Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

how to defraud the U.S. Census

From the Department of Pre-crime, a guy the Trump administration might appoint to run the 2020 Census might try to cook the books. It seems a little unfair to accuse someone of a crime they haven’t even had an opportunity to consider committing yet, but I found it interesting to consider how it could be done. This sort of thing definitely happens in some countries, for example to perpetuate minority rule in spite of demographic change.

Each census starts with a simple questionnaire sent to every household. In 1970 and 1980, over 75% of those queried sent back responses. In 2010 that figure dropped to 63.5%, and in 2020, with distrust of government at an all-time high and increasing fears of data breach, the response rate will likely be significantly worse—current estimates range from 55% to 60%. To identify the non-respondents—at least 40% of Americans—the Census Bureau will have to exert considerable energy.

Thomas Brunell will determine how vigorously to track down these unidentified people in diverse locations. In rural areas that commonly vote Republican, he could direct workers to scour the trailer parks, while in urban Democratic strongholds, he could order census takers to visit non-responding households only during working hours. He could spend his advertising budget wisely in some places and less so in others. He could dispatch non-Spanish-speaking personnel into Hispanic neighborhoods. He could feed fears of deportation in immigrant communities. He could use credit rating companies to locate non-respondents, although many of the poor will never appear on such registries.

There is a simpler route Brunell could take. He might choose to do little, a tool almost as effective as the nefarious schemes detailed above. So far, the Census Bureau’s budget has been held to its 2010 level, despite a significant increase in the population and the expected rise in the percentage of those who do not respond to the initial questionnaire. Without greater resources and dedicated will, the Census Bureau could leave tens of millions of Americans uncounted. The GAO has warned that the 2020 Census is at “high risk of failure,” but requests to add funds have not yet been granted by Congress. New coping technologies are being introduced, yet trial runs have been curtailed due to lack of financing. Plans to test a Spanish-language questionnaire have also lapsed. Such constraints raise the stakes. When resources are limited, how to allocate those resources becomes paramount.

 

Trump and the Apocalypse

I was joking last week that in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Trump might be trying to hasten the Apocalypse. I doubt Trump believes in the biblical Apocalypse, and for the record neither do I, but this Alternet author provides a “shocking” reminder that many of his supporters do. This shouldn’t be so shocking, when Christianity is the prevalent religion in the country, and a good chunk of the Bible is literally about the end times and judgment day. Jesus spent a good chunk of his time talking about them, and his followers expected them to happen immediately upon his death.  Jewish and Muslim traditions include some form of it too. So I am not saying you can’t be religious without believing in the Apocalypse, but if you do that you are choosing not to take your holy books literally, or to take some parts literally and others not. Or, if you are religious but this topic is a surprise to you, then you aren’t really educated about the typical and historical beliefs of members of your own religion. So make no mistake, there are people out there for whom this is the most important thing and the main thing they spend their time thinking about, and they are going to view the world differently than those of us who do not believe in these things. And there are a lot of them out there.

visualizing tunnel progress

Metro Los Angeles has put together kind of a nice graphic to communicate the status of a tunnel construction project. It’s cartoonish, and yet contains a surprisingly large amount of scientific and engineering information.

 

ignorance and common sense

You would think ignorance and common sense would be opposites. But the term “common sense” has been in fact ruined because of its adoption by ignorant people. I’m not going to name names, but I have one particular U.S. President and political party in mind. Having common sense has come to be defined as believing one’s opinion is the truth. If you believe your opinion is the truth, you not only don’t know the limits of your knowledge, you can take willful steps to avoid acquiring knowledge, and you are completely impervious to evidence or logic others might attempt to share with you. Here are some illuminating quotes from a 2016 Washington Post article somewhat sadly titled Donald Trump doesn’t read much. Being president probably wouldn’t change that.

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time…’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

What is that old saying – he who knows not he knows not, he is a fucking idiot with control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Hopefully his age, propensity for temper tantrums, and fast food habit will lead to him having a stroke and dropping dead relatively soon.

If the Secret Service is reading this, yes I hope he dies soon of natural causes, no I wouldn’t pull the trigger myself, but I would be happy to bring the next silver-plated platter of Big Macs.

On the lighter side, Trump is not the first President with a supposed Big Mac habit. Maybe he will join Bill Clinton’s vegan club. No word yet on whether Hillary has come up with a vegan cookie recipe.

Article V

I think most Americans have a basic understanding that the Constitution can be amended, but that this is hard to do and therefore is not done very often. We treat our Constitution almost as a sacred text and that is one reason that even though our country is young compared to many others, its form of government has persisted in its current form longer than almost any other (I want to say longer than any other, but someone more knowledgeable than me could probably prove me wrong.)

Anyway, there is another way amendments can happen without the consent of Congress, which is for legislatures in two thirds of the states to force a constitutional convention. Sure, we all read about that when we studied the Colonial period in elementary school, right? I can actually walk over to Independence Hall on my lunch break any time I want and see where that all happened.

It turns out that as of now, December 2017, 28 U.S. state legislatures have voted to call a constitutional convention. 34 states would represent the two-thirds required. This could be a good thing. For example, a constitutional convention could clarify the definition of a “person” and get us the clean elections we so deserve. But that is not what is behind this. What is behind this is people who want to gut the federal government’s ability to tax, provide benefits, regulate interstate commerce, and protect the environment. This could actually be the beginning of the end of the republic.

liquid metal

The “liquid metal” from Terminator 2 is finally here, although it is not trying to kill us (yet). Still, if they start making autonomous drones out of this stuff…

“If you look at conventional aircraft technology, you have so many moving parts,” says Othmane Benafan, an engineer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Those moving parts are essential—they are how pilots steer, reduce turbulence, take off, land, and basically do everything else besides glide aimlessly. But the actuators, cables, motors, lubricant, hydraulic gear, and other bits needed move those parts around take up weight and space—precious resources on any aircraft.

The alternative is to move those wing parts using shapeshifting metals. Or, as they’re known to engineers, shape memory alloys. “Parts made from shape memory alloys are typically 10 to 20 percent the size and weight of a conventional part,” says Jim Mabe, a shape memory alloy guru at Boeing. For an industry that spent $133 billion on fuel last year, anything smaller and lighter is exciting news.

Shape memory alloys are essentially reversible Shrinky Dinks. When heated to certain temperatures, they shrink, twist, and bend. Cool them off, and they return to their original shape. Hot, cold, hot—shape memory alloys can cycle back and forth millions of times without wearing out. All you need is the ability to generate heat or pull it from some other, already spicy hot part of the plane, like the engine.

What are the trends in ecology and evolution for 2018?

The journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution does an annual “Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global Conservation and Biological Diversity”. I can only see the abstract so here is the one sentence describing the trends:

The issues highlighted span a wide range of fields and include thiamine deficiency in wild animals, the geographic expansion of chronic wasting disease, genetic control of invasive mammal populations and the effect of culturomics on conservation science, policy and action.

I was new to the term culturomics, and thought it might have something to do with synthesizing new compounds in giant vats of yogurt. But no, according to Wikipedia it is not that kind of culture, but relates to search and synthesis algorithms for scientific articles, which does indeed seem to be a recurring theme on this blog lately.

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.[1][2] Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage.[3] The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.[4]

At that point, I just needed to figure out what a neologism was, so I looked it up in Webster’s 1913 which some people say is the most artfully written dictionary:

Ne*ol”o*gism (?), n. [Cf. F. néologisme.]

1. The introduction of new words, or the use of old words in a new sense. Mrs. Browning.

2. A new word, phrase, or expression.

3. A new doctrine; specifically, rationalism.

Mrs. Browning? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a long poem called Aurora Leigh which contains the word. And no, I wouldn’t have learned that if I had looked up neologism in the New Oxford American Dictionary.

I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education,–tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics,–brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous.

It goes on like that. Forever.

Oh okay, one more, here is the definition of flounce in Webster’s 1913:

Flounce, v. t. To deck with a flounce or flounces; as, to flounce a petticoat or a frock.

Flounce, n. [Cf. G. flaus, flausch, a tuft of wool or hair; akin to vliess, E.fleece; or perh. corrupted fr. rounce.] An ornamental appendage to the skirt of a woman’s dress, consisting of a strip gathered and sewed on by its upper edge around the skirt, and left hanging.

Flounce (?), v. i. [imp. & p. p.Flounced (flounst); p. pr. & vb. n.Flouncing(?).] [Cf. OSw. flunsa to immerge.] To throw the limbs and body one way and the other; to spring, turn, or twist with sudden effort or violence; to struggle, as a horse in mire; to flounder; to throw one’s self with a jerk or spasm, often as in displeasure.

To flutter and flounce will do nothing but batter and bruise us.

Barrow.

With his broad fins and forky tail he laves
The rising sirge, and flounces in the waves.

Addison.

“Sirge” I think is an old-timey spelling of “surge”. And if you look up “surge” in this dictionary, its usage is quite interesting and you want to go on. But that’s it for me.

 

bond ratings and climate change

Even if the U.S. federal government officially doesn’t believe in climate change, the municipal bond industry officially does believe in climate change.

In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default…

In its report, Moody’s lists six indicators it uses “to assess the exposure and overall susceptibility of U.S. states to the physical effects of climate change.” They include the share of economic activity that comes from coastal areas, hurricane and extreme-weather damage as a share of the economy, and the share of homes in a flood plain…

Bloomberg News reported in May that towns and counties were able to secure AAA ratings despite their risks of flooding and other destruction from storms, which are likely to be more frequent and intense because of climate change. If repeated storms and floods are likely to send property values — and tax revenue — sinking while spending on sea walls, storm drains or flood-resistant buildings goes up, investors say bond buyers should be warned.

the CFPB

Simon Johnson says the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has actually been doing a good job up until now of, well, protecting consumer finances.

The CFPB was established by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation to do exactly what its name implies: protect consumers in their various financial transactions. A new agency was needed because existing regulators, including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, had manifestly and repeatedly failed to protect consumers from abuses, such as deceptive and fraudulent mortgage-lending practices, some of which were at the heart of what went wrong in 2007-08.

As Elizabeth Warren (then a consumer advocate, now a US senator from Massachusetts) powerfully pointed out, there was a lot more protection for people buying toasters than for someone taking out a 25-year mortgage. Finance is complex, and a lot of devils could be, and were, hidden in the details. The CFPB was designed, above all, to bring greater transparency to consumers’ financial transactions – actually a very pro-market contribution.

And the CFPB has done exactly what Congress designed it to do. So far, the Bureau has arranged for the return of almost $12 billion to 29 million consumers. At the same time, banks are reporting record profits – on the order of $171 billion, according to the latest data. The CFPB is good for business, or at least for the straightforward, transparent business of traditional lending.

Unfortunately, all this seems likely to end as Trump has appointed someone to head the agency who is actually against the agency’s existence, not unlike his approach to the environment, housing, and education. Johnson seems to think the public will catch on to this and punish the Republicans politically when the little guy starts to get hurt by it. I don’t know, it probably depends on the timing. Nobody wants to see another financial blow-up, but if it has to happen mid-2020 seems as good a time as any.