Month: April 2018
Saturday assorted links
1. One out of every 15 Mormons is from Brazil.
2. WSJ James Taranto profile of Bryan Caplan.
3. Why are city accents fading in the Midwest.
4. “…we present a deep learning audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other voices and background noise.” You’ll have to hold that conversation in a park. Until the parks are bugged.
5. First chapter of the new Weyl and Posner now available on-line.
Thwarted markets in everything
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Wall Street billionaire, was prepared to cut a $25 million check to the high school he attended here in the 1960s, to help it pay for a huge renovation project.
He wanted only a few things in return.
For starters, the public school should be renamed in his honor. A portrait of him should be displayed prominently in the building. Spaces at the school should be named for his twin brothers. He should have the right to review the project’s contractors and to sign off on a new school logo.
The school district’s officials accepted the deal.
So it was that this Philadelphia bedroom community of 55,000, not normally a hotbed of civic unrest, exploded into a populist fury.
That is from Kate Kelly at the NYT.
America First to increase its World Bank contribution?
The Trump administration is poised to back a $13bn capital increase for the World Bank in a package that would see significant lending reforms and an increase in China’s shareholding.
Barring last-minute hiccups, US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin is set to tell fellow World Bank shareholders at next week’s spring meetings in Washington that he will support an increase in the bank’s capital, a senior Treasury official confirmed to the Financial Times on Friday. The move would be a significant shift in the US administration’s attitudes towards multilateral institutions.
Friday assorted links
1. Singapore conquers the sea.
2. The campus speech crisis is indeed worsening.
3. Ugandan government plans to tax social media users for too much gossip.
4. Facebook has legal problems stemming from Europe. And more on GDPR, and more here. This is important stuff.
5. Is this a Russian (?) perspective on Syria and Russia? Both speculative and evil.
6. Is Chinese growth overstated? Let’s look at the light.
7. Alcohol might in fact be bad for your health (speculative, but not evil).
The importance of local milieus
Using data on the entire population in combination with data on almost all individuals in Sweden listed as inventors, we study how the probability of being listed on a patent as inventor is influenced by the density of other future inventors residing in the same region. In this process, we control for demographic and sector effects along with the educational characteristics of parents. This approach allows us to trace how location history influences individuals’ inventive capacity. We focus on three types of influences: (a) future inventors in the municipality around the time of birth, (b) future inventors around the time of graduation from high school and (c) future inventors at graduation from higher education. We find suggestive evidence that co-locating with future inventors may impact the probability of becoming an inventor. The most consistent effect is found for place of higher education; some positive effects are also evident from birthplace, whereas no consistent positive effect can be derived from individuals’ high school location. Therefore, the formative influences mainly deriving from family upbringing, birth region and from local milieu effects arising from a conscious choice to attend a higher education affect the choice of becoming an inventor.
Here is the article, “How important are local inventive milieus: The role of birthplace, high school and university education,” by Olof Ejermo and Høgni Kalsø Hansen, via Ben Southwood.
Privacy sentences to ponder
The increasing difficulty in managing one’s online personal data leads to individuals feeling a loss of control. Additionally, repeated consumer data breaches have given people a sense of futility, ultimately making them weary of having to think about online privacy. This phenomenon is called “privacy fatigue.” Although privacy fatigue is prevalent and has been discussed by scholars, there is little empirical research on the phenomenon. A new study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior aimed not only to conceptualize privacy fatigue but also to examine its role in online privacy behavior. Based on literature on burnout, we developed measurement items for privacy fatigue, which has two key dimensions —emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Data analyzed from a survey of 324 Internet users showed that privacy fatigue has a stronger impact on privacy behavior than privacy concerns do, although the latter is widely regarded as the dominant factor in explaining online privacy behavior.
Emphasis added by me. That is by Hanbyl Choi, Jonghwa Park, and Yoonhyuk Jung, via Michelle Dawson.
Why are so many graduate students depressed?
PhD and master’s students worldwide report rates of depression and anxiety that are six times higher than those in the general public (T. M. Evans et al. Nature Biotech. 36, 282–284; 2018). The report, based on the responses of 2,279 students in 26 nations, found that more than 40% of respondents had anxiety scores in the moderate to severe range, and that nearly 40% showed signs of moderate to severe depression.
That is from this summary statement. Here is the original piece. So what might be going on here?
1. The ordeal of studying and possibly finishing is extreme, and extreme ordeals depress people. This seems inconsistent with other evidence, however, namely rising (reported) rates of depression in prosperous, comfortable societies.
2. The task of studying and possibly finishing is correlated with a kind of extreme lassitude, and that in turn is correlated with depression.
3. Graduate students become depressed as they realize they have chosen poor life paths.
4. Graduate students become depressed as they realize, a’la Caplan, that it is mostly about signaling.
5. Graduate students are undergoing a transformation of their personalities, and being turned into intellectual elites, but this process is traumatic in several regards, thus leading to frequent depression. The chance of depression is part of the price of admission to a select club.
6. Our graduate institutions serve women poorly (women in graduate school experience depression at higher rates — 41% vs 35% for the men).
7. It’s all just sample bias, as depressed graduate students have nothing better to do than respond to this survey.
What else? And how much should we regard these results are symptoms of a deeper malaise? Or is the problem confined mainly to academic life?
*Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism*
That is the new book by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall:
Their main point is that social tactics used in interventions abroad tend to come back and haunt us at home. I am not nearly as non-interventionist in foreign policy questions as they are, but still I wish their perspective would receive a much broader hearing. You can buy the book here. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a video related to the book.
Malthusian dog markets in everything
An effort that animal rescuers began more than a decade ago to buy dogs for $5 or $10 apiece from commercial breeders has become a nationwide shadow market that today sees some rescuers, fueled by Internet fundraising, paying breeders $5,000 or more for a single dog.
The result is a river of rescue donations flowing from avowed dog saviors to the breeders, two groups that have long disparaged each other. The rescuers call many breeders heartless operators of inhumane “puppy mills” and work to ban the sale of their dogs in brick-and-mortar pet stores. The breeders call “retail rescuers” hypocritical dilettantes who hide behind nonprofit status while doing business as unregulated, online pet stores.
But for years, they have come together at dog auctions where no cameras are allowed, with rescuers enriching breeders and some breeders saying more puppies are being bred for sale to the rescuers.
Here is more from Kim Kavin at WaPo, substantive throughout with photos and video. In essence, somebody has solved for the equilibrium.
For the pointers I thank Tom Vansant and Alexander Lowery.
U.S.A. (Holocaust) fact of the day
But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.
Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. Only 39 percent of Americans know that Hitler was democratically elected.
Here is the full Maggie Astor NYT story. The last error is a little tricky, since Hitler was elected into a coalition government, but he wasn’t really elected to be “Hitler as head honcho.” His later ascent resulted from political machinations of a not entirely democratic nature. Still, I doubt if that confusion is what is steering most Americans wrong.
The fox
Sen. Leahy has a Facebook pixel, invisible to users, that gathers user data of Facebook users who visit the site. (For a quick primer on what “pixels” do, visit Facebook’s resource guide on the data-gathering tool.)
That’s right, if you visit Senator Leahy’s campaign website, it’s likely your data, including your demographics and what pages you looked at on the site, have been placed into a custom data targeting audience by Leahy’s team.
Here is more, via @tedfrank. You will note that Leahy was one of the interlocutors who confronted Zuckerberg over the privacy issue.
Thursday assorted links
1. NBA cooperation markets in everything: “And so to avoid this descent into the mud, many players strike unofficial pacts with their opponents.”
3. Report from Somaliland. It could be much worse. And night light intensity and Roman road density.
4. Scott Sumner on labor markets, empirics, and monopsony.
5. New study on occupational licensing and restricted mobility.
6. Holly Cowen captures Hawthorne wildlife with photography.
The Chinese corporate apology
When does a corporate apology become a political self-confession, or jiantao (检讨), an act of submission not to social mores and concerns, but to those in power? The line can certainly blur in China. But the public apology today from Zhang Yiming (张一鸣), the founder and CEO of one of China’s leading tech-based news and information platforms, crosses deep into the territory of political abjection.
Zhang’s apology, posted to WeChat at around 4 AM Beijing time, addressed recent criticism aired through the state-run China Central Television and other official media of Jinri Toutiao, or “Toutiao” — a platform for content creation and aggregation that makes use of algorithms to customize user experience. Critical official coverage of alleged content violations on the platform was followed by a notice on April 4 from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT), in which the agency said Toutiao and another service providing live-streaming, Kuaishou, would be subject to “rectification measures.”
Read through Zhang’s apology and it is quickly apparent that this is a mea culpa made under extreme political pressure, in which Zhang, an engineer by background, ticks the necessary ideological boxes to signal his intention to fall into line.
At one point, Zhang confesses that the “deep-level causes” of the problems at Toutiao included “a weak [understanding and implementation of] the “four consciousnesses”. This is a unique Xi Jinping buzzword, introduced in January 2016, that refers to 1) “political consciousness” (政治意识), namely primary consideration of political priorities when addressing issues, 2) consciousness of the overall situation (大局意识), or of the overarching priorities of the Party and government, 3) “core consciousness” (核心意识), meaning to follow and protect Xi Jinping as the leadership “core,” and 4) “integrity consciousness” (看齐意识), referring to the need to fall in line with the Party. Next, Zhang mentions the service’s failure to respect “socialist core values,” and its “deviation from public opinion guidance” — this latter term being a Party buzzword (dating back to the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests) synonymous with information and press controls as a means of maintaining Party dominance.
Zhang also explicitly references Xi Jinping’s notion of the “New Era,” and writes: “All along, we have placed excessive emphasis on the role of technology, and we have not acknowledged that technology must be led by the socialist core value system, broadcasting positive energy, suiting the demands of the era, and respecting common convention.”
In the list of the company’s remedies, there is even a mention of the need to promote more content from “authoritative media,” a codeword for Party-controlled media, which suggests once again that the leadership has been unhappy with the idea of algorithms that wall users off from official messaging if they show no interest in such content.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Software engineer and psychologist wanted
AI Grant (aigrant.org) is a distributed AI research lab. Their goal is to find and fund the modern day Einsteins: brilliant minds from untraditional backgrounds working on AI.
They need a software engineer. The qualifications are twofold: an intrinsic interest in the problem of identifying talented people across the world, and a demonstrated ability to ship software projects without much supervision. This doesn’t have to be through traditional means. It could just be side-projects on Github.
They’re also looking for a psychologist with experience in personality and IQ modeling.
Bay Area location is a big plus, but not a requirement. If you’re interested in learning more, email [email protected] with information about yourself.
This is not a paid ad, but I am seeking to do a favor for the excellent and highly talented Daniel Gross (and perhaps for you), with whom you would get to work. Do please mention MR if you decide to apply!
Wednesday assorted links
1. Do you really understand the letter “g”?
2. Saudis to embrace opera, with help from France.
4. William Vollmann update. Yes, I’ve ordered the book.
5. How Facebook benefits from Instagram. And 37 definitive seconds on the cultural difference between Washington, D.C. and the Bay Area, recommended.
6. Tyler Cowen rates America (short NPR podcast).