Key in the cognition

07:13 pm - Why we're all doomed

Imagine a game with these rules:

1. the game lasts for a finite amount of time (T);
   
2. any player can choose to opt out at any time, which is equivalent to losing;
   
3. the number of possible winners (W) is a small fraction of the total number of players (P);
   
4. when the game ends, if the number of remaining players (R) is greater than the maximum possible number of winners, they all lose, but otherwise they all win.
   

Current Mood: pessimistic

04:45 pm - The art of working with broken systems

We get a lot of junk mail and mail for people who once lived here. Every couple of days or so one of my housemates empties the mailbox onto the dining table. Because we're all messy slobs the pile of unopened unimportant mail has been steadily growing. This is now a problem because it is pretty easy for one of us to miss an important piece of correspondence if it gets lost in the mess on the table. To avoid this I have attempted to get my housemates to deliver anything addressed to one of us by leaving it on the floor immediately outside our rooms. This way the mess on the table can grow unchecked without causing any immediate catastrophes.

In the real world™ we frequently encounter broken systems. It's not always feasible to fix them all immediately so we usually need to work with them to the best of our ability while they are being fixed. But it's important not to normalize the broken systems or they will never be fixed.

Current Mood: mellow

09:25 pm - Of apostrophes and injustice...

On Friday morning I visited the DMV to apply for California state ID. It's almost as useful as a driver license but doesn't permit you to drive. However, they don't make you pass a test of skill to get it. Anyway, I'd made an appointment via the Web a couple of weeks ago and wanted to confirm it before I left home in the morning so I tried looking my appointment up on the Web by providing my full name and phone number but the system insisted that it couldn't find me. Frustrated, I called them and spoke to customer service rep. She asked me for my last name so I spelt it out for her but she stumbled after the 1st letter, having apparently never heard of an apostrophe before! This did not fill me with much confidence in the competence of DMV staff. After informing me that the DMV "didn't use apostrophes" she tried to look me up by last name (minus the apostrophe) and phone number but was unable to find me. I wasn't surprised. I told her that my appointment should be for 9 am that day and asked her to look it up by the time slot. After a few moments she discovered that my last name had been recorded by the system as simply "D", dropping the apostrophe and everything that followed! I'm certainly unimpressed with the degree of care taken by the DMV to handle such exceptional cases in their online data-processing code.

Every year Stanford puts on a production of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for, among other things, the "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves under inhumane conditions by the Japanese government during WW2 and continue to be denied so much as an apology for this horrible mistreatment by the current government of Japan. I'd heard about the deplorable treatment meted out to Canadians of Japanese descent during the war by the Canadian government but I see now that both sides have their respective skeletons. But the Canadian government eventually did issue a formal apology for their misdeeds so there may be hope yet that their Japanese counterparts will come around too. The monologues were both educational and entertaining for the most part although they did betray glimmers of misandry at a few points.

Current Mood: discontent

07:16 am - Why giving ignorant people the freedom to screw up is bad for society

I'd been thinking about putting this argument into words for several days now after discussing the issue with several people recently but this blog entry finally prompted me to actually do it.

adamspitz

Current Mood: determined

07:45 am - Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price

On Wednesday night the local Raging Grannies chapter screened a recent critical documentary about the world's largest retailer. The movie attacked Wal-Mart on several points; while some of these were certainly valid, others came across as purely emotional appeals with no sound reasoning behind them. Here is a breakdown of each accusation and my take on it.

[Disclaimer: I value freedom (defined as the ability to do whatever you want as long as it does not infringe upon the rights or freedoms of others) above happiness (defined as being satisfied with the way your life is progressing); if you invert the priority of these values then my arguments will not make much sense to you.]

Wal-Mart is anticompetitive
The movie criticized Wal-Mart for anti-competitive behaviour, describing how it puts small retailers out of business by luring away their customers with unmatchably low prices because of it's effective monopsony in the wholesale market. What people don't seem to realize is that it only got tis big because it was undercutting the competition's prices from the very beginning by effectively utilizing technology to improve inventory control far beyond the status quo. Now that it's big they can exploit economies of scale to drive prices even lower but that hardly seems like sufficient reason to penalize them.

The movie also mentioned that it was unfair for Wal-Mart to receive subsidies from municipal governments to set up shop in their cities while locally run retailers could not get similar financial incentives. While there's no disputing the fact that this is unfair, it seems to me that the fault lies at least as much with the city councils as it does with Wal-Mart. I know that other large employers (e.g. auto plants) often extract such subsidies from municipalities in return for gracing the city with their presence and it makes about as much sense to me as federal subsidies to the global aerospace industry.

Wal-Mart is a bad employer
This claim had more facets to it than any of the others. The movie pointed out that a large number of Wal-Mart's "associates" were unable to afford health insurance and were therefore relying upon government-provided healthcare. This is certainly a bad situation but the problem is the US healthcare system and not Wal-Mart. Businesses do not have a legal obligation to provide their employees with free healthcare; they usually subsidize it heavily as an incentive to work there. However, since Wal-Mart has no problem attracting "associates", despite the lack of a good healthcare package, then it is only natural that they wouldn't take on additional financial burdens. Healthcare is about twice as expensive in the US as it is in Canada (which is why so many skilled manufacturing jobs moved to Canada) and there is a glut of supply in the unskilled labour market so Wal-Mart has only been doing what makes economic sense.

This glut in the unskilled labour market has lead to other issues as well. Wal-Mart has been pressuring its "associates" to put in unpaid overtime hours. Furthermore, it occasionally altered time-sheets to avoid having to pay overtime wages. Both of these are highly illegal and the company was eventually sued by those whom it had abused in this manner. It's a valid criticism but it has been dealt with in the standard manner and the company is unlikely to attempt such culpable maltreatment in the future if only to avoid another class-action lawsuit.

Wal-Mart was also sued for discriminating against female employees by keeping them out of the management ranks. Again, this was a very bad thing for them to have done but it is the sort of thing that happens in large organizations making them pay a financial penalty for this has undoubtedly provided the top brass with significant incentive to ensure that this does not happen again. Corporations learn from experience in much the same manner as people and it's only fair to give them a second chance here.

The movie claimed that Wal-Mart was "unamerican" for outsourcing production to 3rd-world countries like China. That argument makes no sense at all. It is not the responsibility of a business to employ people; that's just a convenient side-effect. A business exists to serve the customer. For a company that competes primarily on price, the customer is best served by lowering costs. There is no good reason for Wal-Mart (or any other company) to pay an American to do something that somebody in a different part of the world can do just as well for a fraction of the wages. That's just the harsh truth. Americans had better stop expecting jobs handed to them and start demonstrating that they're worth the high wages they demand.

The outsourcing was also criticized for exploiting people in poor countries by making them work under miserable conditions. What people here fail to realize is that these conditions are actually better than whatever they had to put up with before or they wouldn't be doing so. An example from the movie was a woman who gave up her life on the family farm working from dawn to midnight so she could work in a factory producing goods for Wal-Mart. She complained that Wal-Mart provided them with shoddy apartments to live in and would charge them for the apartments even if they chose to live elsewhere. That's a very skewed perspective! Wal-Mart was merely offering them free housing. Why should the company be expected to provide their workers with housing? They certainly don't do that in the US. "Charging them for the apartments" merely translates to paying them lower wages. Those workers have the right to quit any time they want; they stay because the alternative is even worse. This is no different from England during the industrial revolution; modernization is painful at the beginning. Why should China be any different from England just because it is modernizing later?

In the movie Wal-Mart was criticized for being strongly anti-union, to the extent of attempting to brainwash their employees into believing that the union would only take their money and give them nothing in return. I'm not surprised; unions can easily destroy a company. Unions are the solution to a glut in the labour market; by creating a monopoly on labour, they can force employers to provide higher wages and better working conditions. However, like any other monopoly, they can very easily be destructive; this happens when unions prevent companies from hiring the best people by vetoing their recruitment process. Creating an oligopoly and preventing collusion in the labour market would largely alleviate this problem without leaving the workers at the mercy of employers.

Wal-Mart pollutes
There is strong evidence that Wal-Mart's negligence has been responsible for polluting the environment on multiple occasions. Well, we have laws to deal with this. The penalties should be increased and the investigations intensified until companies have a strong incentive to ensure that they do not damage the environment. While this is certainly a failing on the part of Wal-Mart, what needs to be fixed is the environmental protection measures. This may have the effect of raising prices but I would hope that people value the natural environment enough to accept that as a consequence.

Wal-Mart is a bad community-member
Apparently Wal-Mart neglects to ensure that their parking lots are safe, despite the knowledge that they could significantly boost safety by having employees patrol these lots. Well, the last time I checked, the police were responsible for public safety. If people are willing to shop at Wal-Mart despite the safety concerns then there is no financial incentive for Wal-Mart to take on the job of policing their parking lots.

Finally, the movie lambasted the Wal-Mart shareholders for not donating enough to charity. While I can't imagine what they intend to do with all that wealth (even Bill Gates intends to give it to charities upon his demise), they're are certainly under no legal obligation to give it away.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

07:39 am - The camwhores flood Gooogle Base

I was playing around with the newly released Google Base yesterday. It's pretty neat but there are some serious flaws, even after they fixed the nasty security hole. The idea behind the system is an excellent one but Google's implementation of it is not up to their usual high standards. I guess they've been forced to lower their traditionally high barrier-to-entry for employment as they continue to grow in a reviving tech industry.

They have divided the items up into different stock categories, although they allow you to customize them at will. I experimented with the people profiles, only to discover that it has been overrun by camwhores and is already being abused by dating services, although some people are just having fun. I wonder how Google is going to deal with the flood of spam...

Current Mood: annoyed

03:10 pm - Football and Cars!

Last night was the annual football game between arch-rivals Stanford and UC Berkeley (known colloquially as "Cal"). After dinner James and I wandered around observing the fans as they left the stadium. It was clear that Stanford had lost, although I didn't realize at the time how badly they'd been beaten. Football really is the American Hockey. We saw a few (presumably Cal) tailgating parties, which was particularly interesting for me as I'd only found out the football-related meaning of the term a few days hence. But the observation that made the most impact on me was the gridlock. Despite the fact that parking is scarce and the Caltrain stops right at the stadium, a surprisingly high number of people had driven to the game and were having a nasty time leaving it. There was even an accident with accompanying road-rage put on (purely for our entertainment, I'm sure). But I guess you can't have a tailgating party if you take the train...

As for me, I have been having very little trouble living here without a car. Aside from a few minor social inconveniences, my bike (with occasional help from the Caltrain) has been remarkably effective at getting me places. And I'm in fantastic shape as a consequence. It has rained a few times but I have waterproof-gear now so that hasn't really daunted me from hitting the road. I guess I'll have to see how well I last through what passes for winter here before I know if it's truly feasible to thrive in California without owning an automobile. But I have a good feeling about it and I'm pretty stubborn about things like this. After all, I once biked to work in the snow for several weeks so I don't expect rain to deter me significantly, given the many little annoyances that come along with driving.

Current Mood: amused

09:31 am - An evening of international political enlightenment

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Jiunn-Rong Yeh, a cabinet minister for an economic powerhouse whose existence is formally acknowledged by only the pope and 25 econopolitically insignificant nations, about the history and prospects of his enigmatic country. The story of how this strange situation arose is a uniquely fascinating one. When KMT, the organization that had maintained a shaky grip on the reins of power in the Republic of China from its inception in 1912, was finally overthrown by the commies in 1949 its leaders retreated to the tiny island of Taiwan, taking their newly formed constitution with them and effectively relinquishing control of Mainland China to the commies. Since they had retained the constitution and all heads of state, however, they claimed to remain the official governing body of China as a whole and denounced the new People's Republic of China as a bunch of renegades.

While they may have been technically correct, the economic and military clout wielded by these "renegades" in possession of Mainland China held sway and during the 70s virtually all of the world's other countries came to accept that the People's Republic of China was here to stay. Together with this loss of legitimacy, the KMT also lost much of their ironclad authority as successive reforms by their aging leader ceded power to the people until the Republic of China on Taiwan eventually turned into an exemplar of democratic principles and free expression that stands in stark contrast to the systemic abuse of human rights exhibited by the People's Republic of China.

Nonetheless, despite being a free democratic society with a strong economy, Taiwan continues to live under the enormous shadow of the Communist government on Mainland China, which insists that Taiwan is still part of a unified China – even though it has a different currency and pays no taxes to the Communist party governing the People's Republic of China (PRC)! This predicament manifests itself in some peculiar ways. For instance, the PRC recently offered a pair of giant pandas to Taiwan. Normally transferring endangered animals between countries would require approval from CITES. However, since the PRC considers Taiwan to be part of a unified China, they refuse to let CITES get involved with what they insist is a purely domestic matter! Another issue is that one of Taiwan's major political parties (KMT) also happens to be a major commercial power in its own right, with several billion US dollars worth of assets; a unique feature amongst the world's political parties.

Current Mood: enthralled

06:33 am - The science of group social activities

While interacting with people in an informal setting this weekend I made an observation that I hadn't explicitly realized until now: people + food + trivial activity = good time.

That seems to be time-tested formula for creating an enjoyable social event. While the food part is not absolutely vital, it helps a great deal. However, the key is the trivial activity. See, if you collect a bunch of people and tell them to have fun, most people will be unable to deal with the sudden lack of structure and resort either to clumping together in cliques of comfortable friends or being miserable in the company of strangers. Adding an activity to the mix gives them a fleeting sense of purpose; that's all it takes for them to begin interacting. And soon enough they will get distracted from the task at hand and begin having fun with each other, occasionally reverting to the task for a while when a conversation reaches approaches its natural conclusion.

It's important that the task be trivial though. If it seems too serious, complicated or important then people get too wrapped up in the task itself for those all-important distractions to occur with sufficiently high frequency and duration to make the event enjoyable. This little constraint is sometimes not realized by people who take the activity more seriously than its intended purpose requires. For the most part, however, the formula is reliably effective. It can be observed in party games, group retreats, frosh week, etc.

And this shouldn't come as a surprise to most people because we already knew this implicitly. But knowing something explicitly makes it easier to adapt to uncommon situations. In this case, it is now easier to understand why group work is frequently a disaster: the setting is easily unconsciously mistaken for an informal social activity and people get distracted into having a great time instead of completing the assigned task. Ergo, to increase the odds of getting work done, it is necessary to tweak the setting so it appears less like a soiree and more like a work environment.

Current Mood: calm

10:02 pm - Kefir >> milk

Ever since I was a kid I have been unable to drink plain white cow milk without suffering from a powerful urge to throw up. I'm not lactose intolerant because if I add a strong flavour to the milk I can drink it with no ill-effects. So for years I drank chocolate milk to get the calcium that it seemed was best absorbed from milk. That's actually how I ended up with the nickname QuikChange.

However, in the summer of 2003 I got a cold and my chest filled with phlegm. I don't generally get sick and I'm not a fan of taking medication unless absolutely necessary so I simply ignored the cold for a few days until my immune system vanquished it. The problem was that the phlegm didn't leave with the infection. It made me cough all day, which was very annoying. I was even having trouble sleeping at night and was forced to resort to taking NyQuil. It was a sad situation that went on for almost a month.

Then I went to visit shade_42's mom while in Montreal for a weekend. Upon hearing of my plight, she suggested that I discontinue drinking milk for a few days as it tends to prolong pulmonary congestion. I did as she suggested and in a few days I stopped coughing. At this point I was so relieved not to have my lungs filled with phlegm that I developed a reluctance to drink milk again. When I mentioned this to my vegan friend Caro she told me that milk is not really a very good source of calcium anyway and encouraged me to stop drinking it. And so I switched to drinking soy milk instead.

But a_chatterbox periodically warned me that I wasn't getting enough calcium by avoiding milk. And she's in SciBiz so she knows about that sort of stuff. For a long time I couldn't figure out what to do, with my granola-eating tree-hugging hippie/vegan friends telling me to continue avoiding milk and my biology-steeped dairy-industry-influenced friends telling me I needed to drink milk to get my RDI of calcium. Even the Carrotine Kid was perplexed.

But this weekend I discovered Lifeway kefir, which seems to solve most of my problems by providing a healthy source of calcium that I actually enjoy drinking and is produced from the milk of cows treated with love and respect. canoe_drew had actually introduced me to kefir back in 2003 but I hadn't thought of using it as a source of calcium until I saw the label advertising it as such in the grocery store today.

Current Mood: jubilant

09:44 am - Sony begins to feel the pain of market rejection

For the past few years I have watched as Sony continued to flout consumer preferences in favour of pushing it's intellectual property. They avoided open standards like CompactFlash & MMC (and even licensable collaborative ones like Secure Digital) in favour of their home-grown Memory Stick technology that had to be licensed from them. As a result, anybody choosing to purchase an electronic device made by Sony usually ended up being locked in to their proprietary storage media that cost much more than any of the alternates.

They also made the ill-fated move of acquiring media companies, thereby entering the music and film industries. This produced some internal turmoil because of the inherent opposition between the market desires of media companies and consumer electronics companies. Media companies want to make sure that no device is capable of permitting their customers to share content with each other for fear of rampant copyright infringement. They seek this goal regardless of how unusable it makes the devices. Consumer electronics companies, on the other hand, want people to buy their products. This generally entails making them both useful and easy to use. But people like to share stuff. So the successful consumer electronics companies put the bare minimum of restrictions of their hardware. Unfortunately, this turned Sony into a rather conflicted corporate entity. And it showed in their product offerings.

Given that there was plenty of competition from Apple, Casio and the like, Sony is now reaping the fruit of its bad judgement as it is forced to abrogate 10,000 employees in a desperate attempt to trim some fat and become relevant again. But I don't see it gaining the focus it needs yet...

Current Mood: predatory

10:37 am - The UW perception skewing effect

On Wednesday I gave a talk about university to a grade 11 CS class at my former high-school. I was astonished by the lack of ambition and focus I encountered. Only a handful of students intended to go on to college and fewer still were considering university. Mind you, when I was in grade 11 I had no idea which university I wanted to attend either but at least I knew I want to go to one. And I don't mean to imply that university/college is the only way to go because the trades are just as worthy of consideration. However, none of the students I spoke to had given any consideration to an apprenticeship either.

What surprised me the most was that not a single person in that classroom was taking the course because they wanted to. Some were in it because it was the least horrible course that fit into their schedule, others because they had been forced to take it by their parents, and a few had been thrust into it by their guidance counsellors without consent.

Spending 6 years at UW has clearly skewed my perception. It seems most people are rather apathetic in comparison to the typical UW crowd. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, actually. If it's possible to be satisfied with little then why is it better to be constantly driven to greater heights of accomplishment with no real end in sight?

Current Mood: shocked

09:25 pm - The old fogeys are going down

When I was asked to write research papers at UW, most of my profs were adamant about us not relying upon the Net for our research; some went so far as to point out that the goood stuff is only to be found in obscure journals with no online presence. This baffles me. Do these journals revel in their exclusivity? If not, why do they not publish online? The world is changing. These days, if you're not in Google, you don't exist.

Current Mood: optimistic

06:38 am - Meat! Is it evil?

I skipped out on most of Toast Talk last night because I had to study but I had a few thoughts about the topic: should we all stop eating meat?

Historically (over the past few millennia), societies that engaged in animal husbandry for consumption (specifically the rearing of cattle, poultry, swine and sheep) enjoyed a distinct competitive advantage against other societies because these livestock provided them with a high-protein diet. In recent decades, however, several things have changed. Globalization has been effectively turning the planet into a single giant interdependent economy in which any society can use the products created by any other society. And the human population explosion has meant that grazing is not as viable an approach to feeding livestock as it once was; instead we now resort to giant commercial farms to produce the enormous quantity of meat we consume.

One of the side-effects of having had meat as a status symbol and competitive advantage is that we tend to crave and enjoy it in much the same fashion as we do sugar (because fructose was once a competitive advantage). However, our bodies are not particularly good at self-restraint, leading to us consuming far more of such things (sugar, fat and meat) than we require; often more than our bodies can deal with in a healthy manner. Furthermore, the burgeoning levels of meat consumption have been taxing our natural environment as we push its resources increasingly further in the quest for meat.

Nevertheless, dropping meat from our diets altogether seems a bit drastic. Although it is possible to obtain all the nutrients, calories and protein we require without needing to consume meat (although we would still need dairy products for vitamin B12), it is clear that most people are not about to give up on meat anytime soon. Furthermore, abandoning meat in one fell swoop would have disastrous consequences on the livestock markets. A more pragmatic approach would be to reduce our meat consumption to a fraction of its current levels over the span of a few years. Many people have already done this.

How might such a plan be encouraged? Promoting quality over quantity would be one solution: we could eat only grain-fed or free-range livestock. These cost more so they impose an automatic dampening effect on meat consumption at both a personal and macro-economic level. In addition, they are a healthier source of meat. Organizations attempting to promote a reduction in meat consumption could help out by educating people about the advantages of grain-fed and free-range livestock, as well as providing information on how to replace meat with other sources of the same nutrients and protein.

Current Mood: curious