog, but I tend to reserve that blog for longer posts with more analysis and background research. Posting to the tumblr is quick and easy, and so I don’t feel the need to justify time spent in posting in the same way as I do on my WordPress.com blog.
Some time ago I complained about Maryland restrictions on direct-to-consumer genetic testing. The FDA is currently deliberating about whether to impose similar restrictions for the entire U.S., essentially forcing anyone wanting access to their own genetic data to do so only through their doctor.
If you’re at all interested in this particular issue, or if you’re concerned about government restrictions on personal freedom in general, I urge you to submit a public comment before the deadline of midnight tonight (Monday, May 2). (Note that the page has a timeout feature, so if your comment is more than a sentence or two I advise you to compose and save it beforehand and then paste it into the comments field. Also, for really long comments you can upload a Word or PDF document.)
You can find some good background information in a post at the Genetic Future blog, including some links to other people’s comments. However as a layman here’s what I think are the key points:
First, we’re not talking here about potentially toxic drugs or about potentially dangerous medical tests (e.g., X-rays, CAT scans, etc.) where there’s a truly valid concern about consumer safety. There’s no direct risk of harm from genetic testing, so opponents have to fall back on hypothetical scenarios about people suffering psychological harm or otherwise doing bad things based on the results of testing. To the extent that such scenarios are likely (and that’s the subject of much dispute) that’s an argument for companies providing more context for results and appropriate cautions, not an argument for prohibiting people entirely from having access to their own genetic data unless it’s through their physician.
Second, people already have access to lots of information that’s relevant to their personal health. For example, people can find out a lot from their own family history, e.g., whether their parents, grandparents, siblings, etc., have had higher-than-normal incidence of heart disease, breast cancer, mental illness, rare diseases of various sorts, and so on. They can also take their own temperature, get a blood pressure reading at their local supermarket, and even do home testing for cholesterol. They can then go online and research the implications of this and other information on health information web sites maintained by government agencies, hospitals like Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, and commercial ventures like WebMD and Healthline. I don’t believe that genetic tests as currently offered direct to consumers are so qualitatively different that they justify a significantly more stringent regulatory framework.
Finally, some level of regulation is arguably appropriate. It’s entirely reasonable that government adopt regulations to ensure that genetic tests are done in an accurate manner, that standard data formats are used to allow people to transfer their genetic data between services, that health-related information provided in association with tests be written or reviewed by physicians and qualified geneticists, and that false advertising and unethical practices be prohibited.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t make sense to adopt heavy-handed regulations in advance of any real evidence that it’s required. It’s bad for consumers looking for information relevant to their personal health, and bad for the emerging personal genomics industry, which might otherwise become a significant driver of economic growth and health care cost reductions. If you agree, head on over to the comments page and tell the FDA what you think.
