I really did try to get this out last week, Livia, really I did. But I didn’t, and now this post has become bloated in size just like all of the others. *sigh*
I didn’t know how to categorize this first link, so I’ll just let it stand alone above the cut.
- Jens Galschiot’s Survival of the Fattest
There’s an inscription: “I’m sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”
World
- How the US can help the greens in Iran (FP)
- Afghanistan Metrics: Make sure you’re measuring what you need to measure, not just what you think you need to measure. (FP, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
“Any input metric.” Megadittoes. This was another thing that used to drive me nuts in Iraq, listening to Americans boast about money spent, projects initiated, patrols conducted, and such. “These indicators tell us what we are doing, but not the effect we are having.” Rather, he advocates, look at outcomes, and especially the effect on the population. How to measure those will be the subject of our next installment on this insightful essay.
- Advanced Persistent Threats: More on the Google hacking case. (Wired)
“The scope of this is much larger than anybody has every conveyed,” says Kevin Mandia, CEO and president of Virginia-based computer security and forensic firm Mandiant. “There [are] not 50 companies compromised. There are thousands of companies compromised. Actively, right now.”
- China’s Military and Cyberwarfare (Fallows)
- The moderate muslims are winning. (Zakaria)
- Mullah Baradar, second-in-command of the Taliban, captured. Great! (economist)
The development suggests a serious blow has been struck against the Afghan insurgents. It may also indicate a shift in co-operation between American and Pakistani intelligence services, perhaps reflecting a change in policy by the government in Islamabad.
- Mullah Baradar, second-in-command of the Taliban, captured. Great? (NYT)
“He was the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations,” said Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the government-led reconciliation process in the city of Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years.
- Who is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar? (FT)
- Inside the hunt for IED’s in Afghanistan (GlobalPost)
- Inside Somalia. 19 years. Still hurting. (GlobalPost)
US Policy and Politics
- Some statistics on teaching effectiveness and pay
- A Chinese take on the Quadrennial Defense Review
Several years ago, I met with the Deputy Director of the Policy Planning staff of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I asked him what he was working on — and what China’s grand strategy was.
His reply: “We are trying to figure out how to keep you Americans distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.”
It’s pretty memorable when one can joke and be truthful at the same time.
- Innovating education reform (Time)
- Wall St. elders recognize follies of the youth. (NYT)
While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.
Mr. Volcker, 82, signed up the support of nearly a dozen peers whose average age is north of 70 and whose pedigrees on Wall Street and in banking are impeccable.
- State capitals (Harrisburg) trying to declare bankruptcy is probably not a good thing
- The individual coverage health insurance market is unsustainable
Anthem Blue Cross of California announced that its individual market premiums would rise by as much as 39 percent in the coming months.
…
Anthem of Connecticut requested an increase of 24 percent last year, which was rejected by the state. Anthem in Maine had an 18.5-percent premium increase rejected by the state last year as being “excessive and unfairly discriminatory” – but is now requesting a 23-percent increase this year. In 2009, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan requested approval for premium increases of 56 percent for plans sold on the individual market. Regency Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon requested a 20-percent premium increase. UnitedHealth, Tufts, and Blue Cross requested 13- to 16-percent rate increases in Rhode Island. And rates for some individual health plans in Washington increased by up to 40 percent until
Washington State imposed stiffer premium regulations. - What the $787b stimulus bill really bought the US. (Klein)
One point, in particular, kept coming up: If you divide the bill’s spending by the bill’s job creation, it doesn’t look that good. “What is $800 Billion divided by 2.5 Million jobs?” Wrote one reader. “I think it’s $320,000 per job! Is that a good deal for me, the buyer/taxpayer?”
That would be a very bad deal for you, the buyer/taxpayer. But it’s also not the deal you got. The stimulus was meant to create jobs. But it was not a job-creation bill. For instance: Unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits are very important forms of relief for the suddenly unemployed, and they stimulate the economy because the unemployed have more money to spend, and that even creates some jobs. But the correct evaluation is not how many jobs are created by unemployment insurance, but what sort of relief that insurance provides to the unemployed and what sort of stimulus it delivers to the economy.
- Stop with the “selling insurance across state lines will solve all our problems” rhetoric (Klein)
Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state’s regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn’t give the insurers the freedom they want, it’ll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.
This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, which is regulated in accordance with conservative wishes. In 1980, Bill Janklow, the governor of South Dakota, made a deal with Citibank: If Citibank would move its credit card business to South Dakota, the governor would literally let Citibank write South Dakota’s credit card regulations. You can read Janklow’s recollections of the pact here.
- The stimulus: Is it working? (NYT)
Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs.
- Feds want warrantless tracking of cell phones.
- Things that the US government needs to do by April: (CGG)
1. Jobs bill
2. Deficit Reduction Commission
3. Already expired:
1. Estate Tax, currently repealed, but jumping to 2001 law in 2011
2. 71 other expired tax provisions, including the R&D tax credit.
4. About to expire:
1. Highway authorization
2. flood insurance
3. postponement of the 21% cut in Medicare physician reimbursement rates
5. Defense supplemental to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
6. Budget resolution
7. Confirm non-controversial judges and other presidential appointees on “hold” for reasons having nothing to do with their qualifications. - The “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” Report from the DOJ is out. (289 pg PDF) James Fallows followup.
My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey’s Hiroshima was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The OPR report is essentially this era’s Hiroshima. As Hersey’s book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name — “our” meaning the citizens of the United States.
If you want to argue that “whatever” happened in the “war on terror” was necessary because of the magnitude and novelty of the threat, then you had better be willing to face what the “whatever” entailed. Which is what this report brings out. And if you believe — as I do, and have argued through the years — that what happened included excessive, abusive, lawless, immoral, and self-defeating acts done wrongly in the name of American “security,” then this is a basic text as well.
Society
- Getting a PhD in the humanities is not all that its cracked up to be.
- Interesting: “Gay” polls better than “Homosexual” (cbs)
- Plagiarism? Or re-Mixing?
- A confidential informant gone wrong (NPR)
- 10 ideas from the TED conference (CNN)
- The impacts of Title IX
- Heroin moves to middle America (LATimes)
- Suburban homelessness rises
- Barbie: Computer engineer?
This is actually wonderful. Barbie’s had 124 careers since 1959, ranging from Stewardess to Paratrooper. Today she gets her 125th: computer engineer. You can tell she’s smart ’cause she’s got glasses, and reads nothing but binary.
- The new (jobs market) normal
The “new normal” for employment doesn’t work for anyone except employers and career coaches who sell platitudes about how the recession is an opportunity for resourceful people, says CIO.com’s careers editor Meridith Levinson. That’s why they both want us to accept depressed salaries and bigger workloads as the new status quo.
- A Profile of Roger Ebert
- How something gets on the menu of McDonald’s
It turns out there’s a chef at the beginning of that pipeline — a cook who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and who once ran the gracious kitchens at the Four Seasons Resort and Club outside Dallas. The Southwest Salad, the Angus burgers, the Snack Wrap — they all emerged from the food laboratory of Daniel Coudreaut, 44, whose business card reads DIRECTOR OF CULINARY INNOVATION, MENU MANAGEMENT but who likes to go by Chef Dan.
- The Food Environment Atlas (USDA, interactive) (Blog post)
- Some mindblowing income statistics of the wealthy (WSJ)
To make the top 400, a taxpayer had to have income of more than $138.8 million. As a group, the top 400 reported $137.9 billion in income, and paid $22.9 billion in federal income taxes.
…
The 400 best-off taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 16.6%, lower than in any year since the IRS began making the reports in 1992. - On the other side of the income spectrum… (Yglesias)
That means that the top 400 households together earned $138 billion in 2007. By contrast, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey the 24 million households who comprise the bottom fifth of the income distribution together hauled in about $247 billion.
- Unemployment rate for various education levels
- Who uses a payphone? (NYT)
- Gallup poll interactive maps
- How the current joblessness will impact America’s future
- Michelle Obama vs Childhood Obesity. Let’s Move campaign website
- NYC, on the cutting edge of public dietary health. Or invasive government control of what you eat. First fat, now salt.
- The implications of the proliferation of viral war footage.
In the viral video realm, amateur Iraq war footage ranks just behind pornography, celebrities’ drunken exploits, and shark attacks. Do these videos represent what Sontag called our “right to view,” or are they a porn medium made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?
Science and Technology
- The final space shuttle launch (Endeavour)
- Geomapping Facebook networks
- New hospital gowns: improving patients’ dignity, if even by a notch or two.
- Robots in action on the manufacturing floor. (Videos)
- CO2 – bad for global warming AND for ocean acidification (TNR)
- Why does time seem to get faster as you get older? (npr)
Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory.
- Love, sex, and critical thinking / creativity (SciAm)
- The difference between adult and baby brain wirings
“Children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens,” writes Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, a tour through the recent findings of cognitive science about the minds of young children. For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.
- Why the industrial revolution was British
Olympics
- Figure skating routines: from concept to reality
- Don’t know your 1260 Double McTwist from your Frontside 540 Stalefish mute grab? Neither do I. Snowboard Halfpipe Trick List (Videos)
- Shen/Zhao was the fairy tale, but the Pang/Tong free skate was absolutely gorgeous.
Photos and Fun
- New aerial photographs of 9/11 (NPR)
- National Wildlife Foundation Photo Contest
- Know your Sesame Streeters
- Obama forced to feign interest in mundane things (photos, humor)
- Green screens are _everywhere_
- Apologize: Founding Fathers remix.
- Can’t be with a loved one? Send a Hug-E-Gram!
- Women, like men, age like a fine wine. Until they hit 39. (okcupid)
The graph below shows a similar trend, until a poignant drop at the end.
Either something very sad happens to a woman at 40, or something incredibly awesome happens at 39. Hard to tell. And I also want to say, guys, that just because a woman is older, she’s not necessarily on the fast-track to marriage:
Tags: economy, international, linkdump, politics, science, society, STS, world