Free iClip from MacZot

Until July 2nd you can get iClip 3 from MacZot for free. Looks pretty neat.

William Sloane Coffin

"Whereas charity alleviates the effects of poverty, justice seeks to eliminate the causes of it. Charity is a matter of personal attribute; justice is a matter of public policy.

A person's moral character, sterling though it may be, is insufficient to serve the cause of justice, which is to challenge the status quo, to try to make what's legal more moral, to speak truth to power, and to take personal or concerted action against evil, whether in personal or systemic form."

It is not good enough to live life in the harbors of status quo, safe and uncontroversial, for justice is achieved through risk and controversy.

Wine Woot

Kirk with the great find: wine.woot.com Why not just have tech woots?

Go Bucks!

Andrew Sullivan comments on Ryan Fournier the new student body president of The Ohio State University.

Will Shortz: Puzzle Master

This is from an article in the SF Chronicle about Will Shortz and his comments on the importance of the New York Times crossword to folks.

And then there was the time Shortz got a call from a young lawyer who wanted to propose to his girlfriend through the crossword. Shortz' first reaction was that it was a preposterous idea. The New York Times crossword was an august institution, a puzzle consumed by a huge global audience. It was no place for dispensing personal favors. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized it could be "very cool." So he assigned the crossword to one of his regular creators, and coordinated with the boyfriend about when the puzzle would appear in the paper. On the agreed-upon day, the man and his girlfriend went out for brunch, and on the way, they picked up the Times, just as they always did.

At the restaurant, she opened the crossword page, as was her custom, and started doing the puzzle. He pretended to read the front page, but in reality, he was watching her. He'd only slept 15 minutes the previous night. The theme of the puzzle was "A Modest Proposal," the title of a Jonathan Swift pamphlet. "Oh look, your name's in here," she said at a certain point. "Oh, my name's in here, too," she said a few minutes later. One of the answers was THIS DIAMOND RING, a '60s hit by Gary Lewis and the Playboys; another was WILL YOU MARRY ME, the title of a Paula Abdul song. She looked up. "This puzzle," she said. "This puzzle!" The moment was right. He got down on one knee and asked for her hand. Her reply, too, was in the crossword, under the clue, "hoped for response." The answer was YES.

Shortz also comments on how upset the crossword puzzle can make people:

The most offended people ever got, though, was by a puzzle that ran on the day of the 1996 presidential election. Two of the answers were clued as "lead story in tomorrow's newspaper!" The second word was ELECTED, and the first word was seven letters. The crossword provoked something like a popular uprising. Shortz got dozens of phone calls. How dare the Times presume the winner of the election? Furious solvers called in accusing Shortz of being biased, presumptuous, wrong and worse.

The genius of the puzzle was that there were two possible answer sets. An entire section of the grid had bivalent answers. "Black Halloween animal" could be either CAT or BAT; "French 101 word" could be LUI or OUI; "provider of support, for short" could be IRA or BRA. And the answer to the clue about tomorrow's top story could be either BOB DOLE ELECTED or CLINTON ELECTED. Once the diabolical double solution was revealed, Clinton (as he recounts in the movie) made a copy and sent it to Dole, after calling him and saying, "We both won after all!"

GOOOAAAAALLL!

As World Cup fever is on the rise, Nature comments on a paper about the distribution of goals scored in a soccer match. One might think that a team has a certain probability of scoring during a game and this probability remains roughly the same throughout the game. The resulting distribution of scores would be a normal bell-curve.

However, researchers looking at thousands of games have found that the goal scoring distribution is skewed towards high scores. Using a formula for which the probability of scoring goals is increased every goal scored, the researchers matched the skewed distribution. Anecdotally this might make sense, once a team scores it gains confidence and produces one GOOOAAALLLL! after another.

Found in Stanford Daily

Post Editorial on Net Neutrality

An Washington Post editorial from yesterday makes an argument against net neutrality. It argues for the need for internet infrastructure innovation and the preemptive nature of a net neutrality law.

If you want innovation on the Internet, you need better pipes: ones that are faster, less susceptible to hackers and spammers, or smarter in ways that nobody has yet thought of. The lack of incentives for pipe innovation is more pressing than the lack of incentives to create new Web services.

You can see this imbalance in Wall Street's low valuation of Internet infrastructure firms such as Verizon (price-to-earnings ratio: 12) and its infatuation with Internet service firms such as Google (price-to-earnings ratio: 69). You can see it, too, in the fact that U.S. broadband infrastructure lags behind that of East Asia and Europe. Allowing builders of Internet infrastructure to recoup their investment by charging the Googles and Amazons for use of their network would balance the incentives for innovation more closely.

The weakest aspect of the neutrality case is that the dangers it alleges are speculative. It seems unlikely that broadband providers will degrade Web services that people want and far more likely that they will use non-neutrality to charge for upgrading services that depend on fast and reliable delivery, such as streaming high-definition video or relaying data from heart monitors. If this proves wrong, the government should step in. But it should not burden the Internet with preemptive regulation.

Convinced? I'm not sure I am.

Net Neutrality

The constant din of proponents speaking out for Net Neutrality is getting louder and louder. In essence net neutrality wants to ensure that individuals have the ability to 1) obtain access to lawful information of their choice, 2) run the applications of their choice, and 3) connect the legal devices of their choice to the network. One of the consequences is that broadband providers (telephone companies and cable companies) would not be allowed to block access to specific legal sites that they choose. This however is not the main conflict.

The main conflict is a bit more subtle. It involves providers giving better, faster access to specific sites which have formed partnerships with the providers. Why do the telecoms wish to do make better access available only to certain sites and not others? Because as high bandwidth technology such as video streams become more prevalent online, broadband providers need to meet these demands and build more infrastructure to meet future demands. The high demands on bandwidth give the broadband providers an opportunity to cut deals with specific sites to give customers better access to those specific sites. This could mean in the future that if you get internet from provider X that you will in turn have good access to video streams from website A, but slower access to website B, C, D and all of the new innovative websites E, F, and G. Instead of all websites whether old, new, rich or poor that can be accessed equally by consumers--the situation now--discrimination could occur.

The best argument against net neutrality is that broadband providers will not have as much market incentives to upgrade the current connection speeds. Consumer costs would be the only source in which companies can recoup their infrastructure developments. Opponents of net neutrality believe that there is enough broadband competition making it impossible for providers to discriminate against websites.

There is not currently enough broadband providers for ample competition in cities let alone in rural areas. The landscape of the internet might be changing unless the Senate passes net neutrality legislation. New innovative, garage companies might not become the next Google or YouTube, because established companies will be able to pay the toll for the faster lanes of the internet leaving the new companies behind.

The House has already denied net neutrality and it is up for debate in the Senate this week.

Click on the Save the Internet to see the latest news, sign the petition, and contact your Senators.

• Op-ed in WaPo
• Economist article
• Google's support
• NPR: On Point

Nog: Pack Your Lunch

One of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website is financial advice to new graduates. The story links to online calculators that can provide a lot of interesting information. The Starbucks calculator gives you the amount of money you can save by brewing coffee at home as opposed to buying from Starbucks. Other calculators determines the cost of a cigarette habit, eating out for lunch, and the difference in saving money for retirement now versus 10 years from now.

For example: if you eat a cheap $1.50 packed lunch instead of a $5 fast food meal 250 days out of a year and you put that money in an ING savings account at 4% interest over 5 years you'll have saved over $4,700.

Another example: if you invest $4,000/year at 7% interest until 2046 and you start now you'll end up with $798,540, but if you start 10 years from now you'll have $377,843. And if you start this year and you put in $5,000 you'll end up with $998,175.

Diet Coke is Good for Something

I heard the following story on NPR about dropping Mentos into Diet Coke bottles.

Shooting Diet Coke 15 feet in the air is pretty neat, but give some bored people a good idea, throw in some imagination and what you can get is out of this world.

Watch this video.

Amazing

This graph shows the % of adults 65 and older who have had all of their teeth extracted. Any guesses for which state tops the list?

California Primary Elections II

Proposition 81 is a bond measure to raise $600 million for renovation and construction of public libraries.

And on to bond measures. Bonds are clearly useful in situations when there is a one-time large capital expense to build infrastructure such as highways, school, and libraries. Since there is a one-time building of these structures with lasting benefits, bonds are sold initially to build the structures and are subsequently paid for over time. However the argument against state bond propositions is similar to one I’d make to any one of my friends. If you can pay for something straight out in cash it’s much better than having to have to pay interest (unless the interest is lower than you think inflation will be in the future). So for instance Proposition 81 has the state of California selling $600 million in bonds which is going to end up costing the state $1.2 billion over 30 years with $40 million annual payments at 5% interest. If you include inflation estimates conclude that each dollar borrowed by the state will require $1.30 repayment.

The current California state budget is near $100 billion. $600 million/$100 billion = .6%. If you had a friend that wanted to buy a car for $6,000 and she made $1,000,000 a year would you tell her to take out a loan or pay for it in cash?

California Primary Elections

The California ballot today has two propositions on it. Proposition 82 establishes the right of all four year olds to preschool and provides support and establishes standards through a 1.7% tax increase for individuals making more than $400,000 or couples making more than $800,000 a year.

One of the problems with ballot initiatives is that voters cannot see the context in which their choices are being made. Of course everyone is in favor of preschools for children, research shows the benefits. However, this choice of spending taxpayer resources like any policy decision is not made without externalities, nor is it made with unlimited resources. Is preschool education more valuable than libraries? Is preschool education more important than highway improvements? What about universal medical care? What about improvements in K-12 education? What about benefits to illegal aliens? What about the environment? By choosing preschool education what am I turning down?

Another problem with ballot initiatives is that they are an all-or-none options. There is no negotiation that would occur during legislation. The San Jose Mercury and the San Francisco Chronicle both oppose the universal preschool initiative, not because they do not believe in the need for preschool education but because of the flaws in this proposal. A preschool education proposal presented to state legislators could be vetted and concerns including funding and flexibility could be resolved. This might result in a decent policy as opposed to this doomed-to-fail one.

Nog: Looking Out for You

Think supersizing your fast food meal is a bargain? Researchers from University of Wisconsin Madison have looked into some unforeseen costs of getting the extra large fries and coke.

While the average "upsized" fast-food meal costs a mere 67 cents more than a regular meal, those bonus calories could translate into substantial daily costs due to weight gain.

Based on their estimates, each fast-food "value" meal would cost an adult 5 cents more in fuel expenses -- as heavier passengers reduce a car's fuel efficiency - and about 35 cents in overall food costs, since heavier people need more calories.

Add to that the healthcare cost per super-size meal -- which ranges from 82 cents to $6.64 -- and these fast-food deals are no deal at all.

For every 100 calories a person eats beyond his daily needs, the price in terms of food, medical care and gasoline rises anywhere from 48 cents to nearly $2. The heavier a person is, the greater the cost.

Word of the Day: Ursprache

Katharine Close was the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee because she correctly spelled the word ursprache. She knew when she heard the word that the game was over and she had won.

Ursprache: protolanguage, a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages. German origin: "ur" meaning "out of" and "sprache" meaning "language or speech." (From answers.com)

Even gamblers got into the act, putting money down on questions including whether the final word would have an "e" in it and whether the winner would wear glasses.

Simon Noble, CEO of PinnacleSports.com, said his offshore Internet sports betting company had received about $70,000 in wagers on seven propositions about the bee as of noon Thursday. Link

A Larger Experiment

A public good such as controlling global warming tends to be exploited by people and thus becomes a tragedy of commons problem. The direct costs for an individual to be altruistic is larger than the benefits that the individual will receive in return. A new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link) shows that one mechanism to bolster altruistic behavior is to publicly acknowledge the good behavior and thus link the behavior to a person's reputation.

In a normal public goods game the most profitable route is to rely on the altruism of others and have no cost, only benefit. The authors of this PNAS article contend that individuals might instead contribute to preventing global warming if the personal benefits paid out in good reputation is high enough. Individual benefit from reputation + benefits from individual cost of preventing global warming > cost of preventing global warming.

This is an easy enough concept. However reputation is built on many acts of altruism, whether or not acts of preventing global warming is valued enough by others to merit an increase in good reputation exists is unclear. (Aren't they too crunchy?) Risking life and limb to save another human is not the same as recycling your milk jugs. The costs are not the same nor are the benefits the same. Is the gap lessened by driving a hybrid? What about biking to work and planting six trees?

On a final note, today when I went to Trader Joe's, I only used my three reusable canvas bags for my groceries.