Results for “age of em” 15648 found
Cell phones for (beneficial) social control?
Smoking cessation programmes that use text messaging can double the
quit rate in young smokers, according to a clinical trial in New
Zealand.The
trial led by Anthony Rodgers, director of the Clinical Trials Research
Unit at the University of Auckland, NZ, is the first to test the use of
mobile phones as an aid to giving up smoking.In
the study, over 850 young smokers who wanted to quit received text
messages, such as: “Write down 4 people who will get a kick outta u
kicking butt. Your mum, dad, m8s?”The
smokers, whose average age was 25 years old, received five messages a
day for a week before their designated “quit day”, and for the
following four weeks. Then they received three messages a week for a
further five months. They were also given one month of free personal
texting, starting on their quit day, as an incentive.A
similar group of young smokers received one month free texting six
months after their designated quit day, but no text messages designed
to help them quit.
Six
weeks after quit day, 28% of the group that received the texts claimed
to have quit, compared with 13% of the control group. To check these
self-reported results, the team analysed levels of cotinine, a nicotine
breakdown product, in the saliva of one in 10 of the participants. The
results were the same for both groups – about half of those who claimed
to have given up were actually still smoking. Quit rates appeared to
remain high after six months, although the results are less certain
because many of the participants were lost to follow up.
Repetition does matter; here is the story.
Kraftwerk
Two of the four — the bald ones — looked like villains from a Bruce Willis movie. The other two looked like late-career managers after seven years of Arbeitslosigkeit, laid off by Lufthansa due to insufficient downward real wage flexibility.
They didn’t play instruments, nor did they sing. Well, one of them would, every few minutes or so, bark something into a kind of mike. He ejaculated phrases like "Carbohydrat" [sic] and "Tour de France" [at least his country supported the EU Constitution].
All four stood at laptop computers, with, well, "that look." You know, the look you have when you just blogged something that you took just a little too seriously. Hey, maybe they were blogging. [What did you expect Tyler, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf? a ten-minute accordion solo?]
Nor am I the one to call them stiff. I arrived at the 9:30 club – one of DC’s coolest venues — at 7:30, armed with my copy of Oscar Edward Anderson’s 1953 Refrigeration in America: A History of a Technology and its Impact, just in case the proceedings at hand should prove too slow for my tastes.
But I was not to read the book. As a matter of pure accident, I ran into Henry Farrell, of CrookedTimber fame. Here is his excellent recent post on Turkey and the EU.
The bottom line: The music was great, and the show started exactly on time.
More on Real Estate Commissions
Earlier I wrote that when house prices increase real estate commissions don’t fall very much but instead we get increased entry and wasteful competition. A recent article from the LA Times (reg. required) describes the process:
One of the few things increasing faster than house prices in California is the supply of agents licensed to sell them.
More than 22,000 applicants took the state’s real estate exam in April, nearly three times as many as in April 2003, according to the Department of Real Estate. To handle the surge, the department has rented six test centers around the state to supplement the five it already has.
The last time so many people wanted to sell real estate in California was in 1990. In what might be an ominous sign for the current boom, that year marked a peak in the housing market.
and get this:
There are 437,000 agents in California, enough to form the state’s eighth-largest city. With only 680,000 home sales a year, competition for listings can be savage.
Thanks to Paul N. for the pointer.
Fischer Black as macroeconomist
Black’s economic thought is centered around the view that all profit opportunities will be exploited. So what happens if the central bank decides to add zeros to the accounts held at the Fed?
Here is the standard account. In Black’s view banks were already holding all the dollars they wished to. One reaction is for banks to borrow less money at the discount window, or perhaps borrow less from each other. Money will leave the system as quickly as it entered. Another reaction is simply for banks to sit on the new money. Prices will not go up. Alternatively, it could be argued that an indifference relation holds, and whatever people expect to happen will happen. Multiple equilibria obtain. Prices might go up, fall, or stay constant. Monetarism is then true only if people expect it to be true.
Can this be for real? Won’t banks make more loans, thereby increasing the money supply? Black was fond of an arbitrage argument. If banks wanted to make more loans, such loans must be profitable. Ex ante, banks already would have attracted more reserve dollars to make these profitable loans. Black once told me that in such a world, banks would be willing to bid more than a dollar (in expected value terms, using future dollars) for a (current) dollar. Since that would violate the no-arbitrage condition, banks must not want to make more loans.
How do interest rates enter the picture? Perhaps banks didn’t want to make more loans at old interest rates, but now they would make some more loans at the new, lower interest rates. But as I understand Black’s sometimes-murky writings and comments, it is begging the question to suppose that interest rates will change. Why should they? The Fed sopped up some pieces of paper — T-Bills — and replaced them with other pieces of paper (well, zeros in account books, in both cases). Why should this have much if any influence on real interest rates?
My best shot is to postulate that banks have a downward-sloping demand curve to hold reserves, which they treat as differently from T-Bills (is this begging the question?). Give them more reserves, and they — acting in conjunction with their borrowing agents — will push those reserves into other markets. The effect on real rates of return will be small, but nominal variables will rise. The MU curve of bank reserves slopes down ever so slightly, but the resulting adjustments make the Fed a mighty power indeed.
Can that be true? Common sense — not to mention fear of embarrassment — forbids me from siding with Black. But that doesn’t mean I am convinced he is wrong.
Soon we will look at his business cycle hypothesis.
The new Thomas Sowell book
Black Rednecks and White Liberals, here is one summary by Sowell:
The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.
What are the most prestigious jobs?
I can tell you only what people claim are the most prestigious jobs. Here are the top five:
1. Scientist (really?)
2. Doctor
3. Firefighter
4. Teacher (really?)
5. Military officer
I have yet to cash in on the groupies. Here is the full list and story.
Being a lawyer, I suspect, is more prestigious than most people are willing to admit. The same is true for politician, athlete, or entertainer. Clergy comes in number eight, but I suspect its real prestige is lower. But I can believe what comes in last — real estate agent.
The distribution of soccer and baseball
–Baseball has a tremendous emphasis on individual performance. When you strike out, everyone can see, and some kids come out of the batter’s box crying. Hitting is *extremely* hard, as is pitching to a four-footer. Really lousy baseball players are more marginalized and embarrassed than really lousy soccer players. Soccer is more "everybody run around," although of course individuals matter.–Contemporary parents are obsessed with safety. Soccer is perceived as safer, and may well be, at least until the kids get a little older and start banging into one another harder.–Girls seem to like soccer better, and co-ed soccer seems to go on longer than co-ed baseball, perhaps because girls can compete more effectively at this sport. My son’s little league is already probably 97% male, and he’s only 8.
Joke inflation
Whatever tenuous hold the joke had left by the 1990’s may have been broken by the Internet, Mr. Nilsen said. The torrent of e-mail jokes in the late 1990’s and joke Web sites made every joke available at once, essentially diluting the effect of what had been an spoken form. While getting up and telling a joke requires courage, forwarding a joke by e-mail takes hardly any effort at all. So everyone did it, until it wasn’t funny anymore.
Here is the full and fascinating story of how the joke has died as a dominant institution of humor.
Why satellite radio doesn’t make me happier
I love satellite radio. I listen every day and did not flinch when they raised the price. Still I cannot help but feel (boo-hoo) it was not designed with me in mind. I am not completely happy with 70 commercial-free, DJ-driven music stations with no playlists.
The culprit lies in how the channels are defined. They have a station for "50s music," or "bluegrass," or "reggae." They need clear and compelling channel titles to attract subscribers. And with so many channels at hand, many listeners wish to know what is where when.
But I don’t care so much about genre or time period per se. Let’s face it, most music from the 1960s is unlistenable. I love the best of Jamaican music, but most reggae stinks. A station that has to cover a genre or time period gives you, in lieu of a least common denominator problem, too many denominators at once.
I would rather have 70 channels with the liberty of experimenting across all possible dimensions. Even better, how about defining channels by IQ scores? Number of CDs in your collection? Personal mood that day? Best yet, a station: "For people who are convinced that James Brown, Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, Lee Perry, and Pierre Boulez are seminal musical figures of our time."
That is why I am not happier with satellite radio. I hope soon to relate my experiences with Internet radio and podcasting.
More on *Sith* and fascism
…get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited…
The two best entries to this film, and to Star Wars in general, are Milton’s Paradise Lost and the popular fascist art of the Nazis and Soviets. The portrayal of the Jedi shows that the fascist temptation is far stronger than Milton ever believed, which is saying something.
Most of the other episodes also should be viewed with fascistic traditions in mind. (Otherwise you may think of them as stupid and maudlin, esp. I and II.) Is this deliberate, or rather picked up through Buck Rogers, Joseph Campbell, and other intermediate sources? It doesn’t matter. Lucas’s final message is supremely anti-fascistic, and at the end of "Return of the Jedi" he presents entertaining story-telling as his preferred alternative means of enthrallment (remember the ewoks reenacting the whole story?). But of course only a director himself enthralled with the fascistic aesthetic could make such a convincingly anti-fascistic series of movies. That is precisely what makes the whole thing interesting, and is what most critics miss. At least Lane gets half the picture.
The Exam
Exam week is just ending at GMU. One day I hope to have the courage to give this exam as a final in all my classes. I believe it would correlate well with more conventionally derived grades.
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading
The only spoilers in this post concern the non-current Star Wars movies. Stop reading now if you wish those to remain a surprise.
The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:
1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.
2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true (this is from the new movie, alas I cannot say more, but the argument could be strengthened by citing the relevant detail). Aren’t they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.
3. Obi-Wan told Luke scores of lies, including the big whopper that his dad was dead.
4. The Jedi can’t even keep us safe.
5. The bad guys have sex and do all the procreating. The Jedi are not supposed to marry, or presumably have children. Not ESS, if you ask me. Anakin gets Natalie Portman; Luke spends two episodes with a perverse and distant crush on his sister Leia, leading only to one chaste kiss.
6. The prophecy was that Anakin (Darth) will restore order and balance to the force. How true this turns out to be. But none of the Jedi can begin to understand what this means. Yes, you have to get rid of the bad guys. But you also have to get rid of the Jedi. The Jedi are, after all, the primary supply source and training ground for the bad guys. Anakin/Darth manages to get rid of both, so he really is the hero of the story. (It is also interesting which group of “Jedi” Darth kills first, but that would be telling.)
7. At the happy ending of “Return of the Jedi”, the Jedi no longer control the galaxy. The Jedi Council is not reestablished. Luke, the closest thing to a Jedi representative left, never becomes a formal Jedi. He shows no desire to train other Jedi, and probably expects to spend the rest of his life doing voices for children’s cartoons.
8. The core message is that power corrupts, but also that good guys have power too. Our possible safety lies in our humanity, not in our desires to transcend it or wield strange forces to our advantage.
What did Padme say?: “So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause.”
Addendum: By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with “enhanced blood”? That the rebels’ victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?
Will China revalue the yuan?
The US Treasury, in its twice-yearly report to Congress on exchange rates and trade, stopped short on Tuesday of accusing China of currency manipulation but made clear it expected revaluation within six months.
Brad Setser offers an excellent analysis of whether revaluation would be good.
Why is slow life history correlated with intelligence?
…corvids and psittacines [have cognitive powers superior to most apes]. That’s really the culmination of studies beginning in the
1970’s (most famously Irene Pepperberg’s studies on grey parrots and Herrnstein’s on pigeons) and is something that has only just become, I think, mainstream biological thought around now: but it rests on as firm experimental obsrvation as any studies of primates (certainly of orangutans). Corvids and psittacines simply outperform even chimpanzees in many ways. …On the other hand, the selective pressures on birds are pretty nasty. Their biochemistry seems a hell of a lot better than ours (witness the longevity of these things). So perhaps it’s an alternate route to great intelligence: if you know that say four out of five young are going to die anyway you can take the risk of 80% of the offspring being quickly developed morons. I don’t know enough about the field to validate that but I think it’s an interesting idea.
The General Theory on-line
Here it is, that maddening yet brilliant book.
The worst part is the talk about the socialization of investment. My favorite parts — not the same as the best parts — are the notorious chapter 17 (remember all that talk of "own-rates of interest"?), the discussions of "animal spirits," and the short notes at the end about mercantilism and Silvio Gesell. This book is more poetic, and more image-rich, than just about any other economics tract. That is one reason why it it has been read in so many contradictory ways.
What is, after all, the central message? That aggregate demand matters? That wages and prices are sticky? That wages and prices are not always sticky but ought to be, to prevent an ever-worsening downward spiral? That monetary factors prevent the rate of interest from equilibrating ex ante savings and investment, thereby requiring income adjustments to equilibrate them ex post? That the rate of interest is simply too high? That the stock market can screw everything up? That expectations are the key to the macroeconomy? All of those?
Keynes’s great contribution was to create an economics in which a persistent Great Depression was possible. But on policy recommendations, I would stick with Milton Friedman, or for that matter Keynes’s earlier Tract on Monetary Reform. We can recognize the dangers of deflation without embracing Keynes’s seductive yet unworkably byzantine analytical framework.
Thanks to Brad DeLong for the pointer.