Emergence in action: Plaxo is an ex-canary

Plaxo's opt out mechanism was broken the other day. I see variations of this all the time, at work and at home.

Everyone has finite resources. Do they put those into sales, marketing, maintaining core services, or making sure "opt out" or "account termination" or "data transfer" or interoperability services are working?

Obviously services that allow customers to leave are the first to go when times get tough. Exit services are the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- they die first. When customers complained about problems leaving AOL, AOL was on the way to the grave.

Nobody has to plan these sorts of emergent behaviors. They're inevitable.

Plaxo is an ex-canary.

Another best analysis of the Iowa outcomes

It's definitely inside baseball humor, but it's great ...

Jon Swift: Iowa Caucus Results Explained

... The biggest loser of all was Hillary Clinton. If she can't win in Iowa, where can she win? In every contested race since 1972 (Bill Clinton ran unopposed in 1996), the winner of the Iowa caucuses for the Democrats has gone on to be elected President, except for 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2004 when the winner did not go on to be elected President. Iowans have an uncanny ability to predict which Democrat can win in the general election, which means Hillary's campaign may be doomed. Look for members of the party establishment to start looking for another candidate, maybe even going outside the party to someone like McCain who could win both the Republican and Democrat nominations and run on a unity ticket with Mike Bloomberg or Joe Lieberman as his vice president, sparing voters the burden of having to make a hard choice in November. David Broder and his friends are already ecstatic at the prospect....

Was American media coverage always as bad as it is now?

At this rate Hilary is going to earn a sympathy vote from me.

Ok, my real choice is the Dem who will win given the electoral college (not the popular vote or national polls) against either Huckabee or McCain given the entrance of either Bloomberg or Nader. I think anyone would win against Romney or Giuliani and the media so despises Thompson that he won't be a contender.

If we had decent journalists, they'd be setting up electoral college predictions with those matchups so I'd know where to send my money.

Fashionable light bulbs and that darned mercury

Low energy light bulbs are justly praised -- but there's a wee little mercury problem:

...Official advice from the Department of the Environment states that if a low-energy bulb is smashed, the room needs to be vacated for at least 15 minutes.

A vacuum cleaner should not be used to clear up the debris, and care should be taken not to inhale the dust.

Instead, rubber gloves should be used, and the broken bulb put into a sealed plastic bag - which should be taken to the local council for disposal.

Used bulbs are likewise toxic waste.

I've written about this before. The risk for adults is probably very low, but it's infants and children we need answers for. It's quite annoying to have one division of government strongly encouraging adoption (esp. in Canada) and another sending us across the city to a toxic waste dump. In the current state of affairs, the bulbs need prominent toxic waste labels on the packaging.

Where are those darned toxic-but-not-dangerous LED bulds we were promised two years ago?

Andy Olmsted's post-mortem good-bye.

I don't remember reading Andrew Olmstead's posts, but I'm sure I have at various times.

He left a message to be published were he to die in Iraq. It was published today.

Obsidian Wings: Andy Olmsted

...If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions...

It's moving.

Treating explosive aggression in special needs adults - a huge placebo effect

A study on Risperdal in special needs adults is being described as showing that Risperdal has no  benefit.

That's interesting, though the drug is approved for use in children with autism, not for the group that was studied. The most interesting result, however, is the incredible placebo effect seen in the study group...

Treating impulsive aggression: HUGE placebo effect is better than Risperdal

... Impulsive and irritable aggression is a big issue in low IQ adults and children. Risperdal, in particular, has been heavily prescribed for this problem over the past ten years...

Drugs Offer No Benefit in Curbing Aggression, Study Finds - New York Times

... The new study tracked 86 adults with low I.Q.’s in community housing in England, Wales and Australia over more than a month of treatment. It found a 79 percent reduction in aggressive behavior among those taking dummy pills, compared with a reduction of 65 percent or less in those taking antipsychotic drugs.

...After a month, people in all three groups had settled down, losing their temper less often and causing less damage when they did. Yet unexpectedly, those in the placebo group improved the most, significantly more so than those on medication....

Holy cow. That's one hell of a placebo effect.

A typical placebo effect should have been around 30% improvement. In that case Risperdal would be looking great today.

In this group the placebo effect is MUCH larger than expected.

If this is born out in f/u studies, we need to figure out how to leverage that. Why was the placebo effect so large? Was it due to a change how peers and caregivers treated the study participants? A synergistic effect between the study participants expectations and behaviors and those of his (most are male) caregivers...

It's hard to get funding to study a placebo effect. Drug companies, obviously, aren't interested. It will take some serious work to get funding to find out why the placebo effect was so successful in this study. If the effect is real, and we can harness it, we can make a huge difference to the lives of many people.

We really need to find out how large this effect is in children.

Summary of Iowa 2008

TP has a good analysis. Here's the GOP side:

Talking Points Memo | Where We Are

...Purely for my own reasons, I would have liked Romney to do better tonight, because I think he'd be a very weak national candidate. Rudy's already toast. Trailing Ron Paul tonight was just a confirmation of that. He's not even relevant...

McCain had a pretty poor night tonight, coming in fourth behind the comatose Fred Thompson. But let's not kid ourselves. Romney took a big blow tonight. And if he can't come back strong in New Hampshire his collapse will be McCain's gain -- not because McCain's on fire or has any money or really is in any kind of strong position by most objective measures. The truth, though, is that there's simply no one left. It ain't Thompson; ain't Rudy. You can't say Huckabee's out of it but put me down with those that just don't think he can overcome the twin hurdles of a) running amongst more moderate and cosmopolitan Republican electorates and b) running against almost the entire GOP establishment. And that leaves you with McCain.

The truth is that the Republican party tonight is in complete disarray. The best financed candidate just fell on his face. Their big winner of the evening is opposed by almost the entire establishment of his party. The frontrunner of recent months is lost down in Florida shakily repeating '9/11' under his breath like a hobo who needs a stiff drink.

McCain's just the only guy left. And that ain't nothing. Because one of them does have to win. And I'd rather see the Dems face Romney than McCain.

My favorite GOP candidate was also Romney. Primarily because I was pretty sure he'd lose, especially after his dismal 'any religion is ok as long as it's Judeo-Mormon-Christian' speech. Also, if he perchance won the election (Americans can do anything), he's probably the least bad of the bad after McCain.

Huckabee is going to play Reagan for all it's worth. I believe Josh Marshall when he says that won't work for him.

So it's McCain. There's much to admire about him, so I'm disappointed that he'll likely be the GOP candidate.

On the Dem side I hope Edwards still has some staying power. I worry that Obama hasn't had nearly enough nasty attacks. The GOP are going to go after him like a ton of bricks. I also worry about his ego. Presidents are never humble, but he could use another ten years of living.

The wild cards are Nader and Bloomberg ...

Open Left: Still No Specifics From AWWMNUUBM

... It would be nice, for once, if the constant drumbeat from Aging Wealthy White Men for National Unity Under Billionaire Media Moguls (AWWMNUUBM for short) decrying polarization, the lack of bi-partisanship and gridlock in Washington would actually provide specifics on what legislation their hated polarization, partisanship and gridlock is blocking. Of course, they won't actually do that, because blaming national problems on vague, undefined concepts like 'polarization' and 'gridlock' is much easier than actually analyzing the contemporary political scene in America...

If it's Obama or Edwards I don't think Nader will do anything. I'm hoping he's truly finished, but the man is a curse that keeps on giving.

Bloomberg would probably stay out if it's McCain vs. Obama. If it were Huckabee vs. Edwards I'm sure he'd run, but in that case he'd kill the GOP and give Edwards a large victory ...

Human History

10 step summary of human history.

Step 9 takes us through the last hundred years. Step 10 is the unknowable future.

Benazir Bhutto - The Economist's obituary

Even in its dotage, The Economist does a very good job on obituaries.

I learned more about Benazir Bhutto, and Pakistan, from their one page obit than I have from dozens of newspaper stories and blog postings.

Benazir Bhutto | Economist.com

... Benazir straddled three very different worlds. One was a feudal fief: her family's land in Sindh province. As a child, she loved to hear the story of how Charles Napier, the British conqueror of Sindh, had in 1843 marvelled at the extent of the Bhutto holdings. After her father's death, she found herself on the ancestral turf adjudicating over marital disputes among local villagers as if they were her serfs. When she married, it was an arranged match, with a Sindhi bigwig, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she described in her autobiography as “the heir to the chiefdom of the 100,000-strong Zardari tribe”. When they met in London, he wooed her with crates of mangoes from Fortnum & Mason, and marrons glacés. They had three children, and she was fiercely loyal to him, even after friends as well as foes came to regard him as sleazy and corrupt...

My $80 HDTV conversion coupons are on the way

It took about two minutes to apply for our two TV Converter Program Coupons. We don't have cable or satellite and we have two televisions (albeit one is about 8" across), so we qualify.

Best prediction essay ever

8 can't-miss tech predictions for 1998 is brilliant. Funny, yes, but also a great education in the futility of predicting even the near term future.

Mathematical universe: the softly spoken premise of string theory

Why are mathematical models so insanely good at making predictions about the physical universe?

Is this a testament to the general modeling power of mathematics to describe any internally consistent system, or is the universe in some sense fundamentally mathematical?

These are the sorts of questions that used to come up in my undergraduate days. I don't recall a good answer, though I was certainly on the dim side of that student body. It may be that the answers were simply over my head.

I wonder about those questions again as I, very slowly, read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos (See also: BBC IOT - Theories of Everything With Brian Greene). It's a good book; I'll have more to say on it when I'm done - sometime in the spring of 2008. For now I will say I like the substantial non-string chapters better than the string theory portion.

There are a few reasons for this preference. Greene is a string theorist, and I think most specialists do best describing things outside of their core passion. It's easier to be neutral about things that you haven't poured your heart into. More interestingly, the old question, "Is the universe fundamentally mathematical?", plays a role as well.

Most new physics seems, to a hobbyist like me, to make a reasonable bet that the implausible success of mathematical models will hold in new domains. It's a bit like tossing a plank off the end of a pier, assuming that when one walks to the end of the plank a supporting pillar will be found.

String theory tosses a breathtakingly long plank. It's a daring bet indeed. If we're ever to find out that it holds (proof of those necessary 10 space dimensions?) then we do have to take seriously the old whimsy that the universe, at its heart, is purely mathematical.

Until that day, it sure does feel to the physics hobbyist more like an exercise in mathematical brilliance than even traditional theoretical physics ...

Outsourcing surrogacy - and what comes next

FuturePundit: Pregnancy Surrogacy Outsourced To India. No surprises, unfortunately.

I'm tagging this one as "organ trade", though I suspect there will be eugenic implications as well. Some of the newborns, after all, will be defective. Will the contractors, produces, directors, egg and sperm donors necessarily accept defective units?

The surrogate mothers will suffer the usual lifespan reduction and disability associated with human pregnancy.

Liberal and progressive - defined

A good definition.

Why progressives should forget the middle ground. - By Paul Krugman - Slate Magazine: "If you think every American should be guaranteed health insurance, you're a liberal; if you're trying to make universal health care happen, you're a progressive."

I'm with Krugman on the partisanship. Dominance and Display are core GOP values. They won't respect us if we play nice, in fact, they'll be disgusted and disappointed.

The GOP will only reform itself in crushing defeat. We do need a reformed GOP, so both Dems and honest Republicans need a crushing GOP defeat in 2008.

Then we can play nice.

Physics Feast: Sean Carroll's favorite posts

Sean "Cosmic Varience" Carroll has indexed his personal favorite posts. A true feast for the physics fan.

After the crash of '07: what 2008 may bring

The Economist tells us where we are months after the property crash of '07 (emphases mine):

Economist.com

... On December 18th the European Central Bank lent almost €350 billion ($500 billion) to tide banks over the new year. And yet most fear-meters, including, crucially, the price banks have to pay for funds (see chart), still register chronic anxiety...

... Subprime borrowers will probably default on $200 billion-300 billion of mortgages. That is a lot of money, to be sure, but hardly enough to imperil the world economy. For that, you need the baroque superstructure of mortgage-backed derivatives that enabled investors to bet on the housing market. From a mathematical viewpoint, the combined profits and losses on these derivatives will, by definition, cancel out, so they should not add anything to the total underlying loss. But that is only half the story. Individual investment vehicles may have sustained huge losses, especially if they borrowed heavily: it is the fear that your counterparty might be in that predicament that is gumming up the markets.

... banks now facing up to these contingent liabilities have not had to set aside capital in case of trouble—that gap in the regulations was precisely what made it so attractive to get their investments off the balance sheets in the first place...

... the money-market funds have gone on strike, cutting off the interbank markets' main source of cash ...

... Nobody yet knows whether the extreme borrowing in the credit boom was a sensible result of the powerful new machinery of debt, or the sort of excess still unwinding in Japan...

The markets will not recover until lenders believe the banks have credibly owned up to their losses...

... the frenzy of innovation around debt and securitisation got out of hand. Risk was supposed to be bought by those best able to afford it, but often ended up with those seduced by yields they did not understand. Mathematical brilliance was supposed to model risk with precision, but the models evaporated along with the liquidity that they had failed to quantify. Rating agencies were supposed to serve the market, but their first loyalty seems to have been to the issuers who were paying their fees...

Until that moment, the burden will fall on the central banks. They have tried to help by tinkering with the technical operations that supply liquidity (though they keep overnight interest rates on target by draining money elsewhere)...

The rating agencies failed us in the Enron scandal too, not to mention the last market crash. Maybe we need to oblige rating agencies to make financial bets aligned with their ratings -- so if they rate wrongly they go out of business. Oh, and the CEO's compensation should be aligned with those predictions as well.

The editorial claims that the primary fault with the financial instruments was a failure to model liquidity correctly. If so then increasing liquidity is a case of closing the proverbial gate after the horses have exited. I think DeLong and Krugman have been saying this, but I hadn't understood until now.

A significant part of the screw-up seems to have been that banks were allowed to hide very speculative bets from their balance sheets. Shades of the accounting scandals at Enron and others throughout the 90s! It would be interesting to know who put that loophole in, and how they got paid off for it. Now, to get the system going again, we need banks to reveal their liabilities -- to put this stuff back on the balance sheets.

It will be interesting to watch that fight.

Lastly, the reference to Japan is intended to scare. Japan's real estate bubble collapsed in the '80s -- more than 20 years ago. I don't think it will take 20 years for our real estate to recover, but there is a precedent.

As for recession, I guess we'll find out this year how big the pull is from India and China.