Posts

Matthew Yglesias on the source of America’s strength: Winning the second world war entailed building a lot of tanks and ships and warplanes and nuclear bombs. But the reason we won the war is that in the 150 years before the war, we’d gone about building the most prosperous society in human history. The question I have these days is whether we have a government and citizenry that are capable of building a society that continues to build prosperity for the next 150 years. Like Michael O’Hare, I have my doubts. ...

In a post about the adoption rate for FaceTime, Marco Arment talks about the tendency of people not to use new features of devices that they already use. He explains that while people who were already using the iPhone when FaceTime was released may not get into the habit of using it, people who started using the iPhone post-FaceTime may be more likely to make regular use of it. His post reminded me of something I think about a lot – how to get more out of the tools I already use. Most of the devices and applications we use on a day to day basis are incredibly complex. For example, I spend a lot of my day writing code in TextMate and Eclipse, and I’m certain that there are keyboard shortcuts that could make me more productive that I don’t know about, and features that would be really helpful that I never take advantage of. People often ask for features that already exist. ...

Oliver Burkeman says we can all help keep society civilized by inflicting altruistic punishment on rude people that we encounter: The study of happiness rightly focuses on such indisputable virtues as gratitude, generosity, and forgiveness. But any honest accounting of the sources of daily pleasure – for me, anyway – must include the exquisite joys of what I’ve come to think of as Politeness Enforcement Tactics: the guerrilla moves we use to avenge boorish behaviour in public places. ...

M.S. at the Economist’s Democracy in America blog writes about the relationship between government regulations and personal liberty. Here’s the crux of it: But there’s another reason why I can let my daughter swim in the Amstel, and that is that I’m pretty sure that in a well-regulated country like the Netherlands, the water is reasonably free of heavy pollutants and raw sewage. (I would not, for example, let her swim in the Mekong.) This, I think, outlines a useful distinction between different kinds of regulation. I am perfectly capable of assessing for myself the risks of swimming across a small pond in Massachusetts, or the risks of swimming in the Amstel when lots of boat traffic is around. I don’t need regulations to protect me; I have common sense. What I can’t assess for myself is the risk that the water is contaminated by raw sewage. For that, I need a regulatory agency that stops households and businesses from polluting the river. To generalise: for risks I can assess myself, I don’t want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please just because I might end up suing the government. For risks I can’t assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. One kind of regulation stops me from swimming in a pond in Massachusetts. The other kind lets me swim in a river in the Netherlands. One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer. ...

The Blue Legacy expedition blog has more details on the safety of Gulf seafood. Yesterday’s piece from The Daily Beast said that their tests checked for the presence of dispersants, but this article gives the impression that there is no reliable test for those chemicals.

The Daily Beast commissioned its own tests on Gulf seafood to determine whether it is contaminated by the BP oil spill or the byproducts of its cleanup: So is the caution among America’s seafood consumers justified? Seeking a definitive answer to the question, The Daily Beast commissioned an independent lab, one of a handful certified to measure chemical dispersants, to analyze a cross-section of Gulf seafood—red grouper, jumbo shrimp, and crabmeat—for both oil and the dispersants that have prompted almost as much alarm as the petroleum itself. To further sharpen the test, we also performed similar tests on samples of those three types of seafood culled from the Atlantic Ocean. ...

Finance blogger Steve Waldman explains what it’s like to meet Treasury Department officials who he normally criticizes: Abstractly, I think some of them should be replaced and perhaps disgraced. But having chatted so cordially, I’m far less likely to take up pitchforks against them. Drawn to the Secretary’s conference room by curiosity, vanity, ambition, and conceit, I’ve been neutered a bit. There’s some irony to that, because some of the people I met with may have been neutered, in precisely the same way and to disastrous effect, by their own meetings and mentorings with the Robert Rubins and Jamie Dimons of the world. ...

Carl Bialik, the Numbers Guy for the Wall Street Journal, talks about the effectiveness of teacher metrics this week. It’s a pretty good rundown of the risks of applying such a system, including: Incentives to teach to the test. Incentives to cheat outright. Disincentives to go into teaching if the system is seen as unfair by teachers. Problems with measurement resulting from classroom assignments. I’d consider this piece mandatory reading if you read the LA Times piece about teacher evaluation. ...

The LA Times has obtained standardized test results from the Los Angeles school district and is using that information to publish ratings of individual teachers. There’s little doubt that their methodology has flaws, but that’s an argument for better metrics and analysis, not shutting down this line of inquiry. I am a huge believer in public education – it’s probably the most successful government program ever launched – but there’s a bit of a black hole when it comes to accountability. There’s some understanding of which school districts and schools are better than others, but very little information on which teachers are good at their jobs and which ones aren’t. ...

Tyler Cowen posted a link to a great find: a 1910 essay by Robert Sloss in which he predicted that devices very similar to modern smart phones would one day exist. Impressive stuff.