Odd Factoid

I ran across this bit...

I learned from my seatmate on a flight to Winston-Salem a couple weeks ago that High Point University in North Carolina offers students free valet parking and car washes. And other colleges are getting on the valet act. I thought Chicago's business school was the latest in this line of student-panderers, but it turns out this was just a special set-up for corporate recruiters.

while reading Justin Fox's "My educational day in Chicago" posting on his blog The Curious Capitalist.

Not only did they not have "valet" parking when I went to college, most of us didn't own a car. But times change...

Insane Police

If you want to see how easy it is to slide into a police state, look at this poor guy's web site, Innocent in London.

It took the UK police "only" 4 years and 2 months to finally admit that they had no reason to arrest him and that they had "made a mistake". (With speed like that, you wonder how they manage to arrest a murderer before the fellow dies of old age!)

This web site gives you a blow-by-blow description of how this guy was treated. You get to read the ridiculous "reasons" for his arrest. As he puts it, the police reasoning boils down to:

• The Police decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going in a tube station and checking your phone for messages just tick too many boxes on their checklist and make you a terrorist suspect. How many other people are not only wrongly detained but wrongly arrested every week in similar circumstances as myself?


• "All men are suspect, but some are more suspect than others."

Here is the real reason why this should be of concern to everybody:

This gradual erosion of our fundamental liberties should be of concern to us all.

Wall Street Retrospective

In his blog Robert Reich has a posting that looks back over the year since the financial crisis hit. He doesn't like what he sees:

The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders they've even revived the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payments – guaranteed no matter how the employee performs. Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its record pre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattest quarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion to compensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldman employee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course, top executives and traders will pocket much more.

Every other big bank feels it has to match Goldman's pay packages if it wants to hold on to its "talent." Citigroup, still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers, has told the White House it needs to pay its twenty-five top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million.

A few banks like Goldman have officially repaid their TARP money but look more closely and you'll find that every one of them is still on the public dole. Goldman won't repay taxpayers the $13 billion it never would have collected from AIG had we not kept AIG alive. (In one of the most blatant conflicts of interest in all of American history, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein attended the closed-door meeting last fall where then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was formerly Goldman's CEO, and Tim Geithner, then at the New York Fed, made the decision to bail out AIG.) Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman's high-risk operations.

So will the President succeed on financial reform? I wish I could be optimistic. His milktoast list of proposed reforms is inadequate to the task, even if adopted. The Street's behavior since its bailout should be proof enough that halfway measures won't do.

It is pretty clear to me that Obama is on the side of Wall Street and not the little guy. On health care, Obama is on the side of big Pharma and the insurance companies, not the little guy. So much for "change we can believe in".

Torture Nation, a Military Perspective

Most people are aware of Dick Cheney running around the US claiming that torture was necessary to keep the American people safe and that Obama was a dangerous radical who undercut the essential policies of the Bush administration. Cheney claimed "secret knowledge" which justified his claims that Obama was making the US more unsafe and that the country needed to return to the "good old torture days" of Bush and Cheney.

Well... here's an article published in a military journal saying this isn't true. From the final paragraph of an article by John A. Wahlquist published in Parameters, U.S. Army War College Quarterly:

President Obama’s executive order on interrogation provides an excellent opportunity to end abusive practices and to propose a new agenda for intelligence interviewing that increases the capability to collect accurate information from enemy detainees effectively and humanely. Seizing this opportunity is essential to increasing the chances of success for counterterrorism operations worldwide and reducing risks to the lives of American service members and civilians, as well as detainees. Doing so enhances the broader national security agenda without sacrificing American values.

Go read the whole article. Quit letting Cheney try to brainwash you with his political spin.

This article looks at two viewpoints. The "torture them until they sell their grandmother down the river" approach of Cheney:

In an October 2006 interview, then-Vice President Dick Cheney agreed with his host that the use of waterboarding on high-value detainees
was a “no-brainer” because it “provided us enormously valuable information” that contributed to saving American lives.

And the viewpoint a so-called military "genius" named Napoleon:

"[The] barbarous custom of whipping men suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this method of interrogation, by putting men to the torture, is useless. The wretches say whatever comes into their heads and whatever they think one wants to believe. Consequently, the Commander-in-Chief forbids the use of a method which is contrary to reason and humanity.”

Who are you going to believe? The brilliant Veep or that over-rated little general?

OK, putting all kidding aside, the article is interesting and will help you understand the ins-and-outs of the debate. Read this and you will get the various viewpoints on this issue.

Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide"

This is a fun book covering current research in decision-making. It has lots of fun facts and bits about research topics.

The sad news is that we aren't really all that rational. Worse yet, Lehrer points out that having the myth that the "rational" mind must control the emotional mind creates more problems for us. There are lots of cases -- he gives research examples -- where less is more. Situations where being less analytical actually produces better decisions. But he's not one-sided. He points out other research results that show when increased analysis is in fact useful. In short, the world is complicated.

I found this bit discussing political viewpoints and how it affects decisions very interesting:

The flawed thought process plays a critical role in shaping the opinions of the electorate. Partisan voters are convinced that they're rational -- it's the other side that's irrational -- but actually, all of us are rationalizers. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 19996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so'called high-information voters -- these are the Republicans who read the newspapers, watch cable news, and can identify their representatives in Congress -- weren't better informed than low-information voters. (Many low-information voters struggled to name the vice president.) According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partiisan bias is that voters tend to assimilate only those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points -- and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the tax-and-spend-liberal stereotype -- then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Bartels says, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made." Once you identify with a political party, the world is edited to fit with your ideology.

At such moments, rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to just to justify practically any belief. The prefrontal cortex is turned into an information filter, a way to block our disagreeable points of view. Let's look at an experiment done in the late 1960s by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. Half of the subjects involved in the experiement were regular churchgoers, and half were committed atheists. Brock and Balloun played a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity, and, to make the experiment more interesting, they added an annoying amount of static -- a crackle of white noise -- to the recording. However, the listener could reduce the static by pressing a button, at which point the message suddenly became easier to understand.

The results were utterly predictable and rather depressing: the nonbelievers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun that had smokers listeing to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer demonstrated a similar effect. We all silence the cognitive dissonance through sel-imposed ignorance.

Here's another bit about war and killing that I found very interesting. I already knew facts like this, but it is always interesting to get a new twist on old knowledge:

On the battlefield, men are explicitly encouraged to kill one another; the crime of murder is turned into an act of heroism. And yet, even in such violent situations soldiers often struggle to get past their moral instincts. During World War II, for example, U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall undertook a survey of thousands of American troops right after they'd been in combat. His shocking conclusion was that less than 20 percent actually shot at the enemy, even when under attack. ... When soldiers were forced to confront the possibility of directly harming other human beings -- this is a personal moral decision -- they are literally incapacitated by their emotions. "At the most vital point of battle," Marshall wrote, "the soldier becomes a conscientious objector."

After these findings were published, in 1947, the U.S. Army realized it had a serious problem. It immediately began revamping its training regimen in order to increase the "ratio of fire." New recruits began endlessly rehearsing the kill, firing at anatomically correct targets that dropped backward after being hit. As Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman noted, "What is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly ... Soldiers are de-sensitized to the act of killing, until it becomes an automatic response." ... These new training techniques and tactics had dramatic results. Several years after he published his study, Marshall was sent to fight in the Korean War, and he discovered that 55 percent of the infantry men were now firing their weapons. In Vietnam, the ration of fire was nearly 90 percent. The army had managed to turn the most personal of moral situations into an impersonal reflex."

This book is well worth reading. It will expose you to new ideas.

Fate Hangs by a Thread

I enjoyed reading a tribute to Alan Turing Jennifer Ouellette on the Cocktail Party Physics web site. It ends with this sad note:

Britain hounded its war-hero genius to death because he was gay. Of course, no citizen should be so persecuted. Still, I can't help but be astonished by yet another example of the self-destruction implicit in a tribe's impulse to repress its outliers. Turing's colleague, Jack Good, summarized this way (as quoted in Hilton's memoir): "Fortunately, the authorities at Bletchley Park had no idea Turing was a homosexual; otherwise, we might have lost the war."

I've always been puzzled by the common fear of the oddballs and eccentrics of mankind. I find them fascinating. Most people loathe and fear them. I just don't understand this. To me they are interesting because they are like voyagers who have gone to exotic lands and come back to report something the rest of us have failed to see. They enrich our lives. But many people fear the different. Sad.

I've probably lost all readers at this point, but here is a bit about the genius that was Turing:

Only once in my life have I ever heard a mathematician refer to a contemporary as a "genius." The person doing the referring was the well known topologist, Peter Hilton. He was visiting Yale for a few days in the early 1970's, and, since I was a graduate student doing my dissertation research in topology, I was invited to the supper in his honor. I remember a broad-faced man who laughed easily and was brightened by conversation. I told him I was interested in applications, an eccentric impulse by the standards of the mathematicians then at Yale, who were proudly "pure."

Hilton surprised me by saying that he himself had done some applied mathematics. He was British, and during World War II he had been enlisted into the group at Bletchley Park (north of London) working to break the German secret codes and ciphers. He didn't disapprove of my interest in control theory and differential equations, but he urged me to complete my work in topology. He assured me that to be a good applied mathematician, you have to be a good pure mathematician. (I would respectfully debate the point with him today.)

It was in recounting his experiences with the British cryptographers that he let drop his unusual comment about genius. He said something like, "Normally, somebody tells you about a result he's proven, and you think 'I could have done that. I'm just as bright as he is.' Of course you wouldn't say it out loud. But Alan would do something, and I'd be forced to admit to myself: I never would have been able to think of that."

Hilton went on to tell the story of how Alan Turing had taken a set of documents encoded with the German Enigma machine, went away by himself to think, and proved something important about how they had been generated -- proved in the sense of a mathematical proof and important in the sense that it led to breaking the German naval codes, allowing Britain to defeat the German U-boat blockade in 1941 and thereby survive the war.

I thought of my chat with Prof. Hilton when Turing was mentioned recently in the news. The Baltimore Sun headline on Sept. 11, 2009, was "British government apologizes for 'inhumane' treatment of gay wartime codebreaker Alan Turing."

The whole post by Alex Morgan is worth reading.

Synesthesia

I first became interested in synesthesia when I read Richard Cytowic's book The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

Here is a nice video about synesthesia I found on BoingBoing:



Life is stranger than we can imagine. That is why religion and ideology are such pale imitations of reality. Those are systems of thought that claim to be self-contained, not open to contradiction and new experience. The wonderful power of science is that it is truly democratic. Anybody at anytime can step forward with new evidence and change our understanding. There are no dogmas, no sacred truths. Reality is far richer than we can imagine so it is wonderful to stay open to the wonders of nature. Synesthesia is one of those wonders.