Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations - 16mar2012

George Rebane

We watched a DVRd recent ’60 Minutes’ piece on a fifty year program by Texas ranchers to conserve over 150 African game species on their own range lands.  Through their own efforts they have taken contributions from the nation’s zoos and built up the herds/flocks, in the process saving many species that were on the brink of extinction in their native Africa.  The ranchers help pay for this by providing controlled hunting under the aegis of state and federal laws.  The animals are thriving and the enterprise has been a win-win-win all around.

Enter the eco-idiots, a breed that marbles our nation like a disease.  There is a faction that has been working diligently to make hunting of these animals illegal.  Their imminent success promises to shut down the entire conservation program/business.  Their only ‘reason’, besides rank insanity, is that the animals should be taken back to their native Africa and put on nature conserves where dysfunctional governments will allow poachers to kill them off.  In short, the animals should only live in their native habitat that can no longer protect them from extinction – period.

The program's nausea factor was increased by the female correspondent continuing to ask each rancher interviewee ‘If you love and want to save these animals, then why do you allow hunters to come and shoot them?’  The obvious economic answers washed off her little brain like water off a duck’s back.  Now consider the millions of like-minded viewers out there for whom such reportage makes sense.  Pass the barf bag please.

Anthony Watts has published another substantial summary of the scientific controversy over the now notorious temperature ‘hockey stick’ cooked up by Michael Mann over twelve years ago.  Locally, Russ Steele has been tracking the political controversy over anthropogenic global warming (AGW) that has become a public policy control tool for Agenda21 politicians, and article of fervent faith to the scientifically dimwitted.  The review of Mann’s latest book on this controversy again illustrates the sleaze in ‘the debate (about AGW) is over’ that is promoted by the politically correct grant hungry ‘scientists’ and their government handlers.

It is remarkable that the AGW question has not been submitted to a small panel of acknowledged experts who are independent of the government gravy train; a panel similar to the one assembled after the space shuttle Challenger disaster.  The amount of draconian public policy that has already been made by nations, and the more that is contemplated has all been done in the face of a constant stream of evidence that shows the error of the original and revised AGW conclusions.  Would such an issue of global importance be swept under the rug if it were not the only game in town that allows the socialist one-worlders to impose their diktats on the rest of us while we destroy thriving economies on the road to their new world order?

We are attending a Mercatus Center conference in Scottsdale.  As supporters of that institute at George Mason University, we have benefitted from their research into public policy issues that seek to buttress the preservation of rights summarized in The Bastiat Triangle (q.v.).  Of late I have become more and more impatient with what conservatives have traded for progress – namely, preaching homilies to the choir when they assemble (see my ongoing hissy fits about ‘Candyass Republicans’).  At these meetings we are regaled with speeches and presentations that document and memorialize noble accomplishments of free enterprise achieved under the umbrella of liberty.  We are again told how the future would be brighter for all, were we to successfully contain the many-headed monster of collectivism.  But everyone attending such conferences already knows this material chapter and verse, and that is why they wind up only being kumbayahs for conservatives.

This time, instead of having our bellies rubbed one more time, I would like to hear of some, or even any smidgeon of progress made in halting socialism and successfully educating our electorate, then students to reject the ‘solution by redistribution’ messages that originate from the Party of the Fixed Pie and wash across the land.  And if there is no such good news to report, then tell us what we can do to advance liberty and change direction.  Absent that, why gather us together to attend what can only be characterized as the moral equivalent of a wake?

Judea Pearl wins 2011 Turing Award

George Rebane

The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that it has named Dr Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles as the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for 2011.  The announcement itself begins –

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Judea Pearl of the University of California, Los Angeles the winner of the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award for innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines that is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing," carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. It is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, whose 100th anniversary will be celebrated in June at the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration that includes 34 past Turing Award winners along with Pearl.

"Like Alan Turing himself, Pearl turned his thinking to constructing procedures that might be harnessed to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence," said Vint Cerf, chair of the ACM 2012 Turing Centenary Celebration, and a former ACM Turing Award recipient. "His accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning, and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine.'" Cerf pointed to Pearl’s innovation as a quantum leap from Turing’s "test" dating to the 1950s, when Turing set out to discover if machines could think. "Pearl's work on reasoning with uncertainty as well as his game˗changing contributions to machine reasoning about causality have had a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science, and statistics," Cerf said.

The rest of the announcement may be read here.

Judea Pearl and I first became acquainted as colleagues on various defense research projects during the 1970s when he consulted for the small ‘black studies’ company that I headed during that period.  Subsequently our families became friends and over the years we spent many evenings in exciting discussions and song (Judea on guitar and me on the keyboard - Judea is an excellent musician in voice, choral, and several instruments.).  It was Judea who convinced me to complete my doctorate and join his small troupe of students at UCLA working on the various research tasks that served as the halo around the magnificent tour de force that Judea Pearl presented to the world when he showed how Bayesian networks could be constructed and correctly computed.

Once his 1988 Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference was published, Bayes nets became and have remained the state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.  Bayesian inference now is the standard in all applications that required correct probabilistic reasoning, decisions under uncertainty, and management of risk - in short in all human endeavors.  Every field that has not embraced what Pearl started with Bayes is now scrambling to catch up.

I have long had the honor of calling Judea Pearl my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.  Those of us who had the good fortune to recognize early his genius and accomplishments were amply rewarded by what he taught us, and how he guided our individual contributions (my own humble efforts were in machine learning and causality).  It is most appropriate that Judea now joins the pantheon of the recognized greats in computer science. 

‘Rural Myths’ – don’t worry, be happy (updated 2mar12)

George Rebane

There is no question that governments at all levels have become less efficient from the taxpayers’ viewpoint.  This inefficiency is felt from many quarters and with respect to applied metrics, ranging from ‘bang per buck’, through layers of onerous regulations and mandates, to the ongoing removal of freedoms often through gratuitous criminalizations.

We live in a county that, on the whole, is fiscally well managed.  However, in recent years many of us have started to notice some pretty significant lapses in how our elected officials do business.   As examples, we may consider the string of bad decisions made during the recent AtPac lawsuit (q.v.), the demonstrated and endured lack of competency in the county counsel’s office, and our county’s official discounting/denial of its unfunded pension obligations.  On all of these, the inquiring citizen faces a phalanx of tightly circled wagons, and is ridiculed for bringing up individual issues.

The portent of the county’s unfunded liabilities are undoubtedly the biggest sword hanging over our taxable heads.  The amount that the county will have to pay out in the future (the out-years) is actually a complex calculation, and depends on not only the legal obligation to the public service retireds, but also on how much CalPERS will have in our account.  We have to remember that PERS is just an investment manager for the retirement funds the county remits to it.  PERS has no obligation to do anything except disperse what is in the Nevada County’s account.  (And then we are in a risk pool with a couple of hundred other jurisdictions like the profligate City of Bell, which is a whole other dimension of risk.)

This account may go up or down, depending on the vagaries of the securities markets and how astute the PERS portfolio managers are.  Their obligation as a fiduciary is only to do their best, come what may, and also to tell us their best estimate of what our unfunded part is when payments come due.  And that is where the problems start.  Local jurisdictions all over the country are basically in arrears, and many cities and counties are on the brink of Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

In California, Stockton is our next city that is prepared to file.  The San Francisco Chronicle has a more complete report on the entire situation in the state, and it isn’t pretty.

Added to the above calculations we have at least one “side fund” and yet to be explained amounts of monies due that are not shown on the county’s financial statements.  The situation is murky indeed, and our electeds are not exactly leaning forward to clear up the obligations that are facing us.  What I would like to see is a chart like the one below that shows by year Nevada County’s total known and anticipated obligations with error brackets showing the high-to-low range.

For more a higher level perspective, we recall the 2009 quote by Mr Ron Seeling, Chief Actuary of CalPERS –

"I don't want to sugarcoat anything. We are facing decades without significant turnarounds in assets, decades of …unsustainable pension costs of between 25 percent of pay for a miscellaneous plan and 40 to 50 percent of pay for a safety plan …unsustainable pension costs. We've got to find some other solutions.”

And things have gotten worse since then.

The Value of Stereotyping

George Rebane

Stereotyping is the use of a template of characteristics that are thought to belong to members of a particular class more frequently than members of the general population of which the class is a subset.  The template of characteristics is also known as the stereotypical characteristics like, say, a plastic pocket protector full of writing instruments more often seen in the shirt pockets of male engineers than in the pockets of other men.

Stereotyping has gotten a bad rap in our society, and its use is roundly criticized in the public forum.  However, stereotyping, so as to assign or exclude someone from membership in a given class, is built in to almost every critter that lives on this planet.  Why?  Simply because it is a low cost survival technique that has evolved in all species to simplify quick decisions about the famous ‘Three F’ functions – feed, fight, or mount - important to everyone.

But if you understand the underpinnings of stereotyping, it can be a valuable tool in making all kinds of decisions, and also serve as a mirror for better understanding yourself.  I was motivated to write this piece when recently reading Daniel Kahneman’s monumental Thinking, Fast and Slow which dances around the subject without getting into the nitty-gritty of it because of the little math involved.  Kahneman, recent Nobelist and co-father of behavioral economics with the late Amos Tversky, is also a giant in the field of psychology.  In that field stereotyping comes up under the forbidding label of representativeness (q.v. – which is short for quod vide or ‘which see’, and I’ve concluded that its modern version is simply ‘google it’.)

Now consider seeing a good looking woman, finely coiffed, beautifully dressed, and dripping with expensive jewelry, getting out of a chauffeured limousine in front of a fancy restaurant.  You wonder if she’s a member of the currently notorious ‘1%’.  More particularly, what are the chances (friendly word for ‘probability’) that she is a member of that exclusive class, given she has some of the stereotypical characteristics of that class that you just observed?  If you had been facing the other way and your friend told you that a woman just got out a car behind you; then without seeing her, what would you answer if he mused whether the woman belonged to the '1%'?

Christmas in 1949

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 16 December 2011.]

‘Tis the season for Christmas stories, so I’m going to tell you about my first Christmas in America.  The year was 1949.  Dad, mom, and I had arrived here in May on a troopship packed with east European refugees.  All of us had gone through WW2 on the wrong side, and then spent the last four years in refugee camps in Germany.  We arrived here with three suitcases and the clothes on our backs – no language, penniless, and literally no idea what was going to happen next when we got off the boat.

By December mom, dad, and I had gone through a hectic summer on a Connecticut chicken farm and were now living in a rented room with a shared bathroom.  It was located across the street from a noisy bar in downtown Willimantic, a poor New England ‘threadmill town’ that in 1949 already looked long of tooth.  Dad and mom had found work in the big threadmill as thread machine loaders – mom started working the day shift and dad was on the night shift.

Actually, mom had spent the summer in Essex as a dishwasher in a café, while dad and I worked on the chicken farm near Danielson.  Without going into the gory details, mom had a heart problem, and the extra heavy work in the threadmill did her in.  She spent most of the fall of 1949 in the hospital.

Early after starting fourth grade that fall, I wandered into the Willimantic fire department, drawn by the bright red fire trucks on display every afternoon.  My less than perfect English gave me away, and after the firemen quizzed me, they ‘adopted’ me.  Since my father was asleep during the day, there was little for me to do in our room except wake him up, therefore I was told to report to the firehouse every day after school for a hot meal, do a few light chores around the big fire engines, and play with the duty Dalmatian that was a resident of almost every fire house in those days.  My father approved the arrangement, and the firemen became my extended family to make up for the one I seldom saw during those months.  In spite of everything, that fall was exciting for a nine-year-old, I even got to ride on the fire truck responding to a couple of small fires.

As the weather got colder and the New England snows came, I looked forward to Christmas because, well, I had always looked forward to Christmas.  Even in the refugee camp it had been a festive time of music, hand-made decorations, Christmas tree, special church services, hope for a renewed life, and, of course, the anticipation of my present.  But this Christmas was going to be different because my mom would not be home until after the holidays, and dad would only get off on Christmas Day.  I knew that at dad’s $40 per week, presents were out.  Refugee kids become money savvy at an early age.

But I was also part of the fire department, and there was plenty to do to decorate and prepare the fire house for Christmas.  I was pretty much blown away by all the lights and bright shiny things and wreaths and boughs and the big Christmas tree that were part of an American Christmas.  The local Lutheran church had also taken us under their wing, and going to the Advent services was a real introduction to American Christmas music.  It was amazing how much more went on in an American church, especially during the holidays, than at the Estonian church that we had attended in the camp.

About a week before Christmas we found out that mom would be released from the hospital, and we would all be together in our first real home in America at 38 North Street, Willimantic, Connecticut, second floor.  With mom on the mend and expecting to go back to work soon after the holidays, things were again looking up.  Dad and mom were already talking of better jobs which would let us move into a real apartment with a bathroom.  We all felt that the way to an American future was beginning to take shape.

Then a week before Christmas my teacher told me that I was invited to a special Christmas party with a Santa Claus to be held at school.  I remember walking back to school through the snow in the evening.  The room was full of kids I didn’t know, there was a Santa Claus, and when it was my turn, he handed me a toy filling station with a garage and pump island on it.  It was used, but still in good working order.  I was more than a bit embarrassed by this, and walked home carrying the cumbersome filling station.

What had stunned me was that this was a Christmas party for poor kids, and I had been singled out as a poor kid.  But I knew that they had gotten something terribly wrong.  During and after the war I had seen plenty of kids and families who were really poor.  And I knew, that especially on this Christmas, I was definitely not a poor kid.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Merry Christmas.

The Systemic Train Wreck of the American Middle Class

George Rebane

“The truth is that we don’t know how to fix the US labor market – we are in uncharted territory,” says Peter Orszag, Mr Obama’s former budget director, now a vice-chairman of Citi. “It would help to spend more on retraining and on infrastructure and to have a more rational immigration system. But these wouldn’t fundamentally transform the situation for the middle class ... It is not yet clear what, if anything, could.”

This is how Edward Luce concludes ‘Can America regain most dynamic labour market mantle?’ in the 11dec11 Financial Times.  The article itself presents an excellent analysis of the systemic problems in the American workforce which have long been delineated in these pages (to a blizzard of reproach and denial from our Leftwing readers).

While President Obama and his liberal congressional cadres are out there demagogging the decline of the middle class as the fault of capitalism and the Republicans, the inescapable facts point to much deeper and more serious reasons why our middle class workforce is in irreversible decline.  None of it, of course, will make a dent in the herd of voters who are convinced that it is the system that is working against their right to sell for ‘fair wages’ whatever marginal or worthless skills they have left in their kit.  Such is the sum and stuff of populism.  But in a deeper sense they are right – it is ‘the system’ of 21st century Earth that is definitely against them.

And as Orzag eerily echoes the 1939 lament to Congress of FDR’s SecTreas Morgenthau (“… we simply don’t know what to do.”), no one has a plan to reverse this fundamental trend - it is not certain that such a plan even exists.  And by that I mean that neither the Republicans nor Democrats have put anything on the table, or discussed in their vaunted think-tank journals anything that softens the inevitable impact of advancing technology and a competitive global workforce on the expanded panoply of ‘rights’ on which the American worker has come to believe he has a perpetual draw.

Before the developed western countries do stabilize in some new competitive arrangement within the global economy, then to the extent that each of us got into socialized hock there will be hell to pay.  But then you already knew that, didn't you?

Calvin's Econ 101

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it's difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine."  Abraham Lincoln

George Rebane

This post is unabashedly lifted from and is composed of content, in whole cloth, from reader emails.  (I am still in mourning over Bill Watterson's decision to retire the strip in 1995; talk about quitting when you're ahead.)

Ruminations - 15jun2012

The experiment that said “the bigger the state, the more just the society” clearly failed. There is no point pretending that it didn’t. - Tony Blair

George Rebane

- It's the Sun, stupid!
- Dems put bad stuff on hold til 2012
- Mexican right of return

Russ Steele at NC Media Watch reports here the latest real news on climate change – ‘it’s the sun, stupid.’  The AGW true believers are having to run around in ever tightening circles as they try to paper over every piece of new data that belies their political theory of manmade global disaster.  Every day it is more apparent that the only misery man is yet able to afflict on fellow man is through bad politics.  It was ever thus.

The perversion of the progressives is nowhere more visible than in the hiatus that the Obama administration is taking from its own agenda.  All those social and stimulus programs that were designed and passed by the Democrats to get the country back on its economic track have proven to do exactly the opposite.  And the social(ist) engineers in Washington know it in spades.  With the election coming up and the economy on its butt (second cheek is hitting the ground now), these hypocritical leftwingers are pulling back the enforcement of literally every piece of damaging legislation they have passed.  The dirtbags aren’t repealing any of it, only putting it on hold until after 2012 (details here).

That there is no public outcry about any of this will hopefully again explain my ongoing use of Bryan Kaplan’s ‘sheeple’ for a large fraction of America’s electorate.  In his Myth of the Rational Voter – Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies Kaplan presented ample evidence of how the democratic process goes awry the more direct democracy we instill at the cost of removing the republican safeguards bequeathed by our Founders.  (See ‘How Elections Really Work’)

As these pages have noted for the last several years, the Great Divide (here and here) is not just an apprehension of conservatives who view as hopeless the reunion with progressives.  A major force promoting the GD is the latino Reconquista movement (here and search RR with ‘Reconquista’).  The lamestream media has successfully subverted any coverage of the progress of Reconquista.  Now it has advanced to where it is openly taught in American public schools.  As reported in the 20jun11 National Review -

“Mexican-American Studies” in Tucson schools now include “Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America, which proposes that the US southwest become a “Chicano nation” and quotes without disapproval Hispanic activist Jose Angel Guiterrez saying that “we have to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

Shhhh, the sheeple are sleeping.

‘You Are Not a Gadget’

George Rebane

Thus argues secular humanist author, musician, and self-educated techie Jaron Lanier.  His cleverly titled book came out earlier this year, and I received it as a birthday present from old friends in soCal who are of a similar philosophical vein.  The book is a fascinating cobble of various articles and pieces Lanier has written over the last twenty years or so.  The jacket blurb would have you believe that it is also “controversial”, but only if enough people would read it to create controversy.

The essay itself is a rambling yet engaging collection of historical observations, experiences recounted, and musings philosophical of the current pre-Singularity years as Man collides and couples with machine.  I found it interesting because of my own work in the same vineyards, but in many places I saw different things happening for different reasons than did Lanier.

In the book he shows us the impact on society – ‘technical and cultural problems’ – that “can grow out of poorly considered digital design", although I didn’t find cited examples compelling.  He does seem to be concerned about a genre of computer programs (machine intelligence) and the new celebration of ‘mob wisdom’ that yields various algorithmic cook-ups of what groups of people purport to say and do.  These he sees as beginning to trump “over the intelligence and judgment of individuals” in advanced societies.

Finally, he argues for the advent of a “humanistic technology” that somehow will maintain the primacy of human individualism and creativity in a world facing the onslaught of ever more intelligent machines.  Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, introduced the notion of humanistic technology in a 1964 speech at Georgetown University.  He was worried that technology might be developed for its own sake instead of for solving specific human problems.  And high thinking people have been so worried ever since.

‘Quants’, Kelly, and the R-K formula

George Rebane

Contrary to the rumors you’ve been hearing for the last year plus, GeorgeW didn’t cause the Great Recession.  This fiasco had three main progenitors - government idiots, corporate greedies, and some very clever, but not clever enough, Wall Street traders practicing the arcane art and some of the more dubious science of financial engineering.

Scott Patterson has been reporting on things financial for the WSJ, and recently wrote The Quants – How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (2010) which immediately shot up to the top of the charts and is still there.  I finished Quants before going on travel and was just going to add it to my collection of finance and economic history books.  But then I thought that there might be some little gems of broader interest there.

Patterson goes back to the beginnings of financial engineering in the 1960s, and takes us right up to the fall of 2009, the Great Recession and all.  In fact, the whole purpose of the book is to explicate the role of the quants in fostering the recession.  What’s a quant?  A quant is a person trained in many of the mathematical ideas and toolsets of the system sciences.  A bunch of them came from research universities like MIT, Caltech, UC, … .  They are generally at the PhD level, so they have demonstrated an ability to think out of the box and extend human knowledge.

Now these young graduates were snapped up by various ‘Wall Street investment houses’ and hedge funds.  Their job was to examine the price behavior of all kinds of securities around the world, and then apply their math wizardry to develop automated trading programs to lickety-split execute profitable arbitrage transactions that their algorithms discovered in the massive daily dataflows of the finance and securities industry.  Since I have some knowledge of these high-jinks (actually, I also claim to be a financial engineer), this kind of historical background fascinates me.  And doubly so since the political reverberations of this recession will be with us for a long time to come.