In rural India, a fake government office set up originally as a scam expanded to employ 20 people in various civil service roles, like street sweeping and issuing birth and death certificates. The enterprise was discovered when some of the employees complained to the government about problems at the “branch office.” Without blogs, how would we learn about such wonderful things?
In my day to day work, the definition of precision is usually, “All my unit tests run successfully.” The level of precision achieved by the clockmakers at the NIST is significantly more impressive.
Slate’s Emily Bazelton and Dahlia Lithwick break down exactly what was lost when the CIA lied about having taped the interrogations of top al-Qaeda detainees and then destroyed them in 2005. Bruce Schneier notes that if the CIA destroyed the tapes, they must have been really bad, because such tapes are valuable from an intelligence perspective.
Malcolm Gladwell has written a timely article on IQ, specifically about the Flynn effect, which is described thusly: He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter. Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. ...
What’s the state of the art these days in building your own community site? The basic idea is that you start with a blog, but you want user registration, profile pages, forums, and perhaps the ability to give users their own blogs. Yesterday I read some horrible things about Joomla in a private forum. There’s also Movable Type Community Solution. I expect that the UI is very nice, but I can’t get over the idea that Movable Type is slow. That’s a conclusion I’ve come to running this site on Movable Type. (I’ve even installed FastCGI and eAccelerator, but some operations still feel slow. ...
We’re in the middle of the bursting of the real estate bubble, and one of the most interesting things is how unexceptional it is. One of the best-documented bubbles in recent times was the junk bond market in the eighties that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry. Like nearly all bubbles, it started when some smart investors figured out that certain assets were underpriced. In this case, it was junk bonds. All bonds are rated by bond rating agencies, and bonds with a rating below a certain grade are considered “junk bonds.” Someone realized that many companies with low bond ratings were actually quite stable and were almost certain to pay off their debt, and that the bonds were a good investment. (Basically, the bonds were not as risky as their rating portrayed them to be, so they payed more interest than they needed to.) People started making money by buying the bonds, soon the demand for junk bonds exceeded their supply. ...
The New York Times Bits blog writes about the acquisition of Gemstar, a company that provides electronic program guides for TV by Macrovision, a company in the copy protection business. That doesn’t sound promising for consumers.
Herb Greenberg has a lengthy repost of an email from a mortgage industry veteran who says that the troubles in the mortgage industry are only beginning: Sub-prime aren’t the only kind of loans imploding. Second mortgages, hybrid intermediate-term ARMS, and the soon-to-be infamous Pay Option ARM are also feeling substantial pressure. The latter three loan types mostly were considered ‘prime’ so they are being overlooked, but will haunt the financial markets for years to come. Versions of these loans were made available to sub-prime borrowers of course, but the vast majority were considered ‘prime’ or Alt-A. The caveat is that the differentiation between Prime and ALT-A got smaller and smaller over the years until finally in late 2005/2006 there was virtually no difference in program type or rate. ...
Looks like William Saletan is still doing his thing at Slate. I notice he’s off the topic of IQ and race.
Google has struck a deal with AOL that allowed them to add AIM support to Gmail. You can now access AIM from the Gmail Web site (if you’re running the new version of Gmail). I was hoping the announcement meant interoperability between the two networks, but that goal seems more distant all the time.