In Memoriam: Sasha

Sasha died today after a long fight with breast cancer. She took a turn for the worse on Saturday, but bounced back on Sunday and Monday, deciding, after 15 years indoors, that she wanted to spend her last days outside. She promptly dove into the pool on Sunday afternoon. So, we spent most of the rest of Sunday and Monday sitting together in the front yard. She slowed down on Tuesday, went to sleep on my lap, and never woke up.

Goodbye, my sweet friend. I’ll miss you.

Advances in Physics: The Memrister

HP scientists have discovered a fourth element of electrical circuits, the memrister, the implications of which could be revolutionary:

Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they are turned off. When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data stored on a magnetic disk required to run the system.

Memristor-based computers wouldn’t require that process, using less power and possibly increasing system resiliency and reliability. Chua believes the memristor could have applications for computing, cell phones, video games - anything that requires a lot of memory without a lot of battery-power drain.

Brain-like systems?

As for the human brain-like characteristics, memristor technology could one day lead to computer systems that can remember and associate patterns in a way similar to how people do.

This could be used to substantially improve facial recognition technology or to provide more complex biometric recognition systems that could more effectively restrict access to personal information.

These same pattern-matching capabilities could enable appliances that learn from experience and computers that can make decisions.

A threatens B; A stays, B has to leave

This story makes me want to sic a dog on someone. Do administrators have no common sense at all?

The Politics of Fear

Paul Mirengoff dissects the Democrats’ “politics of fear” charge, showing that it is (a) question-begging and (b) baseless.

I find it puzzling that people dismiss talk of terrorism as well as the threat from Iran and its quest for nuclear weapons, its much-expressed hatred of Israel, and its conduct of war by proxy as “the politics of fear.” Fear of these things is entirely rational; anyone who does not fear terrorism and Iran’s aggression is a fool.

Let me be clear: I’m not speaking of personal fear—I don’t worry that terrorists or Ahmadinejad are out to or likely to get me—but of fear of the danger they pose to the international order and the welfare of Israel and the United States.

Who’s Failing?

A professor is fired at Norfolk State for failing too many students. This is more common throughout the educational system (especially at the lower levels) than many people think. I failed two students out of eleven as a student teacher at Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia, and the principal made it clear that I was not welcome to come back.

Haunting Obama

Charles Johnson counts the skeletons in Obama’s closet.  And we’ve barely opened the door….

The Inconsistency of the Crowd

Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea, loves humanity in general—but despises individual people. Rasmussen finds that American voters have the same sort of attitude about Democrats. They strongly favor Democrats in general—they now prefer Democrats to Republicans on every one of ten issues—but nevertheless have much less favorable attitudes toward particular Democratic politicians and policies. They overwhelmingly dislike the idea of tax increases, for example, but prefer Democrats on economic issues, despite the fact that tax increases are the Democrats’ central policy prescription.

PowerLine blames the media. Certainly, that’s a factor. Ignorance is another—do voters realize that the Democrats want to raise taxes? But mostly, I think, Republicans blew their brand image with their overspending ways in Congress. All Democrats have to do to be preferred is to hide their policy views. The bright spot for Republicans is that Presidential races tend to expose policy views. Voters will be reminded again and again between now and November that Democrats want to raise taxes, battle terrorism through conversation rather than military strength, etc., etc. It will be interesting to see how preferences shape up in the fall.

Class-based Affirmative Action

Richard D. Kahlenburg urges Barack Obama to propose ending race-based affirmative action, substituting class-based affirmative action in its place—mostly as a political ploy to move “beyond race” while still channeling mopst fo the program’s benefits to minorities. Commenters give some arguments that Kahlenburg’s political analysis leaves out:

There’s no conflict between academic merit and the goals of racial and SES affirmative action, if one drops the SAT (which is academically useless but positively favors high SES youths) and instead relies on high school grades and class rank.

This, unfortunately, is nonsense. The SAT is not useless; it predicts college performance better than grades, class rank, and letters of recommendation. Evidence that the SAT favors high SES students, though often cited, is weak. The most crucial point, however, is that SES when applying to college simply doesn’t correlate very significantly with educational achievement, later income, or other measures of success. Coming from a low-income household, contrary to leftist stereotypes, isn’t much of a barrier in American society. In short, working-class Americans don’t need affirmative action. They’re doing fine without it.

I don’t see this as a big winner, politically, mostly because I don’t think working-class Americans will see it as likely to benefit them.  “We’ve been discriminating against you for all these years.  Tell you what—we’ll start discriminating for you!”  The obvious reaction is, Why not just stop discriminating?

Updrafts

Megan McArdle writes disapprovingly of the minimum wage:

Both at Crooked Timber, and in my own beloved comment threads, the suggestion has been made that the minimum wage is really swell because it gets rid of low-productivity jobs that only pay the minimum wage.

This sounds lovely–if you are the kind of person who has the skills to get one of the higher productivity jobs. Not so great if you’re a high-school dropout with no appreciable credentials. In effect what you’re talking about is a massive transfer from the weakest members of society.

Let’s say raising the minimum wage makes them unemployable, while creating new, higher skilled jobs making and maintaining the equipment that replaces them. Good for skilled workers. Possibly good for society in some sense, though raising unemployment is rarely a net boon. Definitely awful for the lowest skilled workers, who now can’t get a legal job.

Helping the moderately paid worker by forcing the least skilled out of the legal job market is a very, very bad policy. Whether or not you think that the government ought to be in the business of transferring wealth from one segment of society to another, I hope we can all agree that at least the transfers oughtn’t to go upwards.

This is a crucial but often overlooked point. In fact, it played an important role in my own political formation. The Democratic party, which bills itself as looking out for the “little guy,” increasingly stands for upward transfers—”updrafts,” let’s call them—rather than the downward transfers their rhetoric advocates. The minimum wage transfers from the least advantaged to the not-quite-least-advantaged workers. Support for unions transfers from less-advantaged nonunion workers (often minorities) to more-advantaged union workers. Restrictions on trade transfer from foreign workers and domestic workers lacking political clout to domestic workers with political clout. Support for the arts and humanities, to take something closer to me, takes from the average taxpayer and gives to professionals with advanced degrees and impressive academic affiliations. The current housing bailout takes from the average taxpayer and transfers to people who made risky investments in housing (mostly in California and Florida) and in mortgage-backed securities. And so on. The “heartless” budget cuts proposed by conservatives of yore mostly affected these updrafts, and could have been defended on distributive grounds alone.

I sometimes think that conservatives should base more of their arguments on Rawlsian premises. Conservative policies are better for the least advantaged, giving them pathways to greater advantage, while liberal policies too often take from the least advantaged to give to the politically well-placed while taking away those pathways.

A Puzzle About Causation

Murder or suicide? (HT: Brian Hollar)