Why we need to retire at sixty

Ten years ago there was talk of the boomers working into their seventies. The "me generation" was said to be "young at heart".

Then reality set in. Contrary to popular belief, brain decay is not a late life disorder. It starts in our twenties ....

This Is Your Faulty Brain, On a Microchip - Memory forever - Gizmodo

... Starting in your 20s—not old age—behavioral evidence suggests that you enter a linear cascade of general cognitive decline....

This decline is notably seen in tasks that are highly mentally demanding, like speed of processing (how quickly you handle incoming information), attention, working memory (how well you manipulate and keep information active in your mind), and, of course, long term memory.

In real life, these effects are seen in everything from how long it takes to learn a new skill to how quickly you can recall a factoid....

The Gizmodo article, clearly written by a young chap, imagines we'll outsource our recall and declining cognition to an onboard chip (vs., say Google). Sure.

While we're waiting to be chipped, however, knowledge work is becoming ever more demanding - and non-knowledge work doesn't pay too well (unless you're CEO, then non-knowledge work can pay very well).

In the post-modern world, unless we can bend that decay curve (hello? dementia meds?) many of us will have a hard time doing competitive knowledge work into our 60s - much less our 70s. Bagging groceries yes - genomic engineering not so much.

That could be a bit of an economics problem.

We really should be spending more money on trying to bend that curve. We need my generation to earn money until we take our dirt bath.

Why geek genes win

How is that that many of my fellow homely geeks are happily married to women so much more attractive than we are?

Geek genes (yes, we are "effeminate" no matter how many mountains we might climb)turn out to become desirable in high tech civilizations. Since geeks make tech, geek genes thereby support and create the environments that make more geek genes. Talk about the selfish gene ...

The battle of the sexes: Face off | The Economist

... Mating preferences, too, vary with a society’s level of economic development. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Ben Jones and Lisa DeBruine of Aberdeen University, in Scotland, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine, themselves a married couple, examined what might be called the Deianira paradox. Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess—his jealous wife, Deianira, accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful. Deianira’s predicament is a woman’s ultimate dilemma. In a man, the craggy physical characteristics associated with masculinity often indicate a strong immune system and thus a likelihood of his producing healthier offspring than his softer-featured confrères will. But such men are also more promiscuous and do not care as much about long-term relationships, leaving women to raise their kids alone.

Nowadays, sound parenting is often more important to the viability of a man’s offspring than Herculean strength. That, some researchers suspect, may be changing the physical traits that women look for in a mate, at least in some societies. A study carried out in 2004, for example, discovered that women in rural Jamaica found manly types more desirable than did women in Britain, which led to questions about whether those preferences were arbitrary or whether women in different parts of the world might be adapting to circumstances that place different emphasis on manliness in the competitive calculus.

Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine therefore looked to see if there is an inverse relationship between women’s preference for masculine features and national health. Sure enough, they found one. In environments where disease is rampant and the child-mortality rate is high, women prefer masculine men. In places like America and Britain, where knowing how to analyse health-care plans is more important than fighting off infection, effeminate men are just as competitive...

... Neither wealth nor mating pattern had much impact on women’s preferences for manly men. Disease rates, by contrast, seemed to be directly related to how they went about choosing a mate—the healthier the society, the less women valued masculinity. Hygiene and wimps, it seems, go hand in hand....

So non-geeks really do need to destroy civilization. This explains the GOP.

Health insurance companies: only the demonic survive

Under the current system of incentives, only demonic health insurance companies can prosper…

Demons And Demonization - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

The usual suspects have been attacking Obama for “demonizing” insurance companies; but saying that people do terrible things isn’t demonization if they do, in fact, do terrible things.

And health insurers do, because they have huge financial incentives to act in an inhumane way — most obviously, by revoking coverage when people get sick, using whatever rationale they can devise.

Read this report by Murray Waas on Assurant Health (previously called Fortis), which used a computer algorithm to identify every client with HIV, then systematically revoked coverage on the flimsiest of grounds — and appears to have systematically hidden any paper trail showing how it made its decisions…

…  the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of rescissions, not just at Assurant but across the board, are, in fact, without justification…

… And to repeat what I and other have repeatedly explained, you need the whole package to make this work. You can’t end discrimination based on medical history unless you require that health as well as sick people have insurance, to broaden the risk pool. And you can’t mandate coverage unless you provide aid to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it.

Right now, we have a system that creates huge incentives for bad, one might say demonic, behavior: Assurant made $150 million by revoking coverage, almost always without cause…

In this system of incentives and a competitive marketplace, a virtuous corporation will lose out to one that follows the incentives. The virtuous corporation must either abandon virtue or die. Soon, only the demonic survive.

The same incentives, of course, apply in education. If a provider is judged by educational outcomes, the most successful strategy is to use “recission” to get rid of low performing students. Only the demonic survive.

We need to change the system.

Incidentally, it’s typical that the very first (asinine) comment on Krugman’s post is by someone who didn’t read the second to last paragraph. Eliminating patient discrimination while allowing patient choice on coverage timing is a recipe for bankrupting insurance companies. At that point,the patients are demonic.

We need the entire package.

Texan textbooks: Hallucinations that may backfire

Another reason why friends don't let friends live in Texas ...

Editorial - Rewriting History in Texas - NYTimes.com

... The Texas Board of Education, notorious for its past efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools, has now moved to revise the social studies curriculum to portray conservative ideas and movements in a more positive light and emphasize the role of Christianity in the nation’s founding.

Clearly a loss for Reason in Texas, but, really, there wasn't much to lose. Publishers have been anticipating this, textbooks are being designed so that Texas-specific editions can be inexpensively created.

Even if the these books were widely read though, the consequences may be unexpected. I have some personal experience to share on this.

I grew up in a theocratic state. My public school history book was written by the Catholic church. I wish I'd stolen a copy; it may be the only book written in modern times praising the Children's Crusade as a noble cause.

How did we react to these books? Most of the students paid no attention to history at all, but the smarter students got angry. Whatever the impact of propaganda on individual students, the theocratic state shortly self-destructed. Within 10 years Quebec's Quiet Revolution swept the church away.

Farther afield, the communist propaganda of 1960s China laid the foundations for the most rabidly capitalistic state in modern history.

Who knows? Perhaps the 2010 Texas board of education is laying the foundations for an Enlightenment 2.0 Texas of 2025.

Climate - How will history judge the Wall Street Journal?

When the WSJ iPhone app provided free access to the WSJ, I tried reading it. Alas, it was already the post-Murdoch era. The raving madness of the editorial pages had begun to infect the rest of the newspaper. I gave up after a few months. Now, even friends of mine who have been longtime WSJ readers are also losing interest.

The WSJ has a lot of tribal power however. It will last at least another twenty years. Perhaps long enough that this will matter ...

Breaking the Climate Debate Logjam: Scientific American

... The Wall Street Journal leads the campaign against climate science, writing editorials charging that scientists are engaged in a massive conspiracy. I have made repeated invitations to the Journal editors to meet with climate scientists publicly for an open discussion or debate, but all have been rebuffed...

When the WSJ closes up, will their climate change dismissal and denial be seen as the fatal turning point? The moment at which tribal ideology made them worse than irrelevant?

I'll put a reminder in my Google Calendar to update this post fifteen years from now.

Political reform: Let's license legislators

Americans are grumpy. It's been a bleak decade, and the next one doesn't look too promising. Our politicians are going to have to work through the end of American exceptionalism, the beginning of the end of oil, the age of mass disability, the challenge of CO2 management, the rise of China and India, the Fall of North Korea, nukes galore, the ghost of Malthus and sentient machines.

Just kidding about the last one. Skynet is fifty years ahead and we don't survive it, so no need to worry.

America has the talent to manage these problems. Trouble is, none of the people we need are crazy enough to run for office, and voters wouldn't like 'em anyway. GOP voters would especially dislike the rationalists we need - and we Dems need a sane GOP opposition.

So how do we grow a sane government? I've thought of drafting people to serve, but it's easy to come up with too many objections. I really can't come up with a great alternative to elections, though I still like the idea of taxing campaign related activities at 50% to enable publicly funded campaigns.

So what can we do to improve the system we have now? Let's license legislators. After all, we license lawyers, accountants, physicians, barbers, and realtors -- why not legislators?

It's not hard to image an appropriate curriculum -- starting with courses and evaluation on basic probability, logic 101, business operations, economics, history of science, history, and comparative theology. An intensive 12 month program should do it for most legislators. Grading could be pass-fail -- I'm fine with that.

Legislators would, like physicians, redo their board exams every five years.

Clearly we'd need to compromise on certain topics. For this group there's no problem with "teaching the controversy". By all means, give biologists and Creationists equal time to discuss natural selection. We can balance climate scientists with hobbyists and eccentrics. Different religions can argue for their own creation myths; and our exam questions can cover both scientific and Hindu explanations of biological diversity.

As is the common custom we'll grandfather in current politicians. Maybe we'll even have an interim time when licensure is only needed for those seeking public financing. Eventually though, all legislators will be licensed.

Or we can just stay as we are and die in the cold and the dark. We always have a choice.

See also:

• American crisis – imagining a way out
• Gordon's Notes: The publicly traded politician - and other reform proposals
• Campaign Finance Reform: Voluntary Mandated Sharing (1999)

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France has a carbon tax

Who knew? France now has a carbon tax:

The year it didn't happen - Winnipeg Free Press - Gwynne Dyer

... France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people's patterns of energy use. The tax is US$24 per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years...

Go France!

This is the first time I can remember France leading on anything. It certainly didn't get much coverage in the US, though that's hardly surprising. What could be less popular in America than global warming + taxes + France?

Happily, Gwynne Dyer posts his article notices on Twitter (see also) so I look forward to hearing more news that's forbidden in America.
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Was 10.3 the best version of OS X?

I'm just about done reorganizing the home network after shutting down my XP server and moving accounts to the newest iMac.

It's been a fairly painful process, due to hardware issues with the iMac (now resolved) and ongoing issues with 10.6 (permissions, firewire peripherals). Now that I've moved all the shares to the 10.6 machine things are looking a bit better.

Today I finished up by reorganizing an old iBook running 10. That old machine is the least troublesome device we own; it reminded me what a pleasure it was to run the later versions of OS X 10.3. It was PPC only of course, and it didn't have all the features of later versions, but it was a high quality product. I think Avie Tevanian still ran Apple's development program back then. Earlier versions of OS X had been understandably raw, but by 10.3 it just worked.

It's never been as good since. The OS offers far more power, but it causes me far more pain.

Why is that?

My working theory is that Apple lost some key engineers around 2003-2005, and they moved their very best people to the iPhoneOS around 2005. Of course many resources were also consumed by the Intel migration.

With all their billions, Apple doesn't have enough of the people they need to make OS X 10.6 as robust as 10.3. That's an interesting story.

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Changing habits: How do I know what I don't know?

Cognitive error: defining the possible. Accepting the rules. Failing to question. how many things in my life are like my shoelaces? How can I uncover them?

It is costly to change habits. It requires cognitive work, the transition time has an efficiency cost, and there's a risk the final result will be a regression. In the past I changed technology habits too quickly, and suffered through abandoned solutions.

On the other hand, there's my shoelace tying. For forty years I unwittingly tied granny knots. Then I read a NYT essay on shoelace tying, rear view mirrors, and habits. It wasn't hard to change my shoe lace tying, I had only to reverse the sequence of the first knot to produce reliable square knots. From the same article I've changed how I set my rear view mirrors (I think I had changed back in the 90s however, and then forgot and went back to old habits!).

Similarly I've changed how I tie up cords and cables, looping them into a figure-eight on my fingers. That took a while to learn, but now it's very fast and it's made my life much neater.

I used to open bananas from the top. An article suggested that the bottom worked better (allegedly chimps do it that way). I agree.

In each case it never occurred that there was a better way to do things. That's not true in the computing world. There's a geek fetish for finding ways to work more effectively on a computer - and I frequently find and communicate lessons learned there. My Voice Memos.app post is a recent example. In theory sites like Lifehacker and 42 folders should be a source of these kinds of ideas, but they have too much noise to be useful (no noise, no traffic - tyranny of the market).

So how can I know what I don't know? How can I identify my longstanding assumptions that are flat out wrong -- like the assumption that all shoe laces came loose? How do I test my reasoning and look for unquestioned habits and assumptions?

What else am I missing?

Update: I asked Google: "How do I spot my own blind spots?" and got:

• Amazon.com: Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things ...
• whatsmyblindspot.com
• Blind Spots In Personal Growth (This was the best essay of this set.)

I also did restore my LifeHacker feed, even though the noise level is too high.

Tech churn 2010: How do you share a family file?

Twenty years ago we knew how to share files on a Mac. You created users and groups. When you accessed a share you entered a username and password. You could save a shortcut to the desktop and MacOS would store the credentials.Things weren't that much harder with Windows 95 a few years later.

That was then. In the bright shiny world of 1990's tomorrow a share/permissions bug in the combination of 10.6 + 10.5 + wireless networking put 45,000 zero length files with numerically iterating names in our "parents only" shared folder.

It's not the first time I've run into architectural issues with OS X's post-obsolete permissions framework; although 10.6 is exceptionally bad things have been more or less downhill since 10.3.Back at the corporation we have Microsoft SharePoint - or whatever it's called now. Microsoft keeps rebranding it to hide the bad news. SharePoint makes OS X 2010 look relatively benign.

I don't know how well things work with home Windows 7 network shares. I suspect it's better than OS X, but I don't think the Windows home file share appliance market is doing well.

I'm getting that old King Canute and the unstoppable tide feeling. I'm using something that's completely broken, but the ether isn't filled with the screams of fellow geeks. The path I'm on has clearly been abandoned; the days of being able to share files with one's wife, but not the kids, on a home machine have passed.

Unfortunately, there's no clear alternative. We're in tech churn -- the turbulent white water between technology transitions. We could do all our home file sharing using Google Docs, but, frankly, gDrive sucks and backup is a pain. We could use a drive hanging off the Time Capsule perhaps, but I doubt that's much better and, ironically, you can't easily back up a drive hanging off a Time Capsule. We could use MobileMe, but ... sigh. I could buy a Windows machine to use as an SMB share, but that's a maintenance pain. Everything I read about OS X Server tells me not to go there.

Maybe Apple will deliver a home file share appliance this year with integrated backup. I'm not holding my breath though.The bottom line is that there's no good solution for home-based group file sharing in 2010 on OS X, and probably not any platform. It's a tech regression - we're stuck until something better emerges. That will probably take years.

Vanguard - Adobe Reader required to access tax forms

Once upon a time Vanguard provided documents and tax forms ask PDF files. You could view them in any PDF reader, including Apple's built in product. There was no need to infest a Mac with Adobe's thrice-cursed bug infested reader and it's malign updater.

Now Adobe Reader is obligatory. If you access Vanguard without Reader installed you download the markup for their 'servlet' file.

Vanguard doesn't mail out tax forms any more. This is how you're supposed to get them.

I've been a Vanguard customer for a long time. I liked them when Bogle was in power and stayed after he was booted out. Now I'm looking for a different place to park our money.

Smart move Vanguard.

Anyone know a good mutual fund company?

Minneapolis St Paul bicycle maps: Google and More

After a long stream of disappointing Google news, it's a relief to learn that they've added a map layer for bicycle directions (maps.google.com/biking). A commute by bike announcement references a user map I didn't know about - James Nordgaard's Twin Cities bike map. (I hadn't visited the map gadgets page for a while, it's worth a look.)

Google also offers a "biking directions gadget" that can be embedded in a web page.

Independently, the MSP Cyclopath.org GeoWiki has been developing very nicely over the past year and now has excellent coverage. I'm hopeful Google will be able to harvest that work even as the GeoWiki benefits from the Google maps.

I've long said that if you had only one question to ask about a community to live in, you should ask about the quality of the local bicycle paths. Minneapolis St. Paul does very well with that question.

Now we need to work on a map that shows what bicycle paths are suitable for inline skating!

See also: Google Maps ‘Bike There’ | Submit your bike data to Google.

PS. I’ve had to repost this several times, the Blogger in Draft editor bugs struck again. I think I’ve repaired it this time.

Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0

Google, and Buzz, are flailing. Facebook is evil. Twitter is annoyingly limited [1].

We need to reimagine focalcast realtime communication [1].

As a first pass we can think of a realtime communication message channel as having two key properties: Audience and (primary) Purpose.

Audience is the set of permitted subscribers. Example: “Family” or “Public”.

Purpose is a single sentence definition of what the the channel is used for. Example: “Location sharing” or “Political opinions” or “Mate attraction”.

The resemblance of Audience and Purpose to century old definitions of printed media marketing is not accidental.

To be truly useful Buzz or Twitter 2.0 need to allow any message (not length limited) to be characterized by Audience and Purpose [2]. We can imagine these as two metadata elements [3] represented in a user interface as “drop down” or select boxes.

On the client side users subscribe to a channel defined by Author and Purpose for which they have access rights (Audience).

Since some Audience-Purpose pairs are far more common than others (“Location sharing”+”Family” or “Location sharing”+”Mate attraction”) combining these in a user interface would increase usability.

A single “identity” or “account” should own the definitions of Audience and Purpose, though it may be useful to associate Audience-Purpose pairs with a “persona” [4]

When I see a solution emerging that uses open data standards without data lock (Buzz API?) and that supports Audience and Purpose in a useable way, I’ll know it’s time for me to fully engage. Until then, I’m just playing.

[1] Geezers will remember email lists as the original focalcast medium. Since list communication was not realtime messages resembled postal letters; they often resembled exchanged essays. Twitter’s accidental length limit (determined by the quirks of the text (SMS) message hack) makes Twitter exchanges either staccato status updates or metadata pointing to discussions held elsewhere. Neither realtime length limited Twitter nor slowtime unlimited length email are adequate focalcast communication technologies.

[2] A third attribute of “archive” would cause the communication to become the equivalent of a blog post, but that’s a nice-to-have. Author is an implied attribute; it’s used by subscribers.

[3] Ontology strictly optional, though many will emerge.

[4] As of a few weeks ago I thought that persona management was a key component of Buzz/Twitter 2.0, but now I think the combination of Audience/Purpose pairs makes persona management less critical. One could handle other persona issues through separate accounts (identities).

See also

• The Buzz profile problem- I am Legion
• Why Twitter
• My latest take on Twitter
• Google's latest inadequate Buzz patch - Profile deletion
• How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader
• I am 113810027503326386174. And 578762461. At least
• The best about Twitter essay
• What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux-
• Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it
• Explaining twitter, facebook and myspace to gomer geeks
• Facebook has the eBay disease - the Farmville story
• Responding to Facebook’s lions- Stop friends using the apps

Book Review: Three Steps to Yes - Sales for Poets

My Amazon review on Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way (9780609807194) by Gene Bedell:

Part way through his short and readable book I decided Gene Bedell was just the sort of cheerfully cynical sales gunner I've been looking to learn from - albeit not to imitate. That was when he wrote of meeting his Prospect's "personal needs" by "arranging for him to make the keynote speech at an important industry meeting".

Or, you could, you know, slip your Prospect a thousand dollar bill. It's just a matter of degree.

By the time I was done though, Bedell had persuaded me that he's not nearly as amoral as I first thought. Yeah, he really has to win -- but he likes his Prospects to win as well. Including the Prospects reading his book.

Amoral gunner or admirable entrepreneur, or maybe a bit of both, he's written the sales book for me. In Bedell's words I'm a Poet, I ain't got a sales gene in my body. I'm so bad my specialty is covert persuasion, by which my ideas and proposals are delivered by indirect and untraceable paths.

After reading Bedell's "Sales for Poets" book though, I can see about a dozen ways to change what I do. Even if I can't execute on all 21 of his key recommendations at once, I can surely double my persuasiveness by just getting to average on 3-4 of 'em. I intend to work on a different 3-4 each month over the next year.

I wouldn't have wanted to read this book 10 years ago, but if I had my life would have been different (not necessarily better of course, but certainly different). It's a powerful paeon to persuasion, and, as the title suggests, a good complement to the classic book on negotiation "Getting to Yes".

Google translate 2010 - a marker

This is the Feb 2010 Google Translate output from a Chinese language original ...

天涯周立波

... Perpetual motion machine needs rotor, the rotor is Zhao Benshan and Guo Degang. Zhou Libo positioning themselves with the middle-class waiter, while a decorated themselves with the middle class, followed by a run did not forget about Zhao Benshan. Said Zhao Benshan services for farmers, location of China's rural areas. With that, make up an "In fact, I always have great respect for Old Zhao" and then express their hair a period of "cultural pluralism", the Old Zhao has also stepped on, their body position also climbed up. The results we all know that Old Zhao's fans will feel that "feelings were seriously damaged," the rotor to turn up...

Some of it can be understood, other bits read like receptive aphasia word salad. Amusing, but not terribly informative.

I'm keeping this example as a baseline for the translation results of 2011.

Update 3/21/2010: A NYT OpEd by a translator makes light of Google's efforts.

... Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked....

The approach seems to work well for English/French, but it fails miserably for English/Chinese. The sentences translated from Chinese seem individually meaningful, but the paragraphs are nonsensical.

The critic sounds frightened to me -- and he should be. Google translator works quite well for similar languages. On the other hand, they have another great leap to take if they're going to bridge the Chinese to English gulf.

See also: Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool - NYTimes.com.
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