i am usually astounded by the silliness of the oscars. it’s really just an excuse to eat food with friends and make fun of people i know in my heart are more talented than i. some observations i’ve given only the superficial thought they really deserve:

• i found myself saying “beyonce? again?” far too many times. don’t be greedy, beyonce, let someone else sing phantom of the opera in the fish dress.
• speaking of. far too many fish dresses. here, here, here, here , here, and here. enough is enough, no more fish dresses.
• chris rock: remarkably unfunny. i blame the fcc.
• hottest award: tie between kate winslet and ziyi zhang. i wanted to force-feed poor kate though.
• clint eastwood is OLD. i mean really, really old. still kickass, just old.
• hilary swank: possibly worst acceptance speech, ever. “i’m just a girl from a trailer park with a dream!” and no yelling, honey. you have a microphone.
• boo to pretty people looking ugly. do i watch the oscars to see scarlet johansson look like a poodle with florescent lipstick? no, i don’t. johnny depp, wtf? and laura linney, that hair. what were you thinking? you’re not pink, don’t even try it girlfriend.
• alan alda is my hero.
• completely uncalled for. you’re not THAT cool.
• it's the oscars, man. SHAVE! i don't care if you are married to susan sarandon.

while catching up on my reading, i saw that ana marie cox wrote on howard stern's move to satellite radio in wired online. her claim that the fcc made stern who he is surprised me:

For all Stern's complaints about the FCC, the truth is that government policies made him what he is today. When the government lifted regulations on radio station ownership in the mid-'90s, communications giants like Clear Channel muscled their way into local markets - so no more Dave in the Morning or Billy the Wonder Weasel. Larger-than-life national personalities like Stern and Rush Limbaugh replaced quirky local hosts. Stern can now be heard on 40 stations nationwide. He may be pissed at the FCC for telling him what not to say, but he should send them a thank-you note for allowing him to spray himself across such a big audience.

is it just me, or does anyone else think that stern should not have to thank an agency for "allowing him" to be successful? the fcc didn't do anything positive for him; their action was negative in lifting an unnecessary ban. thanking the fcc for howard stern would be kind of like thanking an attacker for allowing you to live. that's not just inaccurate; it's downright silly.

then she states that:

Stern has to be defended on the precarious ground of the slippery slope: You may not like what he says, but if the government shuts him up, who will they silence next?

the slippery slope always seems an odd way to defend constitutional rights, but considering the political climate it's probably the most pragmatic. i am not a legal or constitutional scholar, as my (very willful) ignorance of why "congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" is disregarded makes clear.

but satellite radio has a disparate war to wage with the boys and girls downtown. congress, for some mysterious reason, has been trying hard to take down the operation, mainly by preventing satellite radio from broadcasting local programming.

while we're on the subject of content regulation, be careful what you say on those cell phones, also regulated by our friendly fcc.

in his new book blink, malcom gladwell writes:

...even the most complicated of relationships and problems have an identifiable pattern. ...overloading the decision makers with information makes picking up that signature harder, not easer. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

this reminds me of a a study i read last month (pdf) in psychological science that hints at why we're so bad at decisions involving too much information. researchers at the university of queensland handed a group of academics information on the interaction between variables, and asked them to make a judgment requiring synthesis of the relationships.

synthesizing three variables was difficult, and more left the academics dumfounded:

“At the level of the four-way interactions, participants made comments such as “Everything fell apart and I had to go back”,” Professor Halford said.

a fashionable critique of the market is that it provides too much choice - i.e., too many variables to consider. consumers can become overwhelmed, and barry schwartz's book paradox of choice claims this leads to "bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction - even to clinical depression."

although by no means a scholarly work, gladwell's book is important in highlighting the counterintuitive observation that economizing is key in decision making, and it seems that process can alleviate some of the supposed psychological harms of the market. halford et. al have told us exactly how far we should go with the information we do use.

from all this we know we must economize, and by how much. now we need someone to tell us how to determine which variables to include in our analyses. i'm inclined to say that reviews are key here. for example, when purchasing a car i can test drive every car on the market and keep accurate record of my observations. my working memory will then overload and my mind will "drop" all of my mental bundles, leaving me tired, frustrated, and confused. a smarter option would be to pick up consumer reports and car & driver. they have done some of the filtering for me, and i can instead focus on a few key criteria.

the ironic part for market critics is that these filtering mechanisms are demanded by consumers, and provided via the free market, to help ameliorate the harms they critique.

[the tile of this post is derived from a quote by military genius paul van riper: "in the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning."]

reference: halford, gs, rosemary, b, mccredden, je, and bain, jd. "how many variables can humans process?" psychological science, january 2005

Labels: decision making, well being

often while wringing our hands over the destructive nature of economic slumps we forget about the resilience and creativity of the people most affected.

case in point: out of the rubble of the 2001 tech crash emerged the blogosphere's favorite program, movable type. the ap reports:

None of it would have happened if Mena hadn't grown bored during the post-boom doldrums of early 2001 and decided to write her own blog.
...
As Mena blogged, Ben became frustrated in his search for a decent computer programming job. While unemployed, Ben began to work on the computer code that became Movable Type.

no one is happy that the tech crash of 2001 happened, and i'm sure most would drop movable type in a second to get their $80 shares back. but let's look on the bright side for once and admit that even out of bad times good can come, and recognize that such destruction is sometimes necessary to push us to acheive great things.

in writing my last post on creamer ranch, i discovered a site sponsored by environmental working group featuring a searchable database of farms drawing subsidies from 1995 to 2003.

naturally i was curious about my ohioan neighbors, and was shocked by what i found. although most of those listed were alive, a nearby school received corn, wheat, soybean, and oat subsidies, which seems suspicious. a family friend (and millionaire) also received subsidies, although he doesn't operate a farm.

my next door neighbor was the fifth-largest recipient in our zip code, and an old classmate's family was number one with subsidies totaling over three-quarters of a million dollars. my own family's small farm was near the bottom of the list.

most of the subsidy recipients i know live quite well. my aforementioned classmate was one of the more "well off" at my school. despite declarations that these subsidies are necessary during lean years, it seems that most farmers have enough resources to, with better planning, spread their money out and get off the taxpayer dole.

i don't mean to imply that my friends and neighbors are bad people for taking money when they don't need it; on the contrary, they are the best of people (my relatives, in particular). however, when presented with easy money and a culture assuming that it's necessary for one's survival, who wouldn't take it? adaptation makes this money, once accepted, seem necessary to accommodate an artificially heightened lifestyle.

the lesser prairie chicken, an odd bird with an even stranger courtship routine, once roamed the western plains in flocks as large as 1,000 (a frightening prospect). hunting, overgrazing, and plowing destroyed their habitat, and in the last 100 years the lesser prairie chicken population has plummeted to just 3 percent of its former glory.

the nature conservancy, a nonprofit based in arlington, virgnia, recently purchased nearly 20,000 acres of prime prairie chicken habitat in new mexico. although the ranch’s former owners will retain a limited livestock operation, the land will largely serve as a preserve for this and other imperiled prairie creatures. the acquisition is seen as a coup for prairie chicken preservation efforts, and benefits the ranchers as well. it will also presumably benefit taxpayers by halting many of creamer ranch’s usda subsidies.

the nature conservancy’s mission has always impressed me as being respectful of private citizens as well as the environment, two forces that need not always be at cross purpose. the conservancy strives to preserve habitat and species not by forcing others to conserve, but by simply purchasing and managing critical lands. since the land is then the conservancy’s alone, they can be confident that lands are treated in an ecologically sensitive manner. this method comes at no expense to taxpayers and to the mutual benefit of both the former land owner and the conservancy. many times the organization is able to purchase conservation easements at a lower cost, allowing owners to maintain usage of their lands while ensuring their preservation.

although i’m concerned with the conservancy’s recent direction, including an increasing reliance on governmental mechanisms for securing and maintaining lands, they’ve got the right idea in general for preserving critical habitat for endangered species.

Labels: social, well being

i am a woman, and a libertarian. for a long time, this never struck me as unusual. most of the officers of my libertarian club in college were women, and many of the people i work with daily are women as well. the fact that my experience was unusual didn't occur to me until a couple years ago when someone lamented to me the dearth of female-kind in libertarian circles. and just like the dalmatian in gestalt psychology, i began to see it too.

why are fewer women libertarians? many speculate that women reject the seemingly uncaring philosophy, so it's exciting that folks are now trying to polularize a different perspective on the ideology. it also seems that university women's centers create a monopoly on feminist ideas on campus. it’s a shame alternatives aren’t presented.

update: link updated.

Labels: personal

now that i'm back to the world of the living...

the fever has subsided thanks to my new favorite pharmaceutical company, abbott labs. thanks, guys! thanks to the coordination of several private enterprises i am sitting here comfortably typing instead of writhing around with a high fever and hallucinations. no one made abbott labs create biaxin to help me and other sickly folks. they helped me because i paid them a lot of money to do so, and i'm okay with that. and if i didn't have money, pharmaceutical companies joined hands to create helpingpatients.com, a site that coordinates pharm companies' free prescription programs.

i'm sick. worse still, i have a fever. i could very well be delirious, so bear with me here...

whenever i get a fever i try to remember whether the old saying is "starve a fever, feed a cold" or the reverse. after doing some digging (rather, typing the phrase in google), i found i should be starving if i follow the lore.

however, google also tells me that this myth may have basis in fact, if only for a little while. cool.

i'm eating anyway, i'm hungry.

i came across a recent interview with a ceo that highlights the prevailing ideas surrounding the profit-driven corporations. the straw man:

While he maintained that modern business schools do an excellent job teaching free-market principles, they often neglect the human aspect of a company.

As a result, employees become more burned out, turnover rates increase and workplace morale suffers because businesses forget that their fundamental objective should be to keep humans in mind, Ouimet said.

Balancing the two isn't easy, he acknowledges, especially since the economic and human aspects should carry equal weight in an organization.

the two - economic and human aspects - need not be mutually exclusive for the smart ceo. focusing only on profits may lead to both quality and quantity of employee benefits. by ensuring that workers ers psychologically healthy, the ceo will gain of a more productive workforce, and thereby more profit. more profit will lead the enterprise to grow and employ more and more people.

on a related note, the economist had an excellent dissection of theories of corporate social responsibility a few weeks ago, and a bit of it is available online.

Labels: social

no blogging until next week...

food for thought from wired:

Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.

OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect.

The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.

read on... or, read some old hedgehog on, say, sexist self (or not), the not-so-gullible public (and p-diddy's vote for bush), the benefit of bad moods, lefty bioengineering, neural correlates of shortsightedness...

Labels: social

john over at notyourtv blogs about viagra's inclusion in medicare's prescription drug benefit. the article includes comments by medicare's spokesman gary karr, reassuring us that viagra will only be covered when "medically necessary."

"necessary" implies requirement and absolute need. i've always thought that a drug is only medically necessary when it is required to save one's life, and although i'm no doctor it seems unlikely that impotence is a life-and-death situation. it's not clear what plausible alternative definition could exist for "necessary."

in reality, karr's statement simply means that viagra will only be covered when there are no alternatives. using the former, broader, interpretation of his statement is more fun, and a better brain exercise regarding the point of medicare. should medicare cover anything not required for survival? are preventative drugs, such as statins and even vitamins, included in that case? if that's so, then perhaps healthy food should be as well. i know, us damn libertarians and our slippery slopes.

Labels: social

studies find little gender difference in intelligence tests, but often do in tests of knowledge, such as aptitude tests. researchers now propose the difference may lie in how men and women approach tests:

Beier hypothesizes that women might be more susceptible to a predisposition for anxiety and rumination that might affect their overall test performance. "If such a link is found," she says, "it may be that appropriate training could help overcome these difficulties."

"I believe that the ability to regulate certain emotions is actually a skill that can be developed, as opposed to a hard-wired disposition that cannot change," Beier concludes.

beier suggests that this difference is exogenous, although it appears to be more of a feeling than anything. research already suggests that test anxiety is linked to gender, but the discrepancy in performance on intelligence vs. knowledge tests had not been examined closely.

a dna study discovered that the endangered preble meadow jumping mouse is identical to a common meadow mouse. this finding will likely lead to its removal from the protected list, and although conservation activists call it a political move, it is clear that it was one expensive mouse:

Builders, landowners and local governments have spent as much as $100 million by some estimates protecting the Preble's meadow jumping mouse since it was added to the federal list in 1998 as a species whose survival was considered 'threatened.'

i realize that conservationists would argue that doing a simple cost-benefit analysis is beside the point. but $100 million? for a mouse?