Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Bad Education
by Malcolm Harris
The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.
Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).
SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000 in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.
The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.
Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).
SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000 in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.
There's Always a Catch
Due to the increasing obsession with quick solutions to excess fat mass, liposuction has become one of the most popular cosmetic procedures.
And as far as simply removing large volumes of subcutaneous fat from one’s body, it just may be the most effective method – certainly, far superior to diet/exercise or bariatric surgery.
But there are a few catches.
As I have previously discussed, in contrast to losing weight via lifestyle modification or bariatric surgery, liposuction does not make an obese person healthier. In fact, the removal of benign subcutaneous fat stores may actually make you worse off in terms of metabolic health.
Also, as I suggested in an earlier post, there was some very preliminary evidence suggesting that after the removal of fat from the buttocks, thighs, and abdomen, women see a compensatory increase in the fat deposition in other places – namely, their breasts. A 2-for-1 deal, if you will.
However, a hot-off-the-press study by Hernandez and colleagues suggests something less ideal than this scenario. Indeed, the authors found that a year after liposuction was performed the fat initially removed is basically all replaced, but not necessarily where you’d want it to go.
And as far as simply removing large volumes of subcutaneous fat from one’s body, it just may be the most effective method – certainly, far superior to diet/exercise or bariatric surgery.But there are a few catches.
As I have previously discussed, in contrast to losing weight via lifestyle modification or bariatric surgery, liposuction does not make an obese person healthier. In fact, the removal of benign subcutaneous fat stores may actually make you worse off in terms of metabolic health.
Also, as I suggested in an earlier post, there was some very preliminary evidence suggesting that after the removal of fat from the buttocks, thighs, and abdomen, women see a compensatory increase in the fat deposition in other places – namely, their breasts. A 2-for-1 deal, if you will.
However, a hot-off-the-press study by Hernandez and colleagues suggests something less ideal than this scenario. Indeed, the authors found that a year after liposuction was performed the fat initially removed is basically all replaced, but not necessarily where you’d want it to go.
In My Life
To Jawaharlal Nehru, it was a symbol of independent India. C Rajagopalachari considered it a masterpiece of Swadeshi manufacturing. For the country’s industry, it was a perfect launch pad. But for a slice of what is soon going to be history, this might be the last chance. Godrej — the last manufacturer of typewriters in the world — has just 500 machines left for sale.
“We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters. Currently, the company has only 500 machines left. The machines are of Godrej Prima, the last typewriter brand from our company, and will be sold at a maximum retail price of Rs 12,000,” said Milind Dukle, general manager-operations, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company.
When the company started making typewriters, the whole nation considered it the first step to an industrialised India.
During its golden age in the 1990s, the company used to produce 50,000 machines every year, while the total output in India was about 150,000.
“From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year,” said Dukle.
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Terrorist Watch List
This item in the Guardian's coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump is not the first time I've heard that the Casio F-91W digital watch is thought to be "the sign of al-Qaida," and "a contributing factor to continued detention of prisoners by the analysts stationed at Guantánamo Bay." But like so much revealed by Wikileaks, when stuff like this is proven out in the State Department's own pen, the absurdity levels really spike:
Briefing documents used to train staff in assessing the threat level of new detainees advise that possession of the F-91W - available online for as little as £4 - suggests the wearer has been trained in bomb making by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
The report states: "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.Don't forget, folks, that you too can own the Casio F91W, the wristwatch considered by America's crack anti-terrorist experts as a sure sign of terrorist affiliations. Just $12! They are also available in a range of classic terrorist colors such as lavender and pumpkin. (Don't worry if they're sold out: you can always go on the terrorist watch list.)
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When Nature Calls
by Cedar Burnett
You never quite forget the first time you crap yourself. Sure, there are the preambles -- the day you barely made it, running down the hall looking like a middle school boy hiding his erection, the many pairs of lightly soiled underwear thrown out in random bathrooms, and the spares you now carry in your purse. But nothing can really prepare you for the real deal. Once you cross that line, there’s no turning back.
I was about a month into my stressful new job selling radio ads when it happened. I spent my days making demoralizing cold calls that ended in rejection, and my nights trying to forget. The best way I knew to forget involved gorging on delicious food. Specifically Indian food. And donuts.
High on sugar and fat, my friend Jordan, my husband, John, and I set out for a postprandial walk from the donut emporium. We made it several blocks when it became clear something had gone horribly awry in my intestinal track.
"Get the car!" I squeaked to my companions, feeling the pressure mount in my guts and heat course through my body. "Get the car NOW!"
One look at my sweating, bug-eyed face was all the encouragement they needed.
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The Art of Seeing
by James Le Fanu
It is well known that towards the end of his life Monet’s sight was seriously impaired by cataracts. Still, it comes as quite a shock to see the effect on his paintings in the flesh, as it were, at the exhibition of his works currently showing at the Royal Academy.
It is well known that towards the end of his life Monet’s sight was seriously impaired by cataracts. Still, it comes as quite a shock to see the effect on his paintings in the flesh, as it were, at the exhibition of his works currently showing at the Royal Academy.
In the early paintings, the reflections in the water of the famous pond at Giverny are so limpid that one has the impression it would only be necessary to reach out to feel the water running through one’s hands.
As time passed, his brushwork became much cruder and the colouring drearier. Writing in 1918, Monet observed: "I no longer perceive colours with the same intensity. Reds appear muddy to me, pinks insipid. What I paint is darker and darker, and when I compare it to my former works, I am seized by a frantic rage and slash at my canvases with a penknife."
Contemporary critics, true to form, stuck their knives in as well. "Monet’s coloured symphony has become increasingly monochromatic," one observed; and another described his paintings as "very unpleasant indeed with their coarse handling of paint and bilious colouring".
This "coarseness and bilious colouring" was due to the two distinct types of visual distortion induced by cataracts. The first, predictably enough, is simply a loss of visual acuity, but less well appreciated is that the cataract also has a yellowish discolouration, which makes the external world seem dirty. This yellowness also blocks out light from the blue end of the spectrum, to which the retina adapts by increasing its sensitivity to blues and greens.
In 1920, after the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau had commissioned Monet to paint a series of enormous canvases of the water lilies in the Giverny pond, he realised he could "no longer make something of beauty". Finally, he agreed to having his cataracts operated on.
The standard procedure at the time was crude but effective, taking less than five seconds in skilled hands. With the eye anaesthetised with cocaine, the surgeon made an incision at the margin of the iris with a scalpel and scooped out the lens, together with its cataract. Then, while the incision healed, Monet had to spend the next 10 days flat on his back, with bandages over the eyes and his head immobilised by sandbags to prevent any movement.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Understanding Your Unemployed Friend
by Stephanie Georgopulos
Like pregnancy, divorce and anal sex, unemployment is one of those things you can’t possibly understand until it happens to you. Whether you left your job voluntarily or not, you never know what to expect until you’re knee-deep in “I have absolutely nothing to do.” Every day feels like the last day of a too-long vacation—you’re eager to get back to something, anything.
Likewise, the people in your life may not know how to deal with your predicament. There’s a good reason for this: unemployed people don’t like to talk about being unemployed. It's hard enough to find someone to talk to between the wasteland hours of 8 am and 7 pm—when you do find someone, you don't want to spend that conversation dragging them down into the dark caverns that you now affectionately refer to as “life." Really, given the choice, you'd rather discuss the season premiere of "Treme."
But on behalf of the unemployed people who refuse to express themselves, I’m breaking the silence. So here is the deal: Life is not the same as it once was, and neither is our friendship. Here is how to maintain a relationship with your unemployed friend.
Stop calling it ‘funemployment.’
Coined by the unemployed masses, ‘funemployment’ was added to the lexicon when the recession hit in 2008. It makes unemployment sound young and sexy. Employed people? They want some of that. But you shouldn’t encourage the use of this word. ‘Funemployment’ is a myth; something unemployed people created as a coping mechanism. Unless eating a bag of Tostitos in one sitting and surfing craigslist for nine hours straight is your idea of fun, there’s not much enjoyment to be found in being idle all day. Unemployment is not Disney World. Dreams do not come true here.
Stiff Upper Lip
You have to hand it to the Brits when it comes to golf. This notice was posted in war-torn Britain in 1940 in a north-country golf club.
German aircraft from Norway would fly on missions to northern England; because of the icy weather conditions, the barrels of their guns had a small dab of wax to protect them. As they crossed the coast, they would clear their guns by firing a few rounds at the golf courses. Golfers were urged to take cover.
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German aircraft from Norway would fly on missions to northern England; because of the icy weather conditions, the barrels of their guns had a small dab of wax to protect them. As they crossed the coast, they would clear their guns by firing a few rounds at the golf courses. Golfers were urged to take cover.
hat tip:
Above the Clouds
How Skyscrapers Can Save the City
Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case for building up, not out.
by Edward Glaeser
In the book of Genesis, the builders of Babel declared, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.” These early developers correctly understood that cities could connect humanity. But God punished them for monumentalizing terrestrial, rather than celestial, glory. For more than 2,000 years, Western city builders took this story’s warning to heart, and the tallest structures they erected were typically church spires. In the late Middle Ages, the wool-making center of Bruges became one of the first places where a secular structure, a 354-foot belfry built to celebrate cloth-making, towered over nearby churches. But elsewhere another four or five centuries passed before secular structures surpassed religious ones. With its 281-foot spire, Trinity Church was the tallest building in New York City until 1890. Perhaps that year, when Trinity’s spire was eclipsed by a skyscraper built to house Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, should be seen as the true start of the irreligious 20th century. At almost the same time, Paris celebrated its growing wealth by erecting the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower, which was 700 feet taller than the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.
The ceaseless climb of the world's skyscrapers is a story of ever-evolving challenges. Here's how we reached the heights we have—and where we might go from here.
Since that tower in Babel, height has been seen both as a symbol of power and as a way to provide more space on a fixed amount of land. The belfry of Trinity Church and Gustave Eiffel’s tower did not provide usable space. They were massive monuments to God and to French engineering, respectively. Pulitzer’s World Building was certainly a monument to Pulitzer, but it was also a relatively practical means of getting his growing news operation into a single building.
For centuries, ever taller buildings have made it possible to cram more and more people onto an acre of land. Yet until the 19th century, the move upward was a moderate evolution, in which two-story buildings were gradually replaced by four- and six-story buildings. Until the 19th century, heights were restricted by the cost of building and the limits on our desire to climb stairs. Church spires and belfry towers could pierce the heavens, but only because they were narrow and few people other than the occasional bell-ringer had to climb them. Tall buildings became possible in the 19th century, when American innovators solved the twin problems of safely moving people up and down and creating tall buildings without enormously thick lower walls.
Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator; Archimedes is believed to have built one 2,200 years ago. And Louis XV is said to have had a personal lift installed in Versailles so that he could visit his mistress. But before the elevator could become mass transit, it needed a good source of power, and it needed to be safe. Matthew Boulton and James Watt provided the early steam engines used to power industrial elevators, which were either pulled up by ropes or pushed up hydraulically. As engines improved, so did the speed and power of elevators that could haul coal out of mines or grain from boats.
But humans were still wary of traveling long distances upward in a machine that could easily break and send them hurtling downward. Otis, tinkering in a sawmill in Yonkers, took the danger out of vertical transit. He invented a safety brake and presented it in 1854 at New York’s Crystal Palace Exposition. He had himself hoisted on a platform, and then, dramatically, an axman severed the suspending rope. The platform dropped slightly, then came to a halt as the safety brake engaged.
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The Man Behind the Curtain
by Tony Rothman
“I want to get down to the basics. I want to learn the fundamentals. I want to understand the laws that govern the behavior of the universe.” Thousands of admissions officers and physics department chairs have smiled over such words set down by aspiring physicists in their college-application essays, and that is hardly surprising, for every future physicist writes that essay, articulating the sentiments of all of us who choose physics as a career: to touch the fundamentals, to learn how the universe operates.
It is also the view the field holds of itself and the way physics is taught: Physics is the most fundamental of the natural sciences; it explains Nature at its deepest level; the edifice it strives to construct is all-encompassing, free of internal contradictions, conceptually compelling and—above all—beautiful. The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.
Of course many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holes—let us say abysses—are planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender.
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Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Meme is the Message
by James Gleick
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”
We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. “TMI,” we say. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus.
The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. The genetic code—no longer a mere metaphor—was being deciphered. Scientists spoke grandly of the biosphere: an entity composed of all the earth’s life-forms, teeming with information, replicating and evolving. And biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself.
Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.
“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”
Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.
Robots At Work and Play
by Alan Taylor
Advancements in robotics are continually taking place in the fields of space exploration, health care, public safety, entertainment, defense, and more. These machines -- some fully autonomous, some requiring human input -- extend our grasp, enhance our capabilities, and travel as our surrogates to places too dangerous for us to go. NASA currently has dozens of robotic missions underway, with satellites now in orbit around our moon and four planets -- and two more on the way to Ceres and Pluto. Gathered here are recent images of robots and those who work with them. [33 photos]
More here:
Advancements in robotics are continually taking place in the fields of space exploration, health care, public safety, entertainment, defense, and more. These machines -- some fully autonomous, some requiring human input -- extend our grasp, enhance our capabilities, and travel as our surrogates to places too dangerous for us to go. NASA currently has dozens of robotic missions underway, with satellites now in orbit around our moon and four planets -- and two more on the way to Ceres and Pluto. Gathered here are recent images of robots and those who work with them. [33 photos]
More here:
11 Alive
On August 2nd of 1943, whilst serving as commander of the PT-109 during World War II, John F. Kennedy and crew were rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri; their boat instantly halved by the impact and two of the crew killed. Six days later, stranded in the Solomon Islands with his fellow survivors, Kennedy carved the following message into a coconut shell and handed it to Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, two natives tasked with delivering it to the nearest Allied base 35 nautical miles away, by canoe. Luckily they succeeded, and Kennedy and his men were soon rescued as a result.
Kennedy later had the shell encased in plastic; it was then used as a paperweight in the Oval Office during his Presidency.
Transcript follows. Image courtesy of the JFK Library.
Transcript
NAURO ISL...COMMANDERvia:
NATIVE KNOWS POS'IT
HE CAN PILOT...11 ALIVE
NEED SMALL BOAT
KENNEDY
Mistakes Were Made
Review by Danielle Procida
There is a vast body of literature on how to do well, how to be happy, what to do and choose for one's own benefit and that of others. This body covers a range from the vulgar to the great moral philosophers. We are not short of such analyses or guidance.
In contrast, the body of work which considers our failure to do well and be good is decidedly smaller, and also, it must be said, rather lamer, particularly in its power to explain why we fall into foolish beliefs, make bad decisions and commit hurtful acts. We remain opaque to others and to ourselves, thinking, acting and responding in ways which are harmful, counter-productive and baffling. Most baffling of all is our propensity to continue in these patterns, to compound error with error and throw good vigorously after bad.
Attempts at explanation tend towards exasperated (and inadequate) conclusions of egoism, stupidity or evil, or contentious structures of historical, social or psychological theory to provide some sort of answer. Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers an alternative to these by describing the workings of a simple process, one which by its nature is hidden from our view. This process is self-justification, and it is driven by an engine of cognitive dissonance, the discomfort we feel at the gap between our self-image and the less attractive reality that sometimes confronts us.
It works like this: I do something that I should not have done, and this troubles me, because I'm not the kind of person who does that sort of thing. Redressing the mistake will be even more painful or difficult than not committing it in the first place would have been. So, to salve this nagging complaint of the soul, I declare to myself that the act was the right one all along, and I confirm this by reinforcing it at the earliest possible opportunity.
Brand on Celebrity
[ed. This has to be one of the most fascinating, articulate interviews I think I've ever seen. Whether you care about Mr. Brand or not, it's certainly worth a look. Who would have thought?]
I'm not a huge Russell Brand fan (I don't dislike him either, but most of his media came out after my daughter was born and I essentially embarked upon a half-decade adult TV and movie fast), but this is a remarkable interview. Brand gets some tough questions from the interviewer, and while he gets excited and even rants a little, he is consistently cogent, intelligent, and well-spoken. This is practically a master class in how to talk about celebrity while being a celebrity without sounding like a knob.
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I'm not a huge Russell Brand fan (I don't dislike him either, but most of his media came out after my daughter was born and I essentially embarked upon a half-decade adult TV and movie fast), but this is a remarkable interview. Brand gets some tough questions from the interviewer, and while he gets excited and even rants a little, he is consistently cogent, intelligent, and well-spoken. This is practically a master class in how to talk about celebrity while being a celebrity without sounding like a knob.
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