WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Hi readers!
Last week, the more observant among you will have noticed that I let you off reading anything in the homework section. My mailbox was full of mail complaining about homework deprivation, well there was one e-mail, anyway. So... This week we make up for it by having nearly all the edition as homework.
Not only that, but for once we stray into the realms of US geopolitical analysis, sociology, psychology, cost benefit analysis, Microsoft and quantum levitation. A potpourri fit for a king! So, gird your lions (or the equivalent for my extra-terrestrial readers) and prepare to get your noses to the grindstone. (Note: more overused cliches will be available in next week's issue...)
Homework:
Any fool knows that the Chinese have bought up all the US government bonds and now own the USA. Well I've got news for you. Any fool is wrong by a very big margin. In fact the Chinese only own 8% of US bonds, according to Business Insider. Compare that with the figure for US ownership of US government bonds and it starts to come into perspective. The Social Security trust/fund owns a whopping great 19%, the US Treasury has 11.3%, US households hold 6.6%, various federal and state bodies hold a further 8.1%, and US private organizations hold another 10%.
In money terms that means that the USA owes foreigners roughly US$4.5 trillion, but it owes Americans more than twice that - US$9.8 trillion. I was interested to note that my own country, the UK, actually holds US$346.5 billion (2.4%) - that's more than US commercial banks hold. I wonder what they know that we don't!
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/21/who-owns-america-hint-its-not-china/
YouTube has an interesting little video on quantum levitation using a technique called quantum trapping. The demonstration is fascinating, and the video also explains very clearly how it works. I think, though that we will have to wait for room temperature superconductors before we can use it on trains! My fave bit of the video? The part where they hung the puck under the magnetic track, like a monorail, but without touching the rail!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&hl=en&v=VyOtIsnG71U&gl=US
The American presidential elections are coming up next year and politics are starting to hot up again on the US side of the pond. I don't have a vote (though arguably how the US votes has more effect on me that who gets into 'power' here in the UK), but like anyone with any common sense I follow what's happening. Thus it was that I found a two part article in the Washington Monthly entitled 'A geography lesson for the Tea Party' by Colin Woodard interesting in that it gave a fresh perspective on the geography of US politics.
Like everyone else I've seen the maps of the country divided into blue and red according to how people voted in the last round of elections, but the thrust of the article is that things are more sophisticated than that, and to really see what is going on you have to look at history and culture. In particular you need to look at which cultural groups originally settled each of the dozen or so geographical regions he identifies. Add to this the remarkable ability of the US regions to assimilate new immigrants into their own local culture, and you have an interesting set of different ideological components in each region.
Woodward sees the major events in US history as a set of shifting alliances between the various groupings. It's an interesting idea, and it would certainly explain much of the background to Lincoln's superb political maneuvering during the Civil War. My main problem with the piece stems from my distrust of one dimensional explanations of anything to do with politics and sociology. However, I have to admit that it certainly grabbed the political analyst streak in me, and Mr Woodard's book, from which the article is drawn, has gone on to my Amazon wish list!
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember_2011/features/
a_geography_lesson_for_the_tea032846.php?page=1
But that wasn't the only book extract I came across this week. The UK Guardian newspaper published a chunk of material from Daniel Kahneman on how what we believe and assume can blind us to what is really going on. Mr Kahneman starts with a story about trying to predict which officer cadets in the Israeli army would make good leaders on the basis of psychological observation of a group of the cadets performing a specific task.
A follow up of the results indicated that the predictions as to who would be the best leaders were no more successful than picking out candidates at random. I don't suppose that any of my readers will be surprised to hear that it didn't stop the army continuing to use the tests, or, more to the point, the psychologists from continuing to have faith in their own predictions!
But that's just by way of a starter. What Mr Kahneman is really interested in is the performance and bonuses of Wall Street traders - something which I suspect all of us take an interest in when world economies are tanking. In this case the author relates the details of how he was commissioned by a Wall Street firm to look at the histories of their traders with a view to setting the firms bonus calculations onto a firmer footing. The conclusion was, that if you looked at the performance over a number of years, that while traders might have a good year here or there, none of them outperformed the market as a whole.
Not everybody will be surprised at that, I'm sure. However, the killer discovery was that the firm that commissioned the study basically buried it, because the senior executives were so attached to the idea that 'good' traders could beat the market, that they simply couldn't believe, or act upon, the reality that the data showed. It is these overwhelming ideas that prevent us from coping with reason that Mr Kahneman calls cognitive illusions. Definitely a recommended read, and I guess that's another book to add to my wish list.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/30/daniel-kahneman-cognitive-illusion-extract
Moving away from Wall Street, I found an interesting article (well a pair of articles, actually) about Homeland Security spending in Slate magazine. Normally, government spending, especially on major projects, is subject to cost benefit analysis. Homeland Security, however, seems to be an exception to the rule. It's the one thing that doesn't have to justify the money it spends in terms of its effectiveness.
Now, though, John Mueller and Mark G Stewart have used standard cost benefit methods to try and figure out just how effective Homeland Security's spending is. The results are stunning, and perhaps give some idea of exactly why the government is so reluctant to subject the department to cost benefit analysis.
In fact, it turns out, that in order to justify the money spent, Homeland Security would have to be foiling no less that 1,667 attacks similar to the 2010 Times Square failed bombing each year. That's 32 attacks a week - more than four a day! Incidentally, the Times Square bombing was foiled by a combination of terrorist ineptitude, sharp observation by a stall holder, and prompt action by an NYC policeman. Homeland Security weren't involved. Take a look at the articles for yourself, because as someone who is not a US citizen, I'm not qualified to comment on whether this represents the efficient use of tax dollars, or not...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/09/does_the_united_
states_spend_
too_much_on_homeland_security.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/09/1667_times_
squarestyle_attacks_every_year.html
And for my last homework article, c|net is running an extended story about the way in which Microsoft killed off its Courier tablet. From what I could tell from the description, I suspect that Microsoft would have been slugging out toe-to-toe with Apple in the tablet market by now if Courier hadn't been killed off. And they would have had a good chance of winning!
Sadly Microsoft completely failed to understand the concept of the twin screen, foldable tablet, and noted that it didn't leverage Microsoft behemoths like its mail server. The result, the whole project was scrapped just when it was all coming together and the iPad was not yet out. A classic case of a failure to understand what they had. The story says almost as much about Microsoft as it does about the tablet itself. Worth a read.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-killed-its-courier-tablet/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128045-75/how-windows-8-kod-the-innovative-courier-tablet/?tag=mncol;txt
Geeks Topics:
Are you paranoid? Are they out to get you? Do you need real security for your secrets? Then I have just the house for you! Take a look at the '1001 Nights' house designed by architects A-Cero; its genesis clearly lies in the design of the Maginot Line fortifications in inter-war France. From the outside the house resembles a concrete bunker, complete with a moat. The architects clearly think that shining different colored lights on the outside will somehow make it less like a bunker. Nice try, but no cigar. Andre Maginot would have been proud of the architects - a must for those into neo-brutalist architecture!
http://www.gizmag.com/1001-nights-house-a-cero/20316/
Scanner:
Cover your ears! Fingernails on blackboards...
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/10/cover-your-ears.html?ref=hp
RIM backdoor access for Indian probers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/28/blackberry_help_indian_government_sip_data/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
6 November, 2011
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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