Week 4
Russ Roberts
[Paraphrasing, in interview with T. Piketty] You complain about inequality but the economy, “the pie” is so much bigger now, and there are more ppl, that is why the top is getting more of the share (it seems) bcz of that bigger pie [..]
Errr
They kept going back and forth on this, Roberts kept saying “more people, bigger pie”, and Piketty kept saying “we cant have the amount of inequality we have right now”.
What Roberts actually meant with his comments was this; “yes the median income might have fallen down, but the economy is feeding so many more people”, i.e. “the economy became bigger, but the population increased much faster, so everyone’s share is smaller”. Then I thought, I cant believe Roberts said this, he made basically a commie argument. His position is “person X, dont you worry, you are making less, but in total, the economy is feeding so many more like you now, you should feel better about that”.
But.. why should that person care, especially in an economy centered around individual? Should person X get get that warm and fuzzy feeling that there are many others who are in the same position? It’s ludicrous. Especially coming from a “market-oriented” liberterian like Roberts. Less money in the hands of the “many” means less spending to go around.
Few solutions to this problem (there is one, I hope everyone agrees). 1) New e-currency, like Bitcoin [1], can be developed that allows personal mining that’ll last indefinitely; everyone “makes” their own money. At certain intervals the system can even start a “taxing round” which shifts money from rich to the poor. Government, if it wants, can be involved to identify who the real people in the system are, so the system (its users) can direct it to real people (or invdividuals themselves keep track of this).
Alternatively the system can have a built-in mechanism that reverses the exponential effect of wealth, money held by small holders is multiplied by a certain constant to bridge the gap between insanely rich and poor.
Or, basic income must be considered.
BTW, I see some criticism (a notable one from America) on basic income on the grounds that;
It’s tremendously important for people to work not just because that’s how they get their money, but also because it’s one of the principal ways they get many other important things: self-worth [..] engagement [..] Nice words, but the authors of this passage must be careful, because the culture code for work in America is WHO YOU ARE. People derive an identity from work, which is a completely different issue than the one we are discussing here.
Codes came below intellect (and stronger), even when ppl think they are thinking rationally, this stuff can sneak in and distort things… So watch out.
Maybe the lowest hanging fruit is the implementation of instantenous conversion from bank accounts to Bitcoin and vica versa; because electronic payments need to come into play somehow, status quo is a major pain in the ass. Credit cars are not secure, there are limits to ATM card payments, and banks are not always open. I need to be able to point to a QR code and be able to pay, from my bank account instantenously.
Bill Donohue, Leader of the Catholic League
Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death [..] Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive.
So .. he had it coming?
Times Higher Education
Dutch universities have vowed not to soften their groundbreaking demands for publishers to permit all papers published by their academics to be made open access for no extra charge [..]
Gerard Meijer, president of Radboud University and one of the lead negotiators for the Dutch universities, said that in addition to preserving access to their subscription journals, the universities wanted publishers to permit all future articles whose corresponding author has a Dutch affiliation to be published on an open access basis for no extra charge. He said universities were also unwilling to tolerate any more above-inflation price rises [..].
Professor Meijer insisted that Dutch universities were determined not to bend.
“We are willing to pay publishers for the work they do, but Elsevier’s profit margin is approaching 40 per cent, and universities have to do the [editing] work and pay for it. We aren’t going to accept it any longer. I think from the fact that Elsevier is not willing to move much, they simply still don’t believe it. Well, they got us wrong,” he said.
Go Dutch
A Tweet
No shit
Nature
[Paraphrasing] First new antibiotic in 30 years discovered, even better, it is unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it.
Awesome
Drug resistant superbugs, bad. New antibiotic that can kill them, good.
Comment
New educational technique tries to encourage in-class collaboration [..]
That’s just one method out of many
Here’s a Drucker post on how one learns. People who learn by by talking, listening might benefit from in-class collaboration, others such as readers, writers, doers might not. There are introverts, extroverts. STPs, NTs, NFs. Also, collaboration might take many forms, in-your-face-one-on-one-talk-your-ear-off kind, or offline, async (post a question to Stack Exchange wait for answer, async). Which one?
Angry Math Blog
[Paraphrasing] Displeased with Udacity statistics class (taught by S. Thrun)
Goal #1: Quality
S. Thrun might be a good teacher for self-driving cars, but apparently not for statistics. Goal of online learning should be connecting rock star teacher with students (For statistics that teacher is Joe Blitzstein of Harvard).
Bill O’Reilly
With Hillary you get Bill. And Bill knows what’s going on.
HaHa
The ultimate compliment a politician can get must be getting kudos from an earlier enemy. But I dont think even Bill is up-to-date with today’s issues. Even during his time the suspension of Glass-Seagall law took place which was one of the key ingredients for 2008 financial crisis. That was his mistake.
Watering down GS might not have caused the financial crisis, but reportedly it made it worse.
Maybe Hillary is in better shape, but our pref is still Gore. INTJ, hi-tech, environmentalist credentials are beyond doubt, bitchslapped NSA at the right time.
Forbes
[Paraph] Glass-Seagall did not effect 2008 crisis at all.
Mmm
How did US banks end up with all these toxic assets then?
UK ex-spy chief
We have to monitor innocent people to ferret out terror
Do you?
The recent attackers in Paris were known to French police. They’d been in and out of jail, and I am sure similar pattern occurs a lot with other attacks. And the pool of people who can pull off such an attack cannot be that large. Why not monitor these people better instead of following anyone and everyone?
Unless.. the security apparatus in all countries is using any and every single event to justify their demand to get more access into people’s daily lives, even using bizarre unrelated events such as N. Korea’s hacking into Sony for US.
Link
[Paraphrasing] Bitcoin had some emotional highs, but beyond the ups and downs, it is here to stay.
Great
Link
A senior judge has recommended the introduction of digital technologies such as video and online filing to bring the criminal courts into the 21st century [..]
In his recommendations, Leveson, president of the Queen’s Bench, explained: “Rather than seeking to bolt procedures onto a system initially designed for the 19th century (as has been the practice for the last 50 years), I have tried to identify ways in which our current procedures can be adapted to make the best use of the skills, resources, IT and systems available.”
Leveson added that criminal justice system currently relies on a combination of long-standing manual processes and aging computer systems. He suggests that the courts need better, quicker and cheaper ways of creating, filing and distributing documents, as well as more flexible ways of communication.
No objections
News
In May 2014, Baidu, the Chinese search giant, has hired Andrew Ng, a leading Machine Learning and Deep Learning expert (and co-founder of Coursera) to head their new AI Lab in Silicon Valley, setting up an AI & Deep Learning race with Google (which hired Geoff Hinton) and Facebook (which hired Yann LeCun to head Facebook AI Lab [who is a student of Hinton]).
The race is on
Ernest Davis (following a link posted by Yann LeCun)
[Criticizing the book Superintelligence by Bostrom] assumption [is] that intelligence is a potentially infinite quantity with a well-defined, one-dimensional value. Bostrom writes differential equations for intelligence, and characterizes their solutions. Certainly, if you asked Bostrom about this, he would say that this is a simplifying assumption made for the sake of making the analysis concrete. The problem is, that if you look at the argument carefully, it depends rather strongly on this idealization, and if you loosen the idealization, important parts of the argument become significantly weaker, such as Bostrom’s expectation that the progress from human intelligence to superhuman intelligence will occur quickly.
Of course, there are quantities associated with intelligence that do correspond to this description: The speed of processing, the size of the brain, the size of memory of various kinds. But we do not know the relation of these to intelligence in a qualitative sense. We do not know the relation in brain size to intelligence across animals, because we have no useful measure or even definition of intelligence across animals. And these quantities certainly do not seem to be particularly related to differences in intelligence between people. Bostrom, quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky, points out that the difference between Einstein and the village idiot is tiny as compared to the difference between man and mouse; which is true and important. But that in itself does not justify his conclusion that in the development of AI’s it will take much longer to get from mouse to man than from average man to Einstein. For one thing, we know less about those cognitive processes that made Einstein exceptional, than about the cognitive processes that are common to all people, because they are much rarer. Bostrom claims that once you have a machine with the intelligence of a man, you can get a superintelligence just by making the thing faster and bigger. However, all that running faster does is to save you time. If you have two machines A and B and B runs ten times as fast as A, then A can do anything that B can do if you’re willing to wait ten times as long.
Thumbs up
WSJ
Over the past decade, smartphones have radically changed many aspects of our everyday lives, from banking to shopping to entertainment. Medicine is next. With innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. And the end result will be that you, the patient, are about to take center stage for the first time [..]
It isn’t just hospitals’ rooms that are on their way out; so are their labs. Smartphone attachments will soon enable you to perform an array of routine lab tests via your phone. Blood electrolytes; liver, kidney and thyroid function [..]
Meanwhile, nearly all sophisticated medical imaging devices are being miniaturized: Hand-held ultrasound devices are already available, and some medical schools have begun issuing them in the place of the old-school stethoscope. Hand-held MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines aren’t far behind, and engineers at UCLA have come up with a smartphone-sized device that can generate X-rays. It won’t be long before you can take a smartphone X-ray selfie if you’re worried that you might have broken a bone.
X-ray selfie!
Cool. 1 more ex of moving away from industrial era specialization to general availability of software-driven services due to easy tranmission and processing of knowledge.
I have to add though even in the previous era, most diagnosis could have been performed through self-help manuals, easy-to-understand decision trees prepared by the best in the field; with intermittent lab tests (left to market forces to compete on) whose output could be fed in to these self-diagnosis decisions.
This did not happen. The 2W system made a concious choice to offer healthcare through this collection of “many”, these average specialists whose jobs would later turn into professions. But average is average; as a result the system still cannot get a lot of the basics right, and it cannot extend top quality to everyone. I was once prescribed penicilin and it turned out I had an allergy to the shit. With decision trees (now software), that would be the first question to check: DO YOU HAVE A PENICILIN ALLERGY YES|NO? Go to lab have test #23423 performed. Check the appropiate box.
This issue keeps coming up over and over again. Instead of propogating the bland, the subpar, just so some people have “jobs”, 3W will allow access to the best, for everyone. Then everyone works for fun (like I do now); and there is basic income. More productivity, more happiness. Boom.
News
White House announced the government wants offer free Community College.
Obamapay
Bad idea.. Let’s say you want to learn data science, in which Linear Algebra is an important subject. MIT has video courses taught by Gilbert Strang who happens to be one of the best teachers in the world in this area. A student can simply watch his courses online.
Why would anyone go to a “free” community college to learn sub-par linear algebra from some schmuck who can never have the grasp on the subject as Strang does? Who thinks up this shit? I guess if you design Obamacare, this is the next logical stupid idea.
There’s also the annoying fact that individual mandate is unconstitutional -I dont care what SC says, this is a body, after all, who “elected” Dubya as president-.
Dean Baker
[T]he level of confusion in public discussions of the economy is truly astounding. The people extolling the virtues of the economy today were too blind to see the $8 trillion housing bubble that had been driving the economy before the downturn. Most economic experts just say what other economic experts say; they are not capable of independently assessing the economy [..]
Public discourse on the economy seems unaware of some basic facts. First and foremost, capitalist economies generally grow. It makes no more sense to celebrate the fact that the economy is larger in 2015 than in 2014 than it does to celebrate that your ten-year old kid is taller than when she was five. Growth is the norm, the relevant question is the rate of growth, and by this measure there is little to be happy about.
Second, the stock market is not a measure of economic success. It is a measure of how much wealth the people who own stock have. If the stock market rises rapidly because the economy is growing, and profits and stock prices are growing along with it, then this is further confirmation of a strong economy. However if the stock market rises because there has been a redistribution from wages to profits, as has in fact been the case, this is hardly reason for the bulk of the population, who hold little or no stock, to celebrate.
A third point is that most workers are unlikely to see wage growth until the labor market has far less unemployment than at present. If the economy continues to add 240,000 jobs a month, we may be at this point somewhere in 2016, but we aren’t there now and we will almost certainly not be there any time in 2015. While the unemployment rate has fallen most of the way back to its pre-recession level, this is largely because millions of unemployed workers have dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed. Contrary to what is often claimed, this is not a story of aging baby boomers retiring.
Yes
The unemploy. numbers need to be reverse-engineered from employment #’s; the ones government releases are unreliable.
Financial Times
[About Tony Judt] A former kibbutznik of the left who had served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Six day war, Judt had long since repudiated both his Zionism and his Marxism. In the aftermath of 9/11, in particular, no issue was more toxic in New York intellectual life than Israel, none more inescapable for someone of Judt’s background and temperament. He once told an interviewer of his “mischievous disposition” and his fondness for sticking his head above the parapet; but in this case there was his sense of moral obligation as well. His writings made him for a time a hate figure for American Zionist groups. His sin was to have pointed out that the burden of responsibility rested with those with power, hence with Israelis more than Palestinians, and with Washington politicians more than with either.
He was not dewy-eyed about the Palestinian leadership, whose shortcomings he recognised, but his real contempt was reserved for Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and all those who were driving Israel deeper and deeper into isolation. He was deeply concerned, too, about the power of the pro-Israel lobby, and despaired of any enduring solution in the Middle East so long as American foreign policy was held hostage by it. In October 2003, a time when discussion of these issues in the US was especially fraught, he got into trouble for saying the two-state solution was finished; today it is hard to see what the fuss was about, unless it was simply about silencing any mainstream criticism of official Israeli policy.
Beyond its influence (or lack of it) on Israel, there was the broader question of the changing role of the US in the world more generally. Judt was not hostile to the idea of American power — he was scathing and amusing about that form of French cultural anxiety that often expressed itself as anti-Americanism — but he despaired of the direction US foreign policy had taken under George W Bush: unilateralist, hectoring, destructive of international institutions that represented in his view the only chance, however limited, for collective action among nations. In his book Postwar (2005), he presented Europe as a less muscle-bound alternative, more concerned about social equity and cohesion.
I like this guy
He is smart.. and I believe the technical term for such people is.. “self-hating Jew”. That’s what Israeli rightwingers keep calling them, right?
The Guardian
Given world events over the past decade or so, the most obvious explanation [for C. Hebdo shooting] is also the most plausible: the fate of Muslims in foreign conflicts played a role in radicalising these young men. Working-class Parisians don’t go to Yemen for military training on a whim. Since their teens these young men have been raised on a nightly diet of illegal wars, torture and civilian massacres in the Gulf and the Middle East in which the victims have usually been Muslim.
In a court deposition in 2007, Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the brothers affiliated with al-Qaida who shot the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, was explicit about this. “I got this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television on what was going on over there. I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis.” [..] These grievances are real even if attempts to square them with the killers’ actions make your head hurt. France opposed the Iraq war; Isis and al-Qaida have been sworn enemies and both have massacred substantial numbers of Muslims. Not only is the morality bankrupt, but the logic is warped.
It’s a big mess all around
In a way this latest attack is a left-over from Bush era; these ppl seem to have been pushed over the edge after Abu Gharib. At the same time, crime is a crime. Fight against ISIS, their supporters, symphatizers and the likes needs to go on unabated. This peasant shit cannot become the norm.
News
85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people).
Damn
These numbers get more comical each time..Now we are comparing a limited headcount to entire percentages.. Isnt that crazy?
News
A new computer algorithm can play one of the most popular variants of poker essentially perfectly. Its creators say that it is virtually “incapable of losing against any opponent in a fair game”. [This] variant of poker, called heads-up limit hold’em (HULHE), can be considered solved. The algorithm is described in a paper in Science.
The strategy the authors have computed is so close to perfect “as to render pointless further work on this game”, says Eric Jackson, a computer-poker researcher [..] As part of its developing strategy, the computer learned to inject a certain dose of bluffing into its plays. Although bluffing seems like a very human, psychological element of the game, it is in fact part of game theory — and, typically, of computer poker. “Bluffing falls out of the mathematics of the game,” says Bowling, and you can calculate how often you should bluff to obtain best results.
Of course, no poker algorithm can be mathematically guaranteed to win every game, because the game involves a large element of chance based on the hand you’re dealt. But Bowling and his colleagues have demonstrated that their algorithm always wins in the long run.
News
Fox News issued an unusual on-air apology on Saturday night for having allowed its anchors and guests to repeat the false claim that there are Muslim-only “no-go zones” in European countries like England and France that are not under the control of the state and are ruled according to Shariah law.
Unfair and unbalanced
Link
[This is a link we shared before, about AI slavery in movie Interstellar] In an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation titled The Measure of a Man, the [..] android named Data […] is ordered by Star Fleet to report for reverse-engineering so that more androids may be built. Data’s legal advocate, captain Picard, is unsure how to defend Data on legal grounds. Data is admittedly the direct product of human invention [.. h]is rights are questionable at best.
It’s just a show
This author is in the opposite end of the “singularity debate”; If an AI is not a Terminator, it has to be a slave. He uses a Trek episode to support his argument.
But TV shows are dramas, and have logical inconsistencies (yes, even Trek has them). How appropiate is it to use them for debates like this? For example, from other episodes in ST TNG we know Data “chooses” to join Starfleet, he is apparently sentient enough for that. But then just for the purposes of The Measure of a Man, the backstory changes (or is ignored), just a little bit, so the show starts as though Data is the property of Starfleet. This had to be done otherwise the rest of the drama would not work.
In 80s soap operas, when the writers wanted to make drastic changes in a show, they would have the main actor wake up in the beginning of, like, season 3, and have him say “Oh man, I dreamt the whole thing!”, by which it was meant entire f..king season 2; So everything that happened in that season could be written off and the writers could start over. Trek isnt that bad, but there are still inconsistencies.
News
Google Glass sales discontinued
Good
GG designers needs to lose that black thingy in the upper-right side of glass, it makes the wearer look like a contract killer sent from 22nd century to the present. And once the “other” person realizes that the glass they are being watched through is Google Glass, they immediately think “Google is watching me” (which is why the gadget has been banned in some SF bars). A gadget like this must look exactly like a glass, otherwise, the scheme does not work. Now this maybe impossible in terms of materials engineering, I dont know; but I am telling you, this gadget has an image problem.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf
The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It’s difficult to quantify the improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of [KZZI] Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms!
Jeez
But how could that be? Innovation is dead (!)
News
[Another Uber PR f..k-up]
Tech is making deeper inroads into social life
Ordering stuff online and having them delivered to people’s doorstep is one thing; inserting yourself in the middle of much richer human interaction is another. Transportation, offered by the people, for the people is that kind of a “busier” and richer interaction IMO. Some of the blame for the most recent PR fubar can be laid on the Uber’s chief executive, due to his particular “style”, but mostly the issue is the new business / social environment Uber finds itself in. AirBnb is having similar experiences (social, legal, etc). This is good! Tech is inserting itself more and more into social realm.
News
French cartoon magazine was targeted for publishing cartoons of prophet Mohammad.
It is ironic
It’s a known historical fact that Mohammed did not want his pictures, likeness to be portrayed in any shape of form – bcz he did not want these images to be worshipped (his new “way” was about tearing down idols u see). Now, in the mind of some, the absence of pictures are becoming a source of worship and ironically becoming another form of idol, then he becomes deity by omission, in a way like god, not described, painted, represented in any shape of form. I dont think this is what he had intended.
It should be fine to draw Mohammed now, in today’s world no single image can become “the truth” anyway, we are not living in modern times, where single channel, single description, single explanation ruled above all else. The preoccupation of some Muslims on such stupid matters on the other hand, has a lot to do with the fact that they still did not shake off their cultural tie to centralized, concentrated Roman / Ottoman barbarism where the former’s connection to Catholic Church plagues it even today, and the latter (along with the former) where meant for peasant population and meant to rule over donkeys not people. This is the backdrop that organizations such as ISIS find their adherents.
News
Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can’t access [..]
[They] have covertly engineered a partial solution by pooling funds to create a private network of more than 9,000 computers with small, inexpensive but powerful hidden Wi-Fi antennas and Ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops spanning the entire city.
All it takes is one satellite hook-up to punch through
.. then you are on the Internet. Another sign of the spread of tech and how unstoppable it is. At the very least these people have a fast way of communicating with eachother.
News
The actor tweeted a message to Tsipras that concluded with “Good luck” in Greek. Alexis Tsipras responded “Thank you Dr. - See more at: http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/01/26/dr-house-congratulates-tsipras-for-greek-election-win/#sthash.GnWviCYe.dpuf The actor [Hugh Laurie a.k.a Dr. House] tweeted a message to [newly elected Greek leader] Tsipras that concluded with “Good luck” in Greek. Alexis Tsipras responded “Thank you Dr.”
Hah
This is very interesting; Our profiling shows Tsipras’ type is Just Do It Nike Man. The Achilles heel for these people (oh that’s so Greek!) is waiting for more and more and more information before doing anything, and because of this waiting, in the negative, they lock-up, unable to go one way or another. Their path of development is diving right in, taking action without waiting for complete information. This is not to say collecting information is bad in general / for others, what we mean is that for these people the threshold seems to be so high that causes them to go inert. Their battle is overcoming this.
Dr. House tweet is funny because it makes sense a JDINM type would like a show like House; Dr. House is the ultimate diagnostician, he knows a lot, is very smart, but there are always uncertainties, but these never seem to be stop him. He pushes, he prods, sometimes he takes action to reveal some tidbit of info that leads him to the correct diagnosis.
Anyway; what does a Syriza election mean for Greeks and austerity? Who knows… I remember a Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini interview where he said maybe Greeks should leave the Euro reinstating the Drachma, weakening it so they can export and rebuild the country’s competitiveness. Maybe that’s the way for them. (Roubini is called Dr. Doom because he was one of the few predicting the 2008 crisis. Then later, when he was bullish on the economy at one point, he said “maybe now they’ll call me Dr. Boom”. This guy… )