In which the Minnesotans call off the paddy wagon and leave us free
Pogemiller, according to the e-mail, said a 20-year-old statute requiring institutional registration clearly did not envision free online, not-for-credit offerings.
“When the legislature convenes in January, my intent is to work with the Governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances,” said Pogemiller. “Until that time, I see no reason for our office to require registration of free, not-for-credit offerings.”
Of course pursuing such an issue was not a political winner in the first place.
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank M.
Very good sentences
“Two types of attractive females were included: sexy females & beautiful females.”
It’s even economics, you can read the abstract and research paper here. Hat tip goes to Neuroskeptic.
Subsidies for virtual water
From Robert Glennon:
In 2012, the drought-stricken Western United States will ship more than 50 billion gallons of water to China. This water will leave the country embedded in alfalfa–most of it grown in California–and is destined to feed Chinese cows. The strange situation illustrates what is wrong about how we think, or rather don’t think, about water policy in the U.S.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank the estimable Chug.
Surnames and the laws of social mobility
Here is some new work by Gregory Clark (pdf):
What is the true rate of social mobility? Modern one-generation studies suggest considerable regression to the mean for all measures of status – wealth, income, occupation and education across a variety of societies. The β that links status across generations is in the order of 0.2-0.5. In that case inherited surnames will quickly lose any information about social status. Using surnames this paper looks at social mobility rates across many generations in England 1086-2011, Sweden, 1700-2011, the USA 1650-2011, India, 1870-2011, Japan, 1870-2011, and China and Taiwan 1700-2011. The underlying β for long-run social mobility is around 0.75, and is remarkably similar across societies and epochs. This implies that compete regression to the mean for elites takes 15 or more generations.
Here is NPR coverage:
“If I just know that you share a rare surname with someone who was wealthy in 1800, I can predict now that you’re nine times more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge. You’re going to live two years longer than an average person in England. You’re going to have more wealth. You’re more likely to be a doctor. You’re more likely to be an attorney,” Clark says.
Dylan Matthews offers some charts. For the pointer I thank Fred Rossoff.
What I’ve been reading
1. Among Others, by Jo Walton. I loved this book. It won a Nebula Award, but is more about the power of books than being a work of science fiction per se.
2. Frances Ashcroft, The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body. One of the remaining popular science topics which has not been exhausted by popular books and so this volume is both instructive and entertaining and comes across as fresh.
3. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, Meaningful Work and Play. He really is an anarchist, left-wing at that, but I couldn’t quite find a central core here, much as I admire his other books.
4. Derek S. Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History. Good survey of early 20th century debates on population and birth rates and eugenics; these topics are making a comeback.
5. Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism. I like Elinor Ostrom as much as the next guy, and this book is well-written, but I am not persuaded by the argument that environmental issues fundamentally can be handled on a local level. At least a few important ones cannot.
Also of note are:
6. Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics, by Robert Fogel, Enid Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte.
7. Gary B. Gorton, Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming.
Nonsense paper accepted by mathematics journal
Last month That’s Mathematics! reported another landmark event in the history of academic publishing. A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’…
Each of these sentences [of the paper] contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning. Nate Eldredge – the blogger behind That’s Mathematics! – wrote Mathgen by adapting SCIgen, which does something similar for computer science. Papers generated by SCIgen have been accepted for publication at academic conferences and journals that claim to carry out peer review.
The article is here and it also excerpts from the referee reports, for instance:
We can’t catch the main thought from this abstract. So I suggest that the author can reorganise the descriptions and give the keywords of this paper.
For the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Solve for the equilibrium
An environmental entrepreneur whose plan to dump iron in a patch of the Pacific Ocean was shelved four years ago after a scientific outcry has gone ahead with a similar experiment without any academic or government oversight, startling and unnerving marine researchers.
…The entrepreneur, Russ George, said his team scattered 100 tons of iron dust in mid-July in the Pacific several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in a $2.5 million project financed by a native Canadian group.
The story is here.
Assorted links
Italy estimates of the day
• According to the IMF’s economic data, Italian corruption losses are larger than the national economy of Serbia, which it ranks 76th in the world at $78.7 billion.
• This new economy would be roughly equivalent to the GDP of Italy’s eastern neighbor, Croatia.
• In 2011, the Italian government spent $1.112 trillion and brought in $1.025 trillion, a gap it could close almost entirely by recovering estimated corruption losses for that year.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Jonathan Weinhagen.
*Glittering Images*, the new Camille Paglia book
The subtitle is A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars and according to Paglia “The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images, like Mass cards of the saints.”
It presents powerful works of art and tells the reader to submit to them; for that alone it is better than most other books. The influence of Harold Bloom, Paglia’s earlier teacher, is strong throughout. The interpretations seem unsure as to whether they are summaries or revelations, bold challenges to orthodoxy or obvious truths. I am glad I bought the book but still my itch for the Paglia of Sexual Personae — say the Edmund Spenser chapter (the book’s highlight in my view) — remains unscratched.
Here is Paglia on George Lucas, an excerpt from the latter part of the book. I do not feel the need to criticize her main claim (Lucas is the greatest artist of our time), still her obsession with mythology and cinematographic technique to me misses the import of Lucas’s saga of glorious collapse, discussed only briefly, though I do like this bit: “Lucas crosscuts to the delirious destruction on Coruscant of the Great Rotunda of the Galactic Senate, with its thousand round balconies in cool tonalities of gray and black. This twinned ruination of industrial and political architecture is an epic Romantic spectacle…”
Recommended, but we are still waiting for the last three installments of Camille’s ouevre.
Mark Bittman on the food plan
He writes:
But there is no national food policy that says, for example, the United States will consume one billion pounds of almonds in the next year, so let’s grow 1.5 billion and there’s plenty for export. Let’s not plant 2.5 billion because that land could be used for tomatoes or something else. I mentioned it to my editor and we agreed that it sounds a bit Stalinist.
[Interviewer] Talk about politically toxic.
Right! But that aside, why would you not want to talk about what’s the best thing for the future of the United States? I would argue that the answer is not what amounts to an anarchic market of a million individuals deciding what they want to plant and then having this dogma that the market will decide. Growing a lot of almonds and exporting them to China is not the end of the world, but I do think that when you look at the Midwest, where the vast majority of land is used to raise corn or soybeans used for feeding industrially raised animals or producing corn syrup for junk food, really is. It is something that is not going to change until we say that land is too valuable to us to be used that way. We need more diverse and regional agriculture. What harm would there be in making a plan?
Mark Bittman has done some of the best writing about cooking which the human race has produced, ever, and he has done it repeatedly and on a large scale, toss in writing on food travel as well. This discussion is…less good than that.
The link is here, and I thank Daniel for the pointer.
The origins of kimchi in Korea
Many would be surprised to discover that this seemingly traditional food was in fact first developed in the late 19th century. Also, the most important ingredient of kimchi, red pepper, was first introduced to Korea in the early 17th century through either China or Japan. The import of cabbage in the late 19th century from China explains the rather late emergence of cabbage kimchi.
That is from Seoul: A Window into Korean Culture, a very good book by Choi Joon-sik.
Rental markets in everything
FlightCar aims to put vehicles left in airport parking lots to use by offering them up for short-term loans.
Does this increase in the velocity of goods require a monetary policy offset? Here is more, hat tip goes to David Wessel.
Assorted links
1. Koreans win gold medal in Alphabet Olympics.
2. Russ Roberts and John Taylor on why the recovery is weak. A new video method of teaching.
3. “Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza Coming to Pizza Hut Canada.”
4. What makes a technology cool?
5. Affective computing, can computers read your moods?
6. Good and very insightful review of the educational philosophy behind MRU.
Sheila Bair’s new book
I put this one in the jaw hits floor category, and for more than one reason. (Sheila ran the FDIC during the financial crisis and her book is titled Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself).
The book is remarkably full of information and substantive narrative. Few books pack in so much and I mean this in a very positive way. I learned something on virtually every page, even after having read many of the other crisis books.
Yet her running claim that she had a plan to end the bailouts, or abolish “Too Big To Fail” is absurd. (Though most of these people do.) She should be presenting only the more modest argument that it would have been better to distribute more losses on creditors, which indeed she did advocate. Her narrative overreaches by a long mile.
Second, to a remarkable degree, she sees everyone else in the process as filled with fault and herself as never at fault. She has zero qualms about ceaselessly flinging mud out the rear view mirror, and does so for even the tiniest and pettiest of squabbles, including ones the readers never knew or cared about. Geithner by the way is villain number one but no one else on the scene matches her virtue and common sense and scarcely a page flies by when we are allowed to forget this.
She is beloved of sentences such as “Maybe the boys didn’t want Sheila Bair playing in their sandbox.” Who am I to say she is wrong? Reading this book now I know why!
This is arguably the most _______ book I have read, ever, and I am still looking for the right word to fill in that blank. It is in any case stunning.
From yesterday’s media, here is Sheila celebrating the departure of Vikram Pandit from Citibank. I do support full free speech rights, but still I feel queasy when former top-ranking government officials — who have been privy to lots of inside knowledge — speak out on such specific matters and in such a negative way on particular individuals and firms, as opposed to making broader policy recommendations. What are now the incentives for CEOs negotiating with the FDIC or for being honest with regulators the next time around? Former government leaders and regulators should not be settling personal scores in public to such an extent. Do you see many other accomplished statespeople doing the same?
This tract is a performance of terror, in good and bad ways. Few books will teach you more about the politics of bureaucracy and regulation, though not exactly as the author intends.