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Hovertext: It's time to take our children back from the Puppet Establishment.

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Yesterday afternoon, I asked the folks on Twitter for help with a special art project:

They could name any two people or characters, and I’d merge them into one.

So like, if people ever wondered what it might look like had Godzilla been part Ninja Turtle, I was their guy.

Dozens were happy to oblige, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of awesome ideas. Below are my first five attempts to do them justice. Please keep in mind, I have the artistic ability of the average third grader.

LIGHT OF THE OUTWORLD!
(Goro + Jesus Christ)
Suggested by @jeffmack

Goro, the four-armed Shokan who beat the shit out of you in Mortal Kombat, finds his more benevolent side through a merger with Jesus Christ. Kind of an extreme measure.

In retrospect, I admit that I should’ve given him (Him?) a halo.

BAT TO THE FUTURE!
(Hordak + Marty McFly)
Suggested by @franzthepest

Merging She-Ra’s greatest foe with Doc Brown’s greatest ally sounded weird at first, but these two blended together almost eerily well.

Marty’s puffy vest is an exact RGB match for Hordak’s demon eyes, and I do so enjoy the idea of a Hordak-in-jeans gleefully snarling over Grays Sports Almanac.

TIM FURRY!
(Harry + The Grand Wizard)
Suggested by @bloodypopcorn

And here we have Harry (of Harry and the Hendersons fame) united with Tim Freakin’ Curry from The Worst Witch. Good lord.

Actually, the resulting creature is way dapper than either of them individually. Tim Furry has a bit of a Prince Adam vibe going on. Just picture this guy doing the monkey-noise version of Anything Can Happen on Halloween. It may be the literal only way to improve that song.

RAINBOW BLIGHT!
(D. Compose + Rainbow Brite)
Suggested by @sammyhain

No other pairing featured here is nearly as strange, and considering that we started off with a Goro/Jesus hybrid, that’s saying a lot.

D. Compose is, of course, the wildest and most depraved monster from Inhumanoids, while Rainbow Brite is, of course, a six-year-old girl who sweats ice cream and Lisa Frank stickers.

As Rainbow Blight, the gruesome giant uses her exposed rib cage to imprison one of the Sprites, who so erroneously believed that a demon with Rainbow Brite’s hairdo would somehow be on his side.

MAC NAPIER!
(Joker + Mac Tonight)
Suggested by @tanookikuribo

Finally, it’s Mac Napier, combining Mac Tonight with the Joker. Because I gotta be me, I chose the 1989 Joker for this challenge.

They fused so seamlessly that I felt like I was cheating, so I decided to add a little bonus: A combination of Bob and Grimace to act as Mac Napier’s goon.

Thank you for reading, and thanks again to the many folks on Twitter who had such great ideas. I’ll likely revisit this idea in the future. I mean, someone suggested a merger of Johnny Five and My Pet Monster, for Goro’s sake. I’m not going to be able to concentrate on anything else until that’s done.

If you’re not already following Dino Drac on Twitter, click here to do so!

Geographic proximity between innovating actors has been shown to facilitate knowledge transfers and spillovers. However, the degree to which these effects are driven by serendipitous encounters has yet to be examined. This column explores this issue for a sample of Norwegian firms. Of the relationships that help firms innovate, fewer than 10% are formed in purely casual circumstances. The results imply that knowledge isn’t so much ‘in the air’; transfers usually result from purposeful search.

Evidence suggests that smaller family size can spur economic development and reduce poverty. This column revisits the quantity-quality trade-off between family size and education in India. The findings show that family size indeed has a negative impact on schooling. The high fertility rate within households may therefore have caused the low level of human capital accumulation in India. 

The unprecedented inflow of refugees to Europe and their uneven distribution calls for coordinated policy actions. This column discusses the economic challenges of the refugee influx. The fiscal and growth impacts largely depend on the speed and success of labour market integration. It is important therefore to implement a range of policies that can foster refugees’ economic integration. 

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During the past couple of months alone, floods have displaced 100,000 people or more in Kenya, in Paraguay and Uruguay, and in India, as well as more than 50,000 people in the UK. And rising sea levels due to climate change loom. This column assesses the risk and the challenges for policymakers. It details the effects of flooding in cities around the world, showing that economic activity is concentrated in low-elevation urban areas, despite their much greater exposure to flooding. And worryingly, economic activity tends to return to flood-prone low-lying areas rather than relocating.

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Jon Schwarz, The Intercept: One Map That Explains the Dangerous Saudi-Iranian Conflict

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia executed Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday. Hours later, Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, the Saudi government, which considers itself the guardian of Sunni Islam, cut diplomatic ties with Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim theocracy.

To explain what’s going on, the New York Times provided a primer on the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, informing us that “a schism emerged after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632” — i.e., 1,383 years ago.

But to the degree that the current crisis has anything to do with religion, it’s much less about whether Abu Bakr or Ali was Muhammad’s rightful successor and much more about who’s going to control something more concrete right now: oil.

WNU Editor: This is one of the many reasons why Saudi Arabia is nervous when it comes to its own Shiite populations .... they are located where the oil wealth is.

Hat tip to Jay for this link.

Washington Post: New infrared video reveals growing environmental disaster in L.A. gas leak

A runaway natural gas leak from a storage facility in the hills above Los Angeles is shaping up as a significant ecological disaster, state officials and experts say, with more than 150 million pounds of methane pouring into the atmosphere so far and no immediate end in sight.

The rupture within a massive underground containment system — first detected more than two months ago — is venting gas at a rate of up to 110,000 pounds per hour, California officials confirm. The leak already has forced evacuations of nearby neighborhoods, and officials say pollutants released in the accident could have long-term consequences far beyond the region.

Newly obtained infrared video captures a plume of gas — invisible to the naked eye — spouting from a hilltop in the Aliso Canyon area above Burbank, like smoke billowing from a volcano. Besides being an explosive hazard, the methane being released is a powerful greenhouse gas, more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the lower atmosphere.

Update: 'Unprecedented' gas leak in California is the climate disaster version of BP's oil spill (Mashable)

WNU Editor: Zero Hedge's explanation on why this news story is important and why we should be concerned is spot on .... "Unstoppable" California Gas Leak Now Being Called Worst Catastrophe Since BP Spill (Zero Hedge).

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Today we are fortunate to have a guest contribution written by Carl E. Walsh, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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On November 19 of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed by a vote of 241-185 H.R. 3189, The Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization (FORM) Act, an act designed, in part, to establish John Taylor’s 1999 rule for the federal funds rate as a “Reference Policy Rule” for monetary policy, with the FOMC required to submit the details of the actual rule the FOMC used to set policy and a statement as to whether this rule “substantially conforms” to the Taylor rule.

Legislating a rule for the Fed’s instrument as a means of constraining its discretion and holding it accountable for its policy actions represents a fundamental shift from a policy such as inflation targeting. Under inflation targeting, the central bank is held accountable for meeting a target that represents an ultimate goal of monetary policy – low inflation – rather than for moving its policy instrument consistent with a specific rule.

The House bill raises important questions: Should central banks be held responsible for achieving specific goals, such as 2% inflation? Or should they be charged to follow specific rules, such as H. R. 3189 proposes? I address this issue in a keynote address delivered at a Reserve Bank of New Zealand and International Journal of Central Banking Conference on “25 Years of Inflation Targeting”, held a year ago to mark 25 years since the passage of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act of 1989. In Goals and Rules in Central Bank Design,” IJCB (2015) [Ungated WP version], I use a simple theoretical model to show that both a goal-based system based on an inflation target and a rule-based system based on the Taylor rule balance a tradeoff between reducing sources of policy distortions and preserving policy flexibility. Using an estimated DSGE model, I find that the optimal weights to place on goal-based inflation and rule-based Taylor rule performance measures depend importantly on the output measure employed in the rule. When the rule is similar to that proposed recently in U.S. H.R. 3189, I find the optimal weight to assign to the rule-based performance measure is always equal to zero – that is, the rule H.R. 3189 proposed would lead to inferior macroeconomic outcomes and should not be used.

This result is largely driven by the fact that the definition of output used in the legislated rule – output relative to trend – is not consistent with the definition of output the theory behind the model I use would imply – output relative to its efficient level. When the Taylor rule is modified to use the measure of economic activity that is more consistent with basic macro theory, outcomes can be improved by making deviations from such the rule a part of a system for accessing the Fed’s performance and promoting its accountability. However, this suggests that a legislated rule would need to be very carefully designed if it is to lead to improved policy outcomes, and the performance of any specific rule may depend critically on model used to assess it.

References

Carl E. Walsh, “Goals and Rules in Central Bank Design”, International Journal of Central Banking, 11 (supplement 1), Sept. 2015, 295-352.

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This post written by Carl E. Walsh.

Donald Trump asserts we should be profiling Muslims because of the events in San Bernadino. Here are some statistics on casualties from mass shootings, disaggregated by religion of perpetrator (Muslim vs. non-Muslim).

Figure 1: 12 month moving average of mass shooting casualties; deaths inflicted by non-Muslims (dark red), wounded inflicted by non-Muslims (pink), deaths inflicted by Muslims (dark blue), wounded inflicted by Muslims (light blue). December observation for data through Dec. 2. Source: Mother Jones, news reports for November, December and author’s calculations. Tabulations of religion of perpetrator by author.

The fact that mass shooting casualties have been occurring with little concern by gun rights advocates (e.g. early 2013) suggests that casualties inflicted by some certain groups elicit disproportionate concern; see here.

Update, 12/12/2015: A tabulation of deaths due to domestic terrorism.

Source: Shane, “Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11,” NY Times, June 24, 2015.

We traditionally think of migrants draining their home country of knowledge and skills, and, instead, giving their all to their host country. Based on patent and inventor data, this column looks at knowledge diffusion conveyed by highly skilled migrants both within their host country as well as back to their homelands. China, South Korea and Russia seem to profit from their diaspora’s knowledge generation but the same can’t be said for India.

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The old chair of my alma mater’s economics department, Glenn Loury is, somehow, wrapped up in a kerfuffle related to the student protests that have broken out across the United States. Loury, who is now at Brown, wrote an op-ed in the student paper which to an economist just says that the major racial problem in the United States is statistical discrimination not taste-based discrimination, and hence the types of protests and desired recourse of the student protesters is wrongheaded. After being challenged about “what type of a black scholar” he is, Loury wrote a furious response pointing out that he is, almost certainly, the world’s most prominent scholar on the topic of racial discrimination and potential remedies, and has been thinking about how policy can remedy racial injustice since before the student’s parents were even born.

An important aspect of his work is that, under statistical discrimination, there is huge scope for perverse and unintended effects of policies. This idea has been known since Ken Arrow’s famous 1973 paper, but Glenn Loury and Stephen Coate in 1993 worked it out in greater detail. Imagine there are black and white workers, and high-paid good jobs, which require skill, and low-paid bad jobs which do not. Workers make an unobservable investment in skill, where the firm only sees a proxy: sometimes unskilled workers “look like” skilled workers, sometimes skilled workers “look like” unskilled workers, and sometimes we aren’t sure. As in Arrow’s paper, there can be multiple equilibria: when firms aren’t sure of a worker’s skill, if they assume all of those workers are unskilled, then in equilibrium investment in skill will be such that the indeterminate workers can’t profitably be placed in skilled jobs, but if the firms assume all indeterminate workers are skilled, then there is enough skill investment to make it worthwhile for firms to place those workers in high-skill, high-wage jobs. Since there are multiple equilibria, if race or some other proxy is observable, we can be in the low-skill-job, low-investment equilibrium for one group, and the high-skill-job, high-investment equilibrium for a different group. That is, even with no ex-ante difference across groups and no taste-based bias, we still wind up with a discriminatory outcome.

The question Coate and Loury ask is whether affirmative action can fix this negative outcome. Let an affirmative action rule state that the proportion of all groups assigned to the skilled job must be equal. Ideally, affirmative action would generate equilibrium beliefs by firms about workers that are the same no matter what group those workers come from, and hence skill investment across groups that is equal. Will this happen? Not necessarily. Assume we are in the equilibrium where one group is assumed low-skill when their skill in indeterminate, and the other group is assumed high-skill.

In order to meet the affirmative action rule, either more of the discriminated group needs to be assigned to the high-skill job, or more of the favored group need to be assigned to the low-skill job. Note that in the equilibrium without affirmative action, the discriminated group invests less in skills, and hence the proportion of the discriminated group that tests as unskilled is higher than the proportion of the favored group that does so. The firms can meet the affirmative action rule, then, by keeping the assignment rule for favored groups as before, and by assigning all proven-skilled and indeterminate discriminated workers as well as some random proportion of proven-unskilled discriminated workers, to the skilled task. This rule decreases the incentive to invest in skills for the discriminated group, and hence it is no surprise that not only can it be an equilibrium, but that Coate and Loury can show the dynamics of this policy lead to fewer and fewer discriminated workers investing in skills over time: despite identical potential at birth, affirmative action policies can lead to “patronizing equilibria” that exacerbate, rather than fix, differences across groups. The growing skill difference between previously-discriminated-against “Bumiputra” Malays and Chinese Malays following affirmative action policies in the 1970s fits this narrative nicely.

The broader point here, and one that comes up in much of Loury’s theoretical work, is that because policies affect beliefs even of non-bigoted agents, statistical discrimination is a much harder problem to solve than taste-based or “classical” bias. Consider the job market for economists. If women or minorities have trouble finding jobs because of an “old boys’ club” that simply doesn’t want to hire those groups, then the remedy is simple: require hiring quotas and the like. If, however, the problem is that women or minorities don’t enter economics PhD programs because of a belief that it will be hard to be hired, and that difference in entry leads to fewer high-quality women or minorities come graduation, then remedies like simple quotas may lead to perverse incentives.

Moving beyond perverse incentives, there is also the question of how affirmative action programs should be designed if we want to equate outcomes across groups that face differential opportunities. This question is taken up in “Valuing Diversity”, a recent paper Loury wrote with recent John Bates Clark medal winner Roland Fryer. Consider dalits in India or African-Americans: for a variety of reasons, from historic social network persistence to neighborhood effects, the cost of increasing skill may be higher for these groups. We have an opportunity which is valuable, such as slots at a prestigious college. Simply providing equal opportunity may not be feasible because the social reasons why certain groups face higher costs of increasing skill are very difficult to solve. Brown University, or even the United States government as a whole, may be unable to fix the persistence social difference in upbringing among blacks and whites. So what to do?

There are two natural fixes. We can provide a lower bar for acceptance for the discriminated group at the prestigious college, or subsidize skill acquisition for the discriminated group by providing special summer programs, tutoring, etc. If policy can be conditioned on group identity, then the optimal policy is straightforward. First, note that in a laissez faire world, individuals invest in skill until the cost of investment for the marginal accepted student exactly equates to the benefit the student gets from attending the fancy college. That is, the equilibrium is efficient: students with the lowest cost of acquiring skill are precisely the ones who invest and are accepted. But precisely that weighing of marginal benefit and costs holds within group if the acceptance cutoff differs by group identity, so if policy can condition on group identity, we can get whatever mix of students from different groups we want while still ensuring that the students within each group with the lowest cost of upgrading their skill are precisely the ones who invest and are accepted. The policy change itself, by increasing the quota of slots for the discriminated group, will induce marginal students from that group to upgrade their skills in order to cross the acceptance threshold; that is, quotas at the assignment stage implicitly incentivize higher investment by the discriminated group.

The trickier problem is when policy cannot condition on group identity, as is the case in the United States under current law. I would like somehow to accept more students from the discriminated against group, and to ensure that those students invest in their skill, but the policy I set needs to treat the favored and discriminated against groups equally. Since discriminated-against students make up a bigger proportion of those with a high cost of skill acquisition compared to students with a low cost of skill acquisition, any “blind” policy that does condition on group identity will induce identical investment activity and acceptance probability among agents with identical costs of skill upgrading. Hence any blind policy that induces more discriminated-students to attend college must somehow be accepting students with higher costs of skill acquisition than the marginal accepted student under laissez faire, and must not be accepting students whose costs of skill acquisition were at the laissez faire margin. Fryer and Loury show, by solving the relevant linear program, that we can best achieve this by allowing the most productive students to buy their slots, and then randomly assigning slots to everyone else.

Under that policy, very low cost of effort students still invest so that their skill is high enough that buying a guaranteed slot is worth it. I then use either a tax or subsidy on skill investment in order to affect how many people find it worth investing in skill and then buying the guaranteed slot, and hence in conjunction with the randomized slot assignment, ensuring that the desired mixture across groups that are accepted is achieved.

This result resembles certain results in dynamic pricing. How do I get people to pay a high price for airplane tickets while still hoping to sell would-be-empty seats later at a low price? The answer is that I make high-value people worried that if they don’t buy early, the plane may sell out. The high-value people then trade off paying a high price and getting a seat with probability 1 versus waiting for a low price by maybe not getting on the plane at all. Likewise, how do I induce people to invest in skills even when some lower-skill people will be admitted? Ensure that lower-skill people are only admitted with some randomness. The folks who can get perfect grades and test scores fairly easily will still exert effort to do so, ensuring they get into their top choice college guaranteed rather than hoping to be admitted subject to some random luck. This type of intuition is non-obvious, which is precisely Loury’s point: racial and other forms of injustice are often due to factors much more subtle than outright bigotry, and the optimal response to these more subtle causes do not fit easily on a placard or a bullhorn slogan.

Final working paper (RePEc IDEAS version), published in the JPE, 2013. Hanming Fang and Andrea Moro have a nice handbook chapter on theoretical explorations of discrimination. On the recent protests, Loury and John McWhorter have an interesting and provocative dialog on the recent student protests at Bloggingheads.

itwbennett writes: Despite assurances that only business listings and not customer names and home addresses would appear in the public search results when someone searches for an Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot, that is exactly what's happened when the service was initiated 2 years ago — and is still happening now, writes CSO's Steve Ragan. And that isn't the only security issue with the service. Another level of exposure centers on accountability. Ken Smith, senior security architect with K Logix in Brookline, Ma., discovered that Comcast is relying on the device's MAC address as a key component of authentication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hovertext: Of course, the real question is whether the bees were alive before the shaking.

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Closing in on 300k! WOW!

 

Much research has gone into trying to establish a connection in the US between having a distinctively black name and disadvantage over a lifetime. This column highlights a striking difference between the historical effects of having a black name and today’s effects. While modern black names show up in modern empirical studies as an albatross around the neck of those possessing them, either because those with such names come from worse socioeconomic conditions or face discrimination later in life, historical black names conveyed a large advantage accumulating over an individual’s lifetime.

The difference between freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) and warships transiting under 'innocent passage' sounds arcane and legalistic. But this wonkish distinction is now central to understanding the nature of the US Navy’s activities in the South China Sea last week and going forward — with a critical bearing on how they are perceived in China and beyond.

USNI News, Defense News and Graham Webster all recently noted that the USS Lassen was undertaking innocent passage when it sailed past Subi Reef on 27 October. This surprising revelation has not been officially confirmed but is understood to have been widely corroborated by sources in the US Navy, Department of Defence and Capitol Hill.

It matters because the regime of innocent passage under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is specific to a country’s 12-nautical mile (nm) territorial sea. This allows warships to enter without notice but under constrained conditions, including that passage should be continuous and expeditious, with no use of on-board weapons, aircraft or 'any act aimed at interfering with any systems of communication or any other facilities or installations of the coastal State'.

It was widely assumed that Subi Reef, as a low tide elevation now extensively built upon by China, was chosen deliberately as the location for the US Navy’s FONOP in order to demonstrate on clear legal grounds that the US does not recognise Beijing’s (or rival claimants’) jurisdiction over the surrounding waters. It is integral to the demonstration value of FONOPs against excessive claims that warships carry out 'the normal range of activities which they would on the high seas, including manoeuvring, the use of active and passive sensors and even the operation of shipborne helicopters'. FONOPs and innocent passage are quite different things.

However, according to Defense News:

New details about the Lassen’s transit became available Oct. 30 from a US Navy source, who said the warship took steps to indicate it was making a lawful innocent passage with no warlike intent. The ship’s fire control radars were turned off and it flew no helicopters. Although a US Navy P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft was in the area, it did not cross inside the 12 nautical mile limit.

When Chinese warships entered US territorial waters off the Aleutian Islands in September they behaved consistently with innocent passage, which may have encouraged a desire to respond in kind. The signal difference is that no-one, China included, contests the US entitlement to a 12-nm territorial sea in the Aleutians. This is no mere technicality. If it transpires that last week’s US Navy Spratlys mission is regarded officially as innocent passage then much of the legal impact will have been blunted for this and future FONOPs, which unnamed US defence officials have said since are likely to be conducted 'about twice' per quarter.

In fact, their demonstration value could be thrown dangerously into reverse if Beijing drew the conclusion that the conduct of innocent passage amounts to customary acceptance of a de jure territorial sea around Subi Reef and other submerged features or low-tide elevations under China’s control in the Spratlys. Innocent passage may have appealed at a political level in Washington, as less provocative than FONOP assertions conducted in the normal operational mode. But labelling US actions around the Spratlys expressly as innocent passage could be handing a legal concession to Beijing.

If Washington is intent on following through on freedom of navigation credibly, it is of critical importance that US operations in the Spratlys are not described or conducted in these terms. Not only would the impact on Beijing be diminished, but also maintaining support from third parties would inevitably become harder as they adopt a watch-and-wait strategy. A widespread sense of relief among many that the Obama Administration has finally grasped the nettle by authorising the US Navy to assert freedom of navigation in the South China Sea could quickly give way to intensified doubts about the conduct of its Asian security policy.

For their part, Chinese officials have thus far maintained steely ambiguity on the precise nature of their sovereignty claims in the face of both the US Navy operation, and last week’s decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration to hear the Philippines’ case, challenging China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea. And yet, as was pondered initially in The Interpreter and later by other observers, broader reaction in China has hinted at movement away from the maximalist positions based upon historic rights and the U-shaped line. These tentative gains suggest that calibrated pressure on China can have a positive effect. Introducing a mixed signal now on innocent passage shows extremely poor judgement.

To give the White House its due, there is always a wider politico-legal context to consider. In the higher strategy, US FON operations are probably meant to play a corralling role in coaxing China 'off-ramp' towards a position of compromise with its maritime neighbours and encouraging a meaningful modus vivendi between the US and Chinese navies, whose senior ranks have been in regular communication over the past week. The White House may be concerned about China’s challenges in the South China Sea but is probably inclined to take a wider, more political and transactional view of the US-China relationship than Congress, or the security arms of government which are professionally focused on China’s break-neck military build-up, and coercive behaviours in the cyber and maritime domains - including islands constructed on submerged features in the South China Sea.

Once again, the White House’s aversion to risking crisis and confrontation in US-China relations is likely to explain the mixing of signals on innocent passage. Unfortunately, the greater legal and political risks to this approach do not appear to have been given the same consideration. Freedom of navigation is not as simple as it looks. Future operational assertions must avoid repeating the mistake.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet

Hovertext: 10 points to anyone who tries this.

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Seattle BAHFest is TOMORROW! 

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An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks has released the finalized Intellectual Property text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which international negotiators agreed upon a few days ago. Unfortunately, it contains many of the consumer-hostile provisions that so many organizations spoke out against beforehand. This includes the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years, and a ban on the circumvention of DRM. The EFF says, "If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever." The EFF walks us through all the other awful provisions as well — it's quite a lengthy analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study, we are all surrounded by a personal "germ cloud" as unique as a fingerprint. Lead author of the study Dr James Meadow says: "We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud. Our results confirm that an occupied space is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one, and demonstrate for the first time that individuals release their own personalized microbial cloud." The findings were published today in the journal PeerJ.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Research consistently finds that men are more risk tolerant, or even risk loving, than women. This column argues that social identity, next to biology, helps explain the stark difference in risk attitudes and beliefs across genders. Men to whom identity is salient become more risk tolerant and invest more often and with more money. Identity makes men overconfident but its effects decrease with age. This is consistent with the notion that gender stereotypes have become less stark over the last decades.

An anonymous reader writes: A report issued by the UK's Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has evaluated how technology in classrooms affects test results, and found that the availability of computers provides "no noticeable improvement" to students' test scores. According to the report, "Students who use computers very frequently at school get worse results." Also, "high achieving school systems such as South Korea and Shanghai in China have lower levels of computer use in school." The organization warns that classroom technology can be a distraction if implemented unwisely, and it also opens the door to easy ways of cheating.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conventional theory suggests that hierarchy and state institutions emerged due to increased productivity following the Neolithic transition to farming. This column argues that these social developments were a result of an increase in the ability of both robbers and the emergent elite to appropriate crops. Hierarchy and state institutions developed, therefore, only in regions where appropriable cereal crops had sufficient productivity advantage over non-appropriable roots and tubers.

Breaking new constitutional ground with a ruling that will be tested in higher courts, a federal trial judge in Washington, D.C., has cleared the way for a lawsuit by the House of Representatives claiming that the Obama administration is spending billions of dollars on the new health care program without Congress’s permission to do so.  The administration plans to appeal Wednesday’s ruling, and this fundamental controversy over inter-branch relations seems destined ultimately for the Supreme Court.  Never before has a lawsuit like this one gone forward in court.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, in a forty-three-page opinion, rejected the government’s argument that the House had no right to go to court at all, to pursue what officials have argued is nothing more than a political ploy by Republican lawmakers in their ongoing challenges to President Obama, and especially to the Affordable Care Act.  On the contrary, the judge decided, at stake in the lawsuit is the specific grant to Congress by Article I of the Constitution of the power to control when federal funds are spent, and the House is threatened with fundamental harm to that constitutional role.

The ruling, however, is not a final decision that the House will ultimately win on its constitutional claim.  The judge has now told both sides to come up with a schedule for how the case moves on from this point, toward such a final decision.  In the meantime, however, officials at the White House and the Justice Department vowed to appeal — probably first in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  The government would have the option, now or later, to go to the Supreme Court.

While the Affordable Care Act has been challenged repeatedly, in court, in Congress and in politics, by its critics, and while two of the most serious court challenges failed in the Supreme Court, the House’s lawsuit opens a new arena of constitutional combat that potentially could deeply undercut one of the main financial parts of the ACA.  The government spent about $3 billion on that provision in the last fiscal year and projects spending of about $175 billion for it over the next decade.

In a second part of her ruling on Wednesday, Judge Collyer did side with the government.  She ruled that the House was not justified in suing with its separate claim that the Obama administration acted illegally when it postponed for a year the ACA’s mandate that larger employers must provide affordable health care coverage for their workers or face a financial penalty.  That claim, the judge found, was not actually tied to constitutional powers, but instead only to a dispute over how the ACA should be implemented, which does not justify the courts’ intervention.

Even so, the judge’s ruling on the funding provision was a major, if temporary, defeat for the administration.

As part of the ACA’s policy of helping millions of lower-income Americans to obtain health insurance at affordable rates, the law has a variety of subsidy provisions.  The Supreme Court in June upheld the system that provides lower-income consumers with a form of tax credit to help them afford policies that are sold on insurance marketplaces (or “exchanges”); that financial provision is not at issue in the House’s lawsuit.  But the lawsuit explicitly targets a mechanism to encourage health insurance companies to reduce the costs of coverage for lower-income individuals.

The House claimed in court that, although Congress has in fact voted the funds to pay for the subsidy system keyed to the insurance exchanges, it has never approved any funds to cover the expense of the cost-sharing approach — technically, the “cost-sharing offsets.”  The ACA required insurance companies taking part in the new program to specifically reduce the co-pays charged to consumers when they visit doctors’ offices or other health facilities.   The federal government then steps in to reimburse the insurers for absorbing those costs.

In going to court, the House contended that the Obama administration has asked for, but never obtained, actual legislation appropriating those reimbursement funds, but instead has simply taken the money out of accounts at the Treasury and sent checks to the insurers.  This, it argued, was a direct violation of the Constitution’s command that no federal funds may be spent unless approved, in advance, by Congress.

The administration has argued in response that the ACA itself provided all the authority that the government needed to finance the cost-sharing provision, so there was no need to ask Congress explicitly to put up the money.  Officials also have disputed the House claim that they did, in fact, ask for appropriations.

At this point, Judge Collyer has not decided who is right on that basic dispute.  Rather, her ruling focused solely on whether the House had a right to sue to defend its control of the federal purse strings.  The government had urged the judge to dismiss the entire lawsuit, claiming that the House cannot meet one of the basic requirements for a right to sue in federal court — that is, that it would suffer a legal injury from what the government has done.  The House suffers no harm, the government argued, when the government chooses how to implement a law that Congress has enacted.

The judge, however, said the entire House of Representatives faces the potential loss of its specific authority to appropriate funds for government programs, if the government, in fact, has spent money without Congress’s prior approval.  “Neither the president nor his officers,” the judge wrote, “can authorize appropriations; the assent of the House of Representatives is required before any public monies are spent.  Congress’s power of the purse is the ultimate check on the otherwise unbounded power of the Executive.”

She added: “Disregard of that reservation [of power to the House] works a grievous harm on the House, which is deprived of its rightful and necessary place under our Constitution.  The House has standing to redress that injury in federal court.”

In the past, when members of Congress tried to sue the federal government over some dispute, the courts have generally turned aside such lawsuits, finding that individual members do not speak for their entire chamber and cannot use the courts to complain about defeats they had suffered in legislative-executive dealings.  This time, however, Judge Collyer noted, it was the whole House that had sued.

Among other points the judge made in clearing the way for the House case to move ahead was the Supreme Court’s decision last Term, finding that the Arizona state legislature, as a whole, had a right to sue in federal court to challenge a voter-approved measure that took away entirely the legislature’s power to draw up new election districts following each new federal census.  The judge also relied on prior precedents of the D.C. Circuit that said there were, in some circumstances, opportunities for a house of Congress to sue.   But she acknowledged that there were no precedents, from any court, that provided sure guides to how she should rule on this particular lawsuit.

Although the Wednesday ruling did not settle the ultimate legality of the government funding of the “cost-share offsets,” the fact that the judge had given the House permission to pursue its case is subject to appeal right away by the government, and officials made clear they would do so.

 

 

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Washington Post: A conservative revolt is brewing inside the Vatican

VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, the Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

WNU Editor: The Cardinals must have known what they were getting when they elected Pope Francis to the Papacy. Is this buyer's remorse .... it sounds like it. In the meantime .... Pope Francis prepares for most political trip yet (AFP).