The Bear Details of Belarus Communist Tyranny

BelarusTeddyBear2012-08-07ProvinceVersion.jpg “Swedish advertising agency employees Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey hold a stuffed bear that was parachuted into Belarus.” Source of caption and image: http://www.theprovince.com/business/Teddy+bears+make+picnic+generals/7028460/story.html

(p. A4) The plane crossed stealthily into Belarussian airspace and headed for the capital, Minsk. At the appointed moment, the cargo doors opened, and an invasion force of tiny plush freedom fighters parachuted to the ground.

Belarus was under attack — by teddy bears.
Three members of a Swedish advertising firm planned and carried out the operation last month, adorning more than 800 plush bears with signs promoting democracy and denigrating Belarus’s authoritarian government.
Comedic touches aside, the security breach has become a major embarrassment for President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who has channeled his country’s meager resources into maintaining a calcified police state.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ. “Teddy Bears Fall From Sky, and Heads Roll in Minsk.” The New York Times (August 2, 2012): A4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date August 1, 2012.)

Intuitive Expertise Develops Best When Feedback Is Clear and Fast

(p. 241) Some regularities in the environment are easier to discover and apply than others. Think of how you developed your style of using the brakes on your car. As you were mastering the skill of taking curves, you gradually learned when to let go of the accelerator and when and how hard to use the brakes. Curves differ, and the variability you experienced while learning ensures that you are now ready to brake at the right time and strength for any curve you encounter. The conditions for learning this skill arc ideal, because you receive immediate and unambiguous feedback every time you go around a bend: the mild reward of a comfortable turn or the mild punishment of some difficulty in handling the car if you brake either too hard or not quite hard enough. The situations that face a harbor pilot maneuvering large ships are no less regular, but skill is much more difficult to acquire by sheer experience because of the long delay between actions and their noticeable outcomes. Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Stewart Brand Marvels at Hippie Perfectionist Jobs’ Results

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Stewart Brand. Source of photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. 3) Stewart Brand is best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture compendium published twice a year between 1968 and 1972 and the only catalog to win the National Book Award. Its credo, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” influenced many of the hippie generation, most notably Steve Jobs.
. . .
READING I’m devouring “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. Steve’s life and interests intersected with mine a number of times, so revisiting all that in sequence is like galloping through a version of my own life, plus I get to fill in the parts of his life I wondered about. Take a hippie who is also a driven perfectionist at crafting digital tools, let him become adept at managing corporate power, and marvel at what can result. The book I’m studying line by line, and dog-earing every other page, is Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” It chronicles the dramatic decline of violence and cruelty in human affairs in every century. Now that we know that human behavior has been getting constantly gentler and fairer, how do we proceed best with that wind at our backs?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY, interviewer. “DOWNLOAD; Stewart Brand.” The New York Times, Sunday Review (Sun., Nov. 6, 2011): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date November 5, 2011.)

In Health Care, He Who Pays the Piper, Calls the Tune

(p. A15) Under the Bloomberg plan, any cup or bottle of sugary drink larger than 16 ounces at a public venue would be verboten, beginning early next year.
. . .
Here is the ultimate justification for the Bloomberg soft-drink ban, not to mention his smoking ban, his transfat ban, and his unsuccessful efforts to enact a soda tax and prohibit buying high-calorie drinks with food stamps: The taxpayer is picking up the bill.
Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; The 5th Avenue to Serfdom; Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone’s health care.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 2, 2012): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 1, 2012.)

Veterinarians Can Suggest Innovative Hypotheses to Doctors

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Vets face less government regulation and so are freer to rapidly innovate. They may thus be a promising source of innovative hypotheses for medical doctors.

(p. D2) Cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz made her first foray into the world of animal medicine when she was asked to treat Spitzbuben, an exceedingly cute emperor tamarin suffering from heart failure.

But first, the veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo warned Dr. Natterson-Horowitz: Mere eye contact with the tiny primate could trigger a potentially fatal surge of stress hormones. What she learns from that experience spurs a journey to examine the links between the human and animal condition–and the discovery that the species are closer than she ever imagined.
. . .
The authors recommend that doctors, who often look with disdain on veterinarians, go the next step and collaborate with them in a cross-disciplinary “zoobiquitous” approach–using knowledge about how animals live, die and heal to spark innovative hypothesis for advancing medicine.

For the full review, see:
LAURA LANDRO. “Healthy Reader.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 12, 2012): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 11, 2012.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Natterson-Horowitz, Barbara, and Kathryn Bowers. Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

When Is Intuitive Judgment Valid?

(p. 240) If subjective confidence is not to be trusted, how can we evaluate the probable validity of an intuitive judgment? When do judgments reflect true expertise? When do they display an illusion of validity? The answer comes from the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill:

  • an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
  • an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

When both these conditions are satisfied, intuitions are likely to be skilled. Chess is an extreme example of a regular environment, but bridge and poker also provide robust statistical regularities that can support skill. Physicians, nurses, athletes, and firefighters also face complex but fundamentally orderly situations. The accurate intuitions that Gary Klein has described are due to highly valid cues that the expert’s System 1 has learned to use, even if System 2 has not learned to name them. In contrast, stock pickers and political scientists who make long-term forecasts operate in a zero-validity environment. Their failures reflect the basic unpredictability of the events that they try to forecast.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Romney Right that Culture Matters for Economic Success

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Source of book image: http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172699090l/209176.jpg

In the piece quoted below, and in much of the TV media coverage, the story is spun as being that Romney offended the Palestinians. But that is not the story. The story is that Romney courageously highlighted an important, but politically incorrect, truth—culture, generally, does matter for economic performance; and Israeli culture, specifically, has encouraged economic growth.
Romney referred to an important book by the distinguished economic historian David Landes. Last school year, one of the students in my Economics of Technology seminar gave a presentation on a related Landes book. That presentation can be viewed at: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2GLBAMFCS5PXH/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0521094186&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=
I recently read another relevant book, Start-Up Nation, that directly supports Romney’s specific claim, by making the case that Israeli culture is especially congenial to entrepreneurial initiative and success.

(p. A1) JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney offended Palestinian leaders on Monday by suggesting that cultural differences explain why the Israelis are so much more economically successful than Palestinians, thrusting himself again into a volatile issue while on his high-profile overseas trip.
. . .
In the speech, Mr. Romney mentioned books that had influenced his thinking about nations — particularly “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” by David S. Landes, which, he said, argues that culture is the defining factor in determining the success of a society.
“Culture makes all the (p. A14) difference,” Mr. Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”
He added, “As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”
The remarks, which vastly understated the disparities between the societies, drew a swift rejoinder from Palestinian leaders.

For the full story, see:
ASHLEY PARKER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. “Romney Trip Raises Sparks at a 2nd Stop.” The New York Times (Tues., July 31, 2012): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 30, 2012.)

The Landes book discussed by Romney is:
Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

The book on Israeli entrepreneurship, that I mention in my comments, is:
Senor, Dan, and Saul Singer. Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. hb ed. New York: Twelve, 2009.

Take U.S.D.A. and C.D.C. Advice with a Grain of Salt

(p. 8) When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
. . .
When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”
. . .
(p. 9) A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.
. . .
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
. . .
Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

For the full commentary, see:
GARY TAUBES. “OPINION; Salt, We Misjudged You.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., June 3, 2012): 8-9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2012.)

Richard Posner Seeks to Limit and Reform the Patent System

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“Judge Richard Posner.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

I am deeply conflicted about patents. On the one hand, property rights are important, both ethically and in terms of economic incentives. On the other hand, patents seem to restrict innovation.
The views of Posner are worth serious consideration. My own current view is that the patent rules need to be reformed and their implementation made more efficient. But I do not think the patent system should be abolished.

(p. B1) While technology companies continue to fight over smartphone patents, one judge has fought his way into the ring.

He is 73-year-old Richard Posner, among the most potent forces on the federal bench and an outspoken critic of the patent system.
Presiding over a lawsuit between Apple Inc. . . . and Google Inc.’s . . . Motorola Mobility in June, he dropped a bombshell, scrapping the entire case and preventing the companies from refiling their claims. The ruling startled the litigants in the case and fueled a national discussion about whether the patent system (p. B5) is broken.
. . .
In the June ruling, explaining why he wouldn’t ban Motorola products from the shelves, Judge Posner said: “An injunction that imposes greater costs on the defendant than it confers benefits on the plaintiff reduces net social welfare.”
Judge Posner, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has continued to press the issue.
This month, he wrote an essay in the Atlantic headlined, “Why There Are Too Many Patents In America.” He said “most industries could get along fine without patent protection” and that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has done a woeful job, calling it “understaffed,” and “many patent examinations…perfunctory.”
He saved ammunition for juries and fellow jurists. “Judges have difficulty understanding modern technology and jurors have even greater difficulty,” he wrote. He suggested several reforms to the patent system, including shortening the patent term for inventors in some industries and expanding the authority of the Patent and Trademark Office to try patents cases.
. . .
Judge Posner’s intellectual curiosity is well-known and “people assume he has no political ax to grind because he’s not trying to advance the fortunes of any particular segment of the economy,” said Arthur D. Hellman, a law professor at University of Pittsburgh who studies the judiciary.
Yet his ruling poses a difficult question for the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the specialized one that handles intellectual property cases, about whether infringement matters without damages.
Peter Menell, a law professor at UC Berkeley, likened it to the old thought experiment that begins “If a tree falls in the woods.” He said: “If there are no damages, do you need to have a trial?”
Juge Posner also rejected Google’s bid to block the sale of iPhones that allegedly infringed a so-called “standards-essential patent” owned by Google. Standards-essential patents protect innovations used in technologies that industries collectively agree to use, like Wi-Fi or 3G. A company that holds one of these patents stands to profit enormously, because its competitors have to pay it for licenses to use the technology.
But Judge Posner ruled that holders of such patents aren’t entitled to injunctions. Michael Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers University, Camden, said the opinion on standards-essential patents came amid a groundswell of opposition to injunctions for such patents and could put an end to the practice among U.S. federal judges.

For the full story, see:
JOE PALAZZOLO and ASHBY JONES. “Also on Trial: A Judge’s Worldview.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 24, 2012): B1 & B5.
(Note: all ellipses were added except for the one internal to the quote from Judge Posner’s Atlantic blog posting.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date July 23, 2012 and has the title “Apple and Samsung Patent Suit Puts Judge Posner’s Worldview on Trial.” The print version of the title could be interpreted as a sub-title of the main title to the accompanying adjacent article. The title of the main article was “Apple v. Samsung; In Silicon Valley, Patents Go on Trial.” The last two paragraphs above appear only in the online, but not in the print, version of the article.)

The Atlantic blog posting by Posner can be found at:
Posner, Richard A. “Why There Are Too Many Patents in America.” In The Atlantic blog, posted on July 12, 2012 at: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-there-are-too-many-patents-in-america/259725/.
(Note: the WSJ article above implies that the Posner essay was published in the print version of The Atlantic, but I can only find it in Posner’s blog on The Atlantic web site.)

Simple Algorithms Predict Better than Trained Experts

(p. 222) I never met Meehl, but he was one of my heroes from the time I read his Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence.
In the slim volume that he later called “my disturbing little book,” Meehl reviewed the results of 20 studies that had analyzed whether clinical predictions based on the subjective impressions of trained professionals were more accurate than statistical predictions made by combining a few scores or ratings according to a rule. In a typical study, trained counselors predicted the grades of freshmen at the end of the school year. The counselors interviewed each student for forty-five minutes. They also had access to high school grades, several aptitude tests, and a four-page personal statement. The statistical algorithm used only a fraction of this information: high school grades and one aptitude test. Nevertheless, the formula was more accurate than 11 of the 14 counselors. Meehl reported generally sim-(p. 223)ilar results across a variety of other forecast outcomes, including violations of parole, success in pilot training, and criminal recidivism.
Not surprisingly, Meehl’s book provoked shock and disbelief among clinical psychologists, and the controversy it started has engendered a stream of research that is still flowing today, more than fifty years after its publication. The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Neural Implants “Restored Their Human Functionality”

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Ray Kurzweil. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C12) Inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in artificial intelligence–the principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first text-to-speech synthesizer, among other breakthroughs. He is also a writer who explores the future of information technology and how it is changing our world.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Kurzweil and The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray discussed advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and what it means to be human. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:
. . .
MR. MURRAY: What about life expectancy? Is there a limit?
MR. KURZWEIL: No. We’re constantly pushing back life expectancy. Now it’s going to go into high gear because of the inherent exponential progression of information technology. According to my models, within 15 years we’ll be adding more than a year to your remaining life expectancy each year.
MR. MURRAY: So if you play the odds right, you never hit the endpoint.
MR. KURZWEIL: Right. If you can hang in there for another 15 years, we could get to that point.

What Is Human?
MR. MURRAY: What does it mean to be human in a post-2029 world?
MR. KURZWEIL: It’s a slippery slope. But we’ve already gone down that slope. I’ve talked to people who have neural implants in their brain, for Parkinson’s, and I’ve asked them, “Are you still human? Are you less human?”
Generally speaking, they say, “It’s part of me.” And they’re very proud of it, because it restored their human functionality.

For the full interview, see:
Alan Murray, interviewer. “Man or Machine? Ray Kurzweil on how long it will be before computers can do everything the brain can do.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 29, 2012): C12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)