Jack

Data never has a virgin birth. It can be tempting to assume that the information contained in a spreadsheet or a database is pure or clean or beyond reproach. But this is almost never the case. All data is collected and compiled by someone — either an individual researcher or a government agency or a scientific laboratory or a news organization or someone or something else. Sometimes, the data collection process is automated or programmatic. But that automation process is initiated by human beings who write code or programs or algorithms; those programs can have bugs, which will be faithfully replicated by the computers.

This is another way of saying that almost all data is subject to human error. It’s important both to reduce the error rate and to develop methods that are more robust to the presence of error.⁴⁵ And it’s important to keep expectations in check when a controversy like the one surrounding the French economist Thomas Piketty arises.

Piketty’s 696-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has become an unlikely best-seller in the United States. That’s perhaps because it was published at a time when there is rapidly increasing interest in the subject of economic inequality in the U.S.⁴⁶ But on Friday, the Financial Times’ Chris Giles published a list of apparent errors and methodological questions in the data underpinning Piketty’s work. Piketty has so far responded to the Financial Times only in general terms.

My goal here is not to litigate the individual claims made by Giles; see The New York Times’ Neil Irwin or The Economist’s Ryan Avent for more detail on that. Rather, I hope to provide some broad perspective about data collection, publication and analysis. A series of disclosures: First, my economic priors and preferences are closer to The Economist’s than to Piketty’s.⁴⁷ Second, I haven’t finished Piketty’s book, although I’ve spent some time exploring his data. Third, I’m no expert on macroeconomic policy or macroeconomic data. Fourth, this comment rather liberally takes advantage of our footnote system; there’s a short version (sans footnotes) and a long version (avec).

My perspective is that of someone who has spent a lot of time compiling and analyzing moderately complex data sets of different kinds. Also, I’m someone who, like Piketty, has seen his public profile grow unexpectedly in recent years. I consider myself extremely fortunate for this — however, I know that attention can sometimes yield disproportionate praise and criticism. Throat-clearing aside, here’s what I have to offer.

Piketty’s data sets are very detailed, and they aggregate data from many original sources. For instance, the data Piketty and the economist Gabriel Zucman compiled on wealth inequality in the United Kingdom for their paper “Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries, 1700-2010″ contains about 220 data series for the U.K. alone which are hard-coded into their spreadsheet. These data series are compiled from a wide array of original sources, which are reasonably well documented in the spreadsheet.

This type of data-collection exercise — many different data series over many different years, compiled from many countries and many sources — offers many opportunities for error. Part of the reason Piketty’s efforts are potentially valuable is because data on wealth inequality is lacking. But that also means his numbers will not have received as much scrutiny as other data sets.

An extreme contrast would be to something like Major League Baseball statistics, almost every detail of which have been scrubbed and scrutinized by enthusiasts for decades. Even so, they contain errors from time to time. There are, however, usually larger gains to be had when data or methods or findings are relatively new — as they are in Piketty’s case. (An analogy is the way a vacuum’s first sweep of the living-room floor picks up a lot more dust and dirt than the second and third attempts.) Perhaps Piketty is guilty of coming to some fairly grand conclusions based on data that has not yet received all that much scrutiny.

What error rate is acceptable? The right answer is probably not “zero.” If researchers kept scrubbing data until it were perfect, they’d never have time for analysis. There comes a point of diminishing returns; that Hack Wilson had 191 RBIs during the 1930 season rather than 190 ought not have a material impact on any analysis of baseball player performance. At other times, entire articles or analyses or theories or paradigms are developed on the basis of deeply flawed data.

I don’t know where Piketty sits on this spectrum. However, I think Giles (and some of the commentary surrounding his work) could do a better job of describing Piketty’s error rate relative to the overall volume of data that was examined. If Giles scrutinized all of Piketty’s data and found a handful of errors, that would be very different from taking a small subsample of that data and finding it rife with mistakes.

All of this is part of the peer-review process. Academics sometimes think of peer review as a relatively specific activity undertaken by other academics before academic papers or journal articles are published. This process of peer review has been much studied over the years (often in peer-reviewed articles, naturally), and scholars have come to different conclusions about how effective it is in avoiding various types of errors in published research.

I’m not necessarily opposed to this type of peer review. But I think it defines peer review too narrowly and confines it too much to the academy. Peer review, to my mind, should be thought of as a continuous process: It starts from the moment a researcher first describes her result to a colleague over coffee and it never ends, even after her work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal (or a best-selling book). Many findings are contradicted or even retracted years after being published, and replication rates for peer-reviewed academic studies across a variety of disciplines are disturbingly low.

I have a dog in this fight, obviously. I think journalistic organizations from the Financial Times to FiveThirtyEight should be thought of as prospective participants in the peer-review process, meaning both that we provide peer review and that our work is subject to peer review.

I can’t speak for the FT, but I know that FiveThirtyEight gets some things badly wrong from time to time. It’s helpful to have readers who hold us to a very high standard. (A terrific question is whether FiveThirtyEight and other news organizations are transparent enough about their research to be full-fledged participants in the peer-review process. That’s something I should probably address more completely in a separate post, but see the footnotes for some discussion about it.⁴⁸)

Piketty’s errors would not have been detected so soon had he not published his data in detail. That’s not to say that transparency is an absolute defense.⁴⁹ But one should also assume that there are as many problems (probably more) with unpublished data, or poorly explained methods.⁵⁰

The peer-review process ideally involves both exactly replicating a research finding and replicating it in principle. It would be problematic if other researchers couldn’t duplicate Piketty’s data. But it would be at least as problematic — I’d argue more so — if they could replicate it but found that Piketty’s conclusions were not very robust to changes in assumptions or data sources.

Some of Giles’s critique of Piketty gets at this problem. For instance, he calls into question Piketty’s finding that wealth inequality is rising throughout Western Europe, a result which he says depends on a particular series of assumptions and choices that Piketty made.⁵¹

Of course, Giles’s methodological choices can be scrutinized, too. Perhaps there’s some reasonable set of assumptions under which wealth inequality is not rising at all in Western Europe, another under which it’s increasing modestly, and a third under which it’s increasing substantially.

In the medium term, the better test might be one of research that’s built up from scratch and largely independently of both Piketty and Giles. How robust are their findings to reasonable changes in data and assumptions?⁵²

And in the long run, the best test might be whether Piketty’s hypothesis makes a good prediction about wealth inequality, i.e. whether wealth inequality continues to rise. The prediction won’t be as easy to evaluate as election forecasts are.⁵³ Still, Piketty’s book comes closer to making a testable prediction than much other macroeconomic work.

Science is messy, and the social sciences are messier than the hard sciences. Research findings based on relatively new and novel data sets (like Piketty’s) are subject to one set of problems — the data itself will have been less well scrutinized and is more likely to contain errors, small and large. Research on well-worn datasets are subject to another. Such data is probably in better shape, but if researchers are coming to some new and novel conclusions from it, that may reflect some flaw in their interpretation or analysis.

The closest thing to a solution is to remain appropriately skeptical, perhaps especially when the research finding is agreeable to you. A lot of apparently damning critiques prove to be less so when you assume from the start that data analysis and empirical research, like other forms of intellectual endeavor, are not free from human error. Nonetheless, once the dust settles, it seems likely that both Piketty and Giles will have moved us toward an improved understanding of wealth inequality and its implications.

How much are you willing to pay for a virtual item? For years, time was the only thing that I needed to invest once I bought a game, so the value of unlockable items was based on how many hours I was willing to kill. I spent weeks unlocking every character in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, even longer to get those last cheats in GoldenEye 007, and I never could quite earn everything that F-Zero GX had to offer. That game was hard! Some of my fondest gaming memories come from finally achieving the unachievable. However, a growing trend has turned this simple practice into one that feels exploitative. Unlockables have become a grind, and the microtransactions that now provide a shortcut to those precious objects only highlights how monetization can taint even the best things.

Electronic Arts has implemented microtransactions in Battlefield 4 for those who would rather shell out a couple of dollars here and there to get every item than mess with the randomness that the real system is built around. On the surface, this seems like a handy feature for those who want to enjoy Battlefield 4 but don't have the free time to get all the goodies. And I do relate to that mindset. As an adult with a full-time job, a wife, and a dog, I can no longer spend endless hours in front of my television trying to master a game's intricacies. So giving people with more money than time a leg up in their digital escapades seems downright generous. Electronic Arts is doing us a favor, right?

Well, not really. You see, Electronic Arts has solved a problem that it has created. Keeping unlocks behind a wall--be it one you hurdle by spending money or investing time makes no difference--is a decision that the publisher made. And if it realized that a segment of its audience had no interest in going through the hoops the developers constructed, it could have doled out said items in a way that didn't require you to spend even more money on a game you had already purchased. By increasing the rewards you earn at the end of every match, or making more weapons available from the onset, EA would have cut down on the time you needed to spend to see everything. So giving us the option to spend money to avoid a time sink doesn't seem like a happy, alternate method at all, but merely another way to nickel-and-dime its customers.

Microtransactions now provide a shortcut to those precious objects and highlight how monetization can taint even the best things.

In games where I spent hours trying to unlock everything that wasn't available from the beginning, I had to develop my skills to reach those heights. F-Zero GX required complete mastery to overcome the conniving racers who populated later tracks, GoldenEye forced me to plan in-depth strategies to shave seconds off my time, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 urged me to learn the subtleties of every one of its 56 characters. The act of playing offered an intangible reward, one in which I grew so proficient at the challenges that it didn't even matter what waited for me on the other side. These unlockables didn't require me to grind levels for hours on end, or perform the same feats ad nauseam. Rather, unlockables were doled out based on my skill level--not my time commitment--which made the process more immediately satisfying.

This is a marked change from how unlockables are often handled now. For those who aren't aware, here's a brief rundown on how you earn new gear in Battlefield 4. You gain levels by completing matches, which earns you weapons and attachments. Well, kind of. You only get new weapons based on the class of gun you're using. So, being proficient with a shotgun gets you a new shotgun. Pretty logical. Only it's never that easy. If you earn, say, a sniper scope for one rifle, you can't just use it on another rifle you unlock later. No, you have to unlock every attachment for each individual weapon, which takes hours upon hours of hard dedication.

That doesn't sound too bad if you enjoy Battlefield 4, but there's a breaking point for everyone. How many dozens of hours are you willing to put in to not only unlock, but fully equip, a weapon you have your eye on? How many times can you stand unlocking the same laser sight and heavy barrel as you work your way up the ladder of assault rifles? Plus, you earn battle packs as well. These are what EA now lets you purchase, and they add randomness to an already overwhelming unlock structure. You never know what these packs will contain, so you spend many more hours trying to get everything.

Of course, EA offered a way around this months ago. They let you spend $50 on "buy-everything" DLC, which doesn't actually fix the problem. But there is a better way to handle rewards already out there. Call of Duty: Black Ops introduced a currency system known as CODPoints. As the name implies, you earn points for hearing the call, but what makes this system work is the freedom it gives to intrepid players. Instead of shuttling you down prescribed unlock trees like Battlefield, Call of Duty lets you choose the weapons and attachments that you want to use. It reduces the grinding element that has become so prevalent. By giving you full control over what you earn, you're not forced to contend with agonizing randomization, or suffer through underpowered weapons until you get the one you want. It's a great solution that empowers players without forcing them to invest countless hours to unlock what they want or cough up extra cash to circumvent the system.

How many dozens of hours are you willing to put in to not only unlock, but fully equip, a weapon you have your eye on?

And it's not like Battlefield 4 is alone in how its unlock system functions. In Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, you can either endlessly play matches or just shell out a couple of bucks to skip over the monotony. The same is true in Forza Motorsport 5. So strong was the outrage for the microtransactions in Turn 10's racer that the developers changed how rewards are doled out so people don't feel as though they're being taken advantage of.

NBA 2K14 was one of my favorite games from last year, but the manner in which you build your created character reeks of exploitation. It takes so long to even earn a pair of new shoes--let alone boost your attributes--that your best options are to either pay the bounty or move on to another mode. Improving your player takes too much time to make it worthwhile for anyone but the most diehard. And when Take Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick says, "when we design our virtual currency packs, we do it in a way that will make consumers happier, not sadder that they are engaged with our games," it worries me that NBA 2K will continue its tradition of making people grind to upgrade their players instead of developing a smoother unlock system.

I don't want to demean the act of playing modern games with an emphasis on unlockable content. There is inherent joy in striving for excellence in all of these games, even if there weren't any bonuses bestowed upon the most dedicated. Rather, the problem is that developers design games in such a way that they demand hours upon hours of the same basic actions to see everything there is. It's such a huge time commitment that it becomes tiring moving up the ladder. The grind that goes with leveling up becomes the norm, so much so that I completely understand why someone would spend money to escape that void. This is especially true if you buy, say, Battlefield 4 after your friends have already sunk hours into it. Do you really want to play with a bunch of strangers to achieve the same rank as your buddies? Or would you rather just bypass that dance so you can have fun with the people you want to play with? It seems like an obvious decision, and one that could be avoided completely if the developers so choose.

There's a middle ground between the grind necessary to unlock items in many games and the money you must pay to skip that process. If the developers realize that people don't have the time or patience to unlock the things they want, then there should be a less punitive way to access that content than we currently have. I understand that companies aren't going to turn up their noses at an alternate revenue stream, but at some point, their customers must take priority over their bottom line. We love unlockables. Rewards can add lasting appeal to a game, give you something to strive for long after you've seen the ending credits roll. But companies shouldn't take advantage of our obsession with earning all of those bonus goodies. Making it an option to pay more money doesn't solve any problem; it just highlights one. Namely, that your unlock system is so much of a grind people are willing to pay money to avoid playing the game.

(via Cheezburger)

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings delivered some pointed thoughts about Comcast’s play for national broadband dominance and the world of net neutrality while speaking at a conference in California this morning.

Hastings spoke in no uncertain terms before the audience at Code Conference today, making clear his issues with the ever-growing scope of Comcast.

He called residential internet a “natural monopoly,” which in most places it is, and drew attention to the fact that for most consumers, the only non-cable option is fiber — and even that’s limited. Cable, Hastings said, is pretty much the entire residential internet.

That turned the conversation to the recent peering deal Comcast and Netflix made earlier this year. Comcast continues to claim that Netflix is thirty percent of their internet traffic, and so should pay its fair share. Hastings quipped, “We offered to pay 30 percent of the costs if we get 30 percent of the revenue.” Comcast was not particularly interested in that arrangement.

Though the details of the arrangement between Comcast and Netflix remain confidential, Hastings expressed his displeasure with the fact that it needed to exist at all. The principle of the thing, he said, is the problem. “They want the whole internet to pay them for when their subscribers” do anything online. It starts with a small charge now, but over time, Comcast will want more and more. “Not just us, but to the whole internet,” Hastings said.

Comcast’s double-dipping money-making doesn’t just face the consumers, after all. It can hit businesses, too. And of course, it’s not just Comcast. Now, Netflix has to cut similar deals with everyone else, too.

Hastings pivoted from there to say that’s why Netflix endorses net neutrality: “If you have a monopoly structure, you need some protections,” he said. “That’s why we’ve been talking about creating an Internet with no slow lane.”

“When you listen to the radio more, it doesn’t cost you more,” explained Hastings. “But with gasoline, you pay more. The Internet is much closer to radio than to gas. There’s only a marginal increase in costs.”

Hastings has been on the record before saying that the Comcast/TWC merger is a terrible idea. When asked why he and his company have been such staunch and solo voices against the Comcast merger and for net neutrality, Hastings readily admitted that it was in the company’s best interests to do so. But, he added, someone has to:

“Someone has to stand up for what’s important. We’re raising the question –- [Comcast will] have 40 percent of residential Internet – what does it mean when one company has that kind of control?”

Data caps, higher prices, and even tighter control, that’s what. Netflix doesn’t see Comcast as the competition; that place is reserved for content companies like HBO. But it does need to get to viewers to succeed. And for that, it needs Comcast.

For more, not only about Comcast and net neutrality, but also about upcoming Netflix shows and why its DVD-only spinoff failed, check out the full liveblog at Re/Code.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Talks Net Neutrality [Re/Code]

The critics prove too much.

Matt Yglesias has a post suggesting that if the NBA were "any normal industry" it would not be able to get away with collusive schemes like the NBA draft. For those who don't follow American sports, the new players entering the pro basketball league are picked via a draft and assigned to various teams. This does seem to violate anti-trust rules. Here I'm going to take a contrarian position, although the truth is probably somewhere in between my view and Yglesias's view. I will simplify to make a point.

It's not clear to me how we should think about the pro basketball industry:

1. It's an industry with 30 firms that collude.
2. It's an industry with a single monopolistic firm having a bunch of franchises.
3. It's not an industry at all; it's a group of firms in entirely different industries.

Matt Yglesias seems to hold the first view. I lean toward the second or third. Firms are in the same industry if consumers see their products as close substitutes. In my view going to a Cleveland Cavalier game is not a close substitute for going to a Boston Celtics game. Rather the Celtics are competing against other sports teams in Boston, and indeed other forms of entertainment in Boston, such as movies. It's in the (monopolistically competitive) "Boston entertainment industry."

Now this is where the simplification comes in. What I said is not completely correct. Even though a Boston fan would not go to a Cleveland game, they might watch Cleveland on TV. So in that limited sense they are in the same industry, or at least have been since the onset of TV revenues. I simply don't know how important that factor is. There are all sorts of complications such as the sharing of TV ad revenue that cloud the picture. So to be precise, my claim is that the teams were in completely separate industries until the onset of TV, and are still in mostly separate industries.

Now let's think about option 2. Suppose we think of the NBA as a single firm, which uses inputs from all these teams to produce a product called "games." Notice how far we are from traditional industries like automobiles, where GM and Ford do not cooperate to produce cars. Basketball teams compete in an athletic sense, but they cooperate in an economic sense. I have two problems with Yglesias' claim that any normal industry would not be allowed to do something like the draft. If that were true, then wouldn't it be equally true that any normal industry would not be allowed to collude on output? In other words, the mere fact that the NBA sets up a schedule of games is evidence of a collusive output agreement. Do we really want to apply anti-trust logic to schedules? Should we have a free market where teams (and fans) just randomly show up and hope there is someone else to play that day? I have a hard time imagining the NBA as anything other than a monopoly that organizes output (i.e. that sets schedules.)

My second objection is that it's not clear that other industries don't behave this way. Prior to the 1970s, ATT had a monopoly on phone service. Even today Boeing is the only builder of jumbo jets in America. A young American who wanted to work in the phone industry in the 1960s, or who wants to build jumbo jets today, has only one firm they can work for. If that firm hired them, the firm can assign them to any part of the country it wishes to. Yes, the young jumbo jet engineer could go to Europe and work for Airbus, but the young basketball player can also go to Europe and play in a different league. So if you consider the NBA to be a single firm, a monopoly, then the draft is really no different from the personnel policies of any other monopoly in the US.

To summarize, I have my doubts as to whether basketball firms are even in the same industry. In that case antitrust issues don't apply. If I'm wrong, and they are in the same industry, then I think it makes more sense to view that industry as a single firm that uses inputs from multiple teams to produce a product called "games." And that product can only be produced via collusion. Thus either basketball firms aren't in the same industry, or they are in the same industry, but should be allowed to collude.

None of this has any bearing on the issue of whether players are under- or overpaid, a debate that I find to be mind-numbingly boring. It's just one of those monopoly/monopsony deals where both sides of the negotiation are quite rich. Yawn.

(13 COMMENTS)

The way in which we think and the way we write is greatly influenced by the authors we read. This applies especially to those we read daily: journalists, and now bloggers. When their style is distinctive and vivid, we often pick up uses and words, sometimes inadvertently, and we make them ours.

I was however a bit surprised, the other day, when I did realise that there is an author that influenced the way I dine out. I'm referring to Tyler Cowen, for his wonderful little book "An Economist Gets Lunch." Published a few years ago, I found it a tremendously enjoyable read. It also gives you plenty of tips. In particular, I treasure two of them, and I realised that, perhaps casually, ever since I've read the book my behaviour changed because of those tips.

For one, when you go out "at fancy and expensive restaurants", Tyler suggests you try the oddities. Ask yourself "which of the dishes on the menu sounds the least appetising".

The logic is simple. At a fancy restaurant the menu is well thought out. The time and attention of the kitchen are scarce. An item won't be on the menu unless there is a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probables rates especially good. (...) In plain language: order the ugly and order the unknown.

This served me well, on a number of occasions, and also stimulated me to be a bit more adventurous at the dinner table.
Another is Tyler's suggestion to ask the waiter "What is best?" before ordering.

I get more nervous when the waiter responds: "All of our menu items are good". Another problem is when you hear: 'Best? That depends on what you like. It's hard for me to say". These responses are signs of cowardly or under-informed waiters, not used to dealing with demanding foodies. The bottom line is that these waiters have never been given firm instructions by a quality boss or chef, or those instructions have been summarily forgotten. It's a bad sign for the whole restaurant.

This served me well too but I noticed that some waiters are rather shy, or indeed do not want to make a commitment. Others will simply point you to the most pricey item on the list. In some very good restaurants (including two of my favourite restaurants, one very posh, the other quite unpretentious), some waiters really idolise the chef--who happens to be the owner of the place, too. So, I've developed my own version: I single out a couple of dishes that I'm looking forward to trying, and ask them which one of them I should have, according to their own preferences (ok, I ask them "What's best between A and B?"). When they're confronted with two options, this is at least my experience so far, waiters who believe in their restaurants tend to become more talkative, and since what they are asked to do is taking side between two options, and not picking up just one out of all what gets out of the kitchen, tend to strongly recommend the one or the other. This too has served me well. (4 COMMENTS)

Robert P. Murphy, a frequent writer for Econlib, has a good analysis of Kevin Drum's (of Mother Jones) comments on the current scandal with Veterans Administration health care. I'll hit a few highlights and then add some of my own thoughts.

Quick background: Drum makes it clear that he's not trying to defend Obama or Veterans Administration health care. What he does is give some facts that he fears will be left out of the discussion, facts that, in his view, are somewhat mitigating. His piece is short and so I won't summarize it further. Instead, I want to highlight one argument he made and one response that Murphy gave to this argument.

Drum writes:

During the Clinton administration, the performance of the VHA was revolutionized under Kenneth Kizer. The old VHA of Born on the 4th of July fame was turned into a top-notch health care provider that garnered great reviews from vets and bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill. The best account of this is Phil Longman's 2005 article, "Best Care Anywhere."

In 1999, Republicans decided to play dumb political games with Kizer's reappointment. Eventually, with the handwriting on the wall, he chose to leave the VHA.

Under the Bush administration, some of the VHA's old problems started to re-emerge, most likely because it no longer had either presidential attention or a great administrator. As early as 2002--before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars made things even worse--claims-processing time skyrocketed from 166 days to 224 days.

Under the Obama administration, the patient load of the VHA has increased by over a million. Partly this is because of the large number of combat vets returning from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and partly it's because Obama kept his promise to expand access to the VHA.

The most sensational charge against the VHA is that 40 or more vets died while they were waiting for appointments at the VA facilities in Phoenix. But so far there's no evidence of that. The inspector general investigating the VHA testified last week that of the 17 cases they've looked at so far, they haven't found any incidents of a patient death caused by excessive wait times.

Murphy replies:

Look at what Drum is saying here. Even on his own terms, he admits that the VA system used to be awful--hence the reference to the Tom Cruise movie. Then, so long as there was a point man in the federal government committed to cleaning up the system, it worked. But alas, the moment that person left, the system went to hell again.

And:

One of the main virtues of a decentralized market economy is that no one person has the power to kill you. If you don't get along with your boss, you can quit and work for somebody else--or start your own business. If you don't like your butcher, you can buy your meat somewhere else. And in a genuinely free market, if you didn't like the service you were getting from one doctor or hospital, it would be easy to take your business elsewhere. (italics his)

Murphy is right. If Drum's argument is that running a good health care system depends on having a good President in office and, further, on having that President appoint a good administrator of the system, then that's a real problem. Indeed, that is a problem I often see with people on the left and the right. On the left, people often complain about how a Republican president runs a part of the government that the left wants the government to run. But they have to know that occasionally there will be a Republican president and that there will even be a Democratic president they like who appoints people they don't like. On the right, I see Republicans and neo-conservatives advocate a highly interventionist foreign policy and then complain when someone like Obama comes along and carries out that interventionist foreign policy in a way they don't like. They have to know that occasionally there will be Democratic presidents.

This is one of the major problems with government. The government comes in and sets up an agency, in health care, in foreign policy, or in some other area. Then, whether it runs well depends on which particular appointee runs the agency.

But let's not carried away with talking about how well the agency ran. Look back at one point made by Drum. Early in the Bush administration, "claims-processing time skyrocketed" to 224 days. That is long. And it skyrocketed from what level? 30 days? 60 days? No. Kevin Drum tells us: 166 days. Now, that is a 35 percent increase, which is a substantial number. But 166 days itself is well over 5 months. So the original claims-processing times were already in the sky.

Maybe, then, we can depend on bloggers and reporters to track the behavior of government agencies so that they will be accountable. Maybe. But notice that in 2011, well into the Obama administration's time in office, when a lot of these problems with the Veterans Health Administration were happening, blogger Paul Krugman was calling he VHA "a huge policy success story."

Krugman wrote:

What's behind this success? Crucially, the V.H.A. is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it's free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense. And because V.H.A. patients are in it for the long term, the agency has a stronger incentive to invest in prevention than private insurers, many of whose customers move on after a few years.

It's much better to depend on competition among private firms than on a government-funded agency. (5 COMMENTS)

A study finds that promises fulfilled beyond expectations don't significantly boost the satisfaction of the people who benefit

The statistical manipulation will make it easier for Italy to slip under the European Union's debt-to-GDP ceiling

The FT economics editor Chris Giles says French economist Thomas Piketty's bestseller "Capitalism in the 21st Century," about rising inequality in the West, contains serious errors that undermine his conclusion that wealth distributions are widening.

Giles says there are clear examples of some "fat finger" mis-transcriptions, and compares the situation to omissions found in Reinhart and Rogoff's data on debt levels and growth.

But while the two Harvard professors' errors seemed to have been unintended, Giles levels a more serious critique: That Piketty actively manipulated his data.

His most damning claim: Piketty altered UK data to show that wealth distribution there is worse off than it appears to be. 

Piketty says the share of income going to the top 10% never fell lower than 60%, and since the end of the 1970s has returned to 70%, a level not seen in 70 years.

But the data Piketty himself cites shows the top 10% share of wealth is no greater than 50%, and may be as low as 42%.

Giles writes: "This appears to be the result of swapping between data sources, not following the source notes, misinterpreting the more recent data and exaggerating increases in wealth inequality."

Below is the chart. The right-most portion of Piketty's blue trend line showing the share of wealth owned by the top 10% of Britons ends up well above what's suggested by the data, in red, that Piketty himself cites.

Meanwhile, just one official data point for the top 1% share of wealth aligns with Piketty's blue line. But Giles said the source of that data said it was not suitable for the kind of calculation Piketty is trying to make. 

"Prof. Piketty ends his series taking at face value the level of the HMRC data, despite HMRC saying clearly the data is not suited for that purpose, nor is it consistent with the old Inland Revenue Series which Prof. Piketty uses for earlier years. This latter point is also clearly stated in the notes to the source data."

In a follow-up video on FT.com, Giles shows another example: Piketty appears to have to added random numbers to certain formula to bend the data toward his hypothesis. "A two is added because the number wasn't high enough — it didnt seem to fit what he wanted to show in his charts, so he just added two to it," Giles says. "There was quite a lot of this sort of thing in his spreadsheets."

 

Read Giles' full blow-by-blow account of Piketty's alleged error here »

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Americans are getting fatter. A recent Gallup Poll found that nearly 30 percent of adult Americans are considered obese.

Research on the obesity epidemic to date has identified a long list of contributing factors, including ethnicity, income, bigger portion sizes, and fast food, among many others.

But according to a recent report published in the journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, scientists should rethink entirely the way obesity research is conducted and what causes of the problem we should focus on.

Many obesity studies looks at certain subgroups of the population. For example, earlier this year we reported on a study that found obesity rates were decreasing among teens from well-educated families, but continuing to rise among poor teens.

This new research found that Americans across all income levels have been gaining weight at similar rates for the past 25 years. That suggest that obesity is driven by environmental factors that affect the entire population, not just particular subgroups.

Researchers dispel popular obesity-related myths

Myth One: Americans are fat because we don't have time to work out

People have blamed obesity on the fact that we are overworked and don't have time to exercise, but actually, over the past half century, there has been a reduction in work hours and an increase in free time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, people spent 10 minutes less on work and watched 15 minutes more of TV or napped 10 minutes more than they did in 2003.

Myth Two: Americans are fat because we get less exercise than we have in the past

We often hear that advances in technology, and computers in particular, have contributed to more sedentary lifestyles. But, as it turns out, Americans are actually exercising more today than in the past. In 2001, 46 percent of Americans reported at least 30 minutes of moderate activity on 5 or more days per week. The number increased to 51 percent in 2009, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Myth Three: Americans are fat because they don't have access to grocery stores

The term "food desert" has been popularized over the past few years to describe an urban location that doesn't have great access to grocery stores that sell fresh produce. These communities tend to have higher rates of obesity — and naturally people have drawn a link.

But several recent studies have found there isn't a significant relationship between distance from food stores and obesity. And, surprisingly, fruit and veggie consumption in the U.S. has actually increased over the past few years. Americans are eating more broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, onions, apples, bananas, and grapes than ever before.

Why, then, are we so fat?

Instead of the myths about food and obesity above, the report's authors suggest the cause of our unhealthy weight could be more general: the overall cost and availability of food in the United States.

"The high cost of healthy food may not be the problem as far as obesity is concerned, rather it is the excess availability and affordability of all types of food," said Roland Sturm, lead author of the report and a senior economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization in a statement.

Food in the U.S. is currently at the cheapest level in history when measured as a fraction of disposable income. For example, in the 1950s, Americans spent one-fifth of their disposable income on food. Nowadays, people in the U.S. are spending an average of one-tenth of disposable income on food.

This means less money buys more calories for people at every economic level and that all Americans are exposed to an environment that tends towards obesity. This is true at every level of wealth.

SEE ALSO: The Most Obese Cities In America

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About 1.3 billion people use one or other version of Microsoft's Windows operating systems, and well over a billion have downloaded Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Minor variations aside, every copy of these products--like all other mass-market software--has exactly the same bits in it.

This makes such software a honeypot for hackers, who can write attack code that will cause precisely the same damage to, say, every copy of Windows 7 it infects. Worse, the bad guys can hone their attacks by practising on their own machines, confident that what they see will be what their victims get.

This computing monoculture--which also extends to the widespread use of particular pieces of hardware, such as microprocessors from Intel and ARM--has long been the bane of technologists. In the face of a near constant onslaught from hackers, antivirus software is frequently several steps behind the foe.

Symantec, one of the commercial pioneers of online security, estimates that antivirus software now stops only 45% of attacks. The firm recently declared that this approach was "dead" and a new one was needed.

Michael Franz, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine, agrees. And he believes the answer is to learn from nature. Lots of species are composed of individuals which are, the occasional set of identical twins apart, all slightly different genetically from each other.

Sexual reproduction ensures this. Indeed, it is probably the reason sex evolved in the first place, for it means that no bacterium or virus can wipe out an entire population, since some are almost certain to be genetically immune to any given pathogen.

Applying the idea of genetic diversity to software is not a new idea. High-security systems, such as the fly-by-wire programs used in aeroplanes, are designed from the outset with code that differs between installations. But this approach is too costly for large-scale use.

Some mass-market software companies have instead introduced modest diversity to deter attackers, such as randomly choosing the starting addresses of big blocks of memory, but this is not enough to defeat a determined hacker.

Dr Franz is therefore taking a novel approach by tweaking the programs, called compilers, that convert applications written in languages such as C++ and Java into the machine code employed by a computer's processor. Most compilers are designed to optimise things such as the speed of the resulting machine code. That leads to a single answer.

Dr Franz's "multicompiler" trades a bit of this optimality for diversity in the compiled code. This leeway, which diminishes the code's speed of execution by an amount imperceptible to the user, enables a multicompiler to create billions of different, but functionally identical, interpretations of the original program.

When a user requests a specific application from a cloud-based "app store", the appropriate multicompiler in the store generates a unique version for him, thus making a hacker's task nigh impossible.

Dr Franz has already built a prototype that can diversify programs such as Firefox and Apache Linux. Test attacks designed to take over computers running the resulting machine code always failed. The worst thing that happened was that the attack crashed the target machine, requiring a reboot. The rest of the time it simply had no perceptible effect.

Dr Franz puts the chance of a hacker successfully penetrating one of his randomised application programs at about one in a billion. No doubt these odds would shorten if his approach were taken up widely, for hackers are endlessly ingenious.

But at the moment they mean that, if his system of multicompilers were used universally, any given hack would affect but a handful of the machines existing on the entire planet.

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When the Minute 319 "pulse flow" began in March 2014, it was not clear whether the effort would be enough to reconnect the Colorado River with the Sea of Cortez. Some hydrologists thought there might be just enough water; others were less optimistic.It turns out the optimists were right, though just barely. For the first time in sixteen years, the Colorado River was reunited with the Sea of Cortez on May 15, 2014.

While scientists involved in the effort point out the goal was always to recharge groundwater and deliver water to special ecological restoration zones, environmental advocates haven't been shy about basking in the symbolic importance of the river reaching the sea.

Now that we've witnessed the Colorado flowing in its delta, we know that it is possible to conjure the river back to life where the world thought it was dead. It's a resurrection that we won't soon forget, and a vision of what could be in the future," wrote Jennifer Pitt, the director of the Environmental Defense Fund's Colorado River Project in an article published by National Geographic.

Francisco Zamora, director of the Sonoran Institute's Colorado River Delta Legacy Program, took these photograph from a Lighthawk-supported plane on May 15, 2014. See the Sonoran Institute's Facebook page for more images. To learn more about the scientific rational behind the pulse flow, see this EOS article. View satellite imagery of the pulse flow here.

SEE ALSO: For First Time In 16 Years, Colorado River Flows Into The Gulf Of California

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Lost luggage and ever-shrinking leg room aren't the only hazards of air travel. New research has found that deadly bacteria can hang around airplane cabins for up to a week. 

These aren't your everyday bacteria, either. The researchers specifically tested for two two nasty ones: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and a dangerous strain of E. coli.

"Our data show that both of these bacteria can survive for days on the selected types of surfaces independent of the type of simulated body fluid present, and those pose a risk of transmission via skin contact," study researcher Kiril Vaglenov of Auburn University said in a statement.

The diseases caused by this bacteria aren't fun: MRSA can cause a painful, antibiotic-resistant skin infection that can sometimes spread throughout the body. And E. coli can cause severe abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea, and vomiting.

They tested for these superbugs on six different airplane cabin surfaces: armrest, plastic tray table, metal toilet button, window shade, seat pocket cloth, and leather.

Their findings? MRSA was still alive after a week on seat-back pocket material. E.coli lived for four days on an armrest. 

The researchers presented their findings at at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Massachusetts. 

(A note: The study didn't test the cleaning products or protocols used by airlines, so these aren't totally real world conditions.)

"The take-home message is be careful about your hand hygiene and don’t travel while contagious or immune compromised," Vaglenov told The Washington Post. Basically, don't forget the hand sanitizer.

SEE ALSO: Hand Sanitizer Doesn't Create Superbugs

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It's Memorial Day weekend, which means the time for barbecues and nights outside has begun. But, unfortunately, it's also the time that mosquitoes see as open season to dine on humans.

If you can't spend a summer night outside without slapping your ankles — and you still end up with dozens of mosquito bites — then it might be true that the flying pests really do love you.

And those lucky people who say they don't get bitten? They exist too.

But it's not because one person's blood tastes better to the small hovering bloodsuckers — or at least, not just that. In a TED 2014 talk earlier this year in Vancouver, microbial ecologist Rob Knight explained that the bacteria, or microbes, on skin produce different chemicals, some of which smell more attractive to mosquitoes.

The trillion or so microbes that live on skin are a small percentage of the 100 trillion bacteria that live on and inside the body, but they play a huge role in body odor. Without those bacteria, human sweat wouldn't smell like anything.

However, those different bacteria vary greatly from person to person. Knight explained that while we share 99.9% of DNA with other humans, most people only share about 10% of their microbes.

A siren song for mosquitoes

To demonstrate that mosquitoes are overwhelmingly attracted to certain types of skin microbes, researchers asked 48 adult male volunteers to refrain from alcohol, garlic, spicy food, and showers for two days. The men wore nylon socks for 24 hours to build up a collection of their unique skin microbes.

Researchers then used glass beads that they had rubbed against the underside of the men's feet to pick up their scent as mosquito bait.

Nine men out of the 48 proved to be especially attractive to mosquitoes, while the scents of seven lucky volunteers were largely ignored. The "highly attractive" group had 2.62 times as high a concentration of one common skin microbe, and 3.11 times higher concentration of another common microbe, compared to the "poorly attractive group." That poorly attractive group had a more diverse bacterial colony on their skin as a whole.

Researchers say that it's possible that some people's smell acts a natural deterrent.

But there's an equalizer for those that naturally draw swarms of mosquitoes. The same pests are attracted to beer drinkers.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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SEE ALSO: This Small Patch Could Make You Invisible To Mosquitoes

DON'T MISS: 11 Reasons Why Mosquitoes Are The Worst

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Taobao, a large online retail platform, has become increasingly important to rural economies across China.

Establishing online stores on Taobao requires little more than decent internet links and a logistics chain (often motorcycle delivery), so millions have been able to start selling goods at low cost.

The trend has reversed the fortunes of many rural people.

In the typical narrative of what have become known as "Taobao villages", a group of locals starts selling handicrafts online and taps into a lucrative consumer market, bringing money and success to the village. Some villages near to factories also sell mass-produced manufactured goods.

Alibaba, the conglomerate that owns the platform, says a Taobao village is any place where 10% of the population is engaged in online retailing.

It says such activity is growing fast and that there are already 20 such villages across China, each generating at least 10m yuan ($1.6m) in Taobao-driven revenue. In some rural areas, the ability to set up Taobao shops has meant there is no need to leave home to work in a factory or on a building site in a big city.

One village in the southern province of Guangdong has now taken the concept to the next level, opening a "Taobao university" where people come to learn how to sell online.

The local government of Junpu decided early on to support the Taobao concept with free wireless internet for residents, tax credits and an informal plan to give free store space to anyone--even people from outside Junpu--who wants to set up a physical shop for their inventory.

At the same time, local officials went a step further by opening a professional school with dozens of teachers to spread the art of Taobao selling--everything from beginner-level computer skills to mastering customer service. Nearly 300 students are enrolled in the school, which is free to all.

Julie Zhang teaches entry-level computing at the school. She says students are motivated because they have seen the wealth amassed by Taobao sellers in the village. "They need to work on learning basic things, but most students develop their skills very fast," she says.

Junpu was previously home to a heavily polluting food-processing industry. Its switch to progressive online business has been impressively swift. One reason was the success of a hometown boy, Xu Zhuangbing. Mr Xu, now 27, started a successful shop on Taobao in 2011, when he was living in Guangzhou, the provincial capital 450km (280 miles) away.

He soon realised he could just as easily be working from his home village, so the following year he moved back to Junpu, paid off his entire family debt within a year and hired 15 employees. His next plan is to start his own fashion label.

Even Mr Xu was surprised that the local government wanted to support the Taobao village concept. But he agreed to help train people, build up the school and give advice to others wanting to get rich online. Of the 3,000 residents in this tight-knit community, more than half make their living on Taobao, most of them selling clothes made in nearby factories.

Last month a group of 20 prospective online retailers came from several African countries to study Junpu for three weeks. The official Xinhua news agency carried an article in April about the international training, noting how the "African friends" had learned tremendous skills. In most villages in China, people leave to find work. In Junpu, the flow is the other way.

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Alcohol consumption varies widely across the globe, and the U.S. stacks up pretty well compared to some other countries.

As the map below from the World Health Organization shows, Russians and their neighbors drink more than almost everyone else in the world.

Portugal, Grenada, and Andorra are also ranked in the highest category at more than 12.5 liters per person over the age of 15 in 2010.

WHO notes in its report that 48% of those included in this data abstain from drinking altogether. So if those people were excluded, per capita consumption among those who do drink would be even higher than what's shown on this map.

Check it out:

Canadians drink more than Americans, keeping pace with most European countries. Alcohol consumption is low in northern Africa, but the southern half of the continent sees higher drinking rates, especially South Africa and Namibia.

Alcohol consumption in Russia is a major concern. A recent study found that the high number of early deaths in Russia could be attributed to people drinking too much. Commons causes of early deaths include liver disease, alcohol poisoning, and getting into accidents or fights while drunk.

Other countries near Russia, including Ukraine and Belarus, have similar levels of alcohol consumption.

WHO's report notes that the European region contains just 14.7% of the world's population above the age of 15, but accounts for 25.7% of the total alcohol consumed worldwide. The report uses the most recent data for alcohol consumption around the world.

In addition to having some of the highest alcohol consumption rates in the world, Russia and Ukraine also have the most risky patterns of drinking, according to WHO:

To determine which countries have the riskiest drinking patterns, WHO considers the usual quantity of alcohol consumed per occasion, proportion of drinking events when drinkers get drunk, proportion of drinkers who drink daily or nearly daily, festive drinking, drinking with meals, and drinking in public places.

SEE ALSO: Beers Of The World [MAPS]

NOW WATCH: Is Draft Beer Better Than Bottled Beer?

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Sometimes when you have a lot of dogs, they don't all get the exercise they need. Not these dogs though, they get to use these sweet dog treadmills at their outdoor dog gym. So even though there's a lot of dogs, they all get to be active. Well, most of them. The dog on the left is just out for a relaxing stroll.

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Who invented cloud computing? Some say it was Amazon in 2006. Others say it was Google a few years earlier. But it's all a matter of perspective. We have video proof that cloud computing was really invented in 1994 by AT&T.

French state-controlled railway operator SNCF will be forced to modify more than a thousand stations after it was revealed that the 1,860 new trains it ordered at a cost of  €15 billion ($20.5 billion) are too wide for many of the country's platforms. The mistake, which was revealed by satirical magazine Le Canard Enchainé, has already cost SNCF more than €50 million ($68.4m), as the operator started quietly "shaving" the edges of affected platforms.

1,300 stations out of a total of 8,700 in the country were deemed too narrow for the new trains to use, but 300 of those had already been discreetly widened when the scale of the error was shown to the public. The new regional express trains, due to go into service in 2016, were ordered...

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Some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the US is currently scattered between 77 locations all over the country, awaiting permanent storage. Until February, many experts suggested that the best place to put it was a facility about 40 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). For 15 years, WIPP has operated as the first and only permanent, deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the country, holding "low level" radioactive materials — mostly clothing and tools exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons production — in steel barrels more than 2,150 feet below the Earth’s surface.

But earlier this year two emergencies brought that suggestion — and WIPP’s future — into question. And now it...

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Studio apartments can get pretty tiny, but MIT is working on a new arrangement that could make them feel a whole lot bigger. For several years now, it's been iterating on a concept product called CityHome that could efficiently pack key pieces of an apartment into a single modular unit, allowing owners to pull out a bed or a table and then store it again when they're through with it in order to free up space. Many concepts and even some actual products have already done this, but MIT's latest vision goes far beyond simple storage.

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Jason Koebler writes: "Researchers are working to hybridize existing animals with extinct ones in order to create a '2.0' version of the animal. Using a genome editing technique known as CRISPR, Harvard synthetic biologist George Church has successfully migrated three genes, which gave the woolly mammoth its furry appearance, extra layer of fat, and cold-resistant blood, into the cells of Asian elephants, with the idea of eventually making a hybrid embryo. In theory, given what we know about both the woolly mammoth genome and the Asian elephant genome, the final product will be something that more closely resembles the former than the latter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Krumbach, a tiny, 1000-person village in Austrian, has some of the most avant-garde bus stops in the world. In exchange for a weeklong holiday in the village, seven architects designed bus stops that are alternately whimsical, weird, and dazzling.

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Smoking is bad for you. There! We said it right up front. There's no reasonable line of argument that can lead to any other conclusion: smoking kills lots of people, around 50 percent of its long term users. But with all that said, people love to...

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I'm fairly certain that the idea of jumping over an island has never crossed my mind in all my years of thinking. But if you're a champion kitesurfer like Youri Zoon and you stumble across a small enough island, well, that's just another day on the beach for you. Jumping the damn thing and nailing it is just how you live. Watch Zoon catch the perfect gust of wind and fly over an entire 120-foot island near New Caledonia. Sick.

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