Miguel A. Arévalo

Have you ever needed to freeze a water pipe to do a quick plumbing job without shutting off all the water? It’s actually a fairly common practice for contractors, except they use a rather expensive tool to do it. As it turns out, there’s actually a fairly cheap and easy DIY solution you can do with minimal supplies or experience.

[Go Repairs] shows us that all you need is some pipe insulation (or a large sponge), a plastic bag, two zip-ties, and a air duster can. Wrap the insulation and plastic bag around the pipe, and zip-tie it in place. Holding the air duster can upside down, release the majority of the contents into the insulation. Congratulations, you’ve just frozen your pipe.

It works by exploiting the properties of a compressed gas — in this case tetrafluoroethane — the “air” in the air duster.

When this gas is under pressure it exists as both a liquid and a gas in the can. When you spray the can normally, you’re just getting the gas out — but if you hold the can upside down, the liquid comes out instead. Because liquid tetrafluoroethane can’t exist at atmospheric pressure as a liquid, it boils instantly as it leaves the can. This causes an extreme temperature drop in the surroundings due to the endothermic reaction occurring.

For a complete explanation, check out the video below.

Here are the opening lines of a report in today’s New York Times about a recent applause-worthy court decision:

Internet service providers are free to make deals with services like Netflix or Amazon allowing those companies to pay to stream their products to online viewers through a faster, express lane on the web, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

Federal regulators had tried to prevent those deals, saying they would give large, rich companies an unfair edge in reaching consumers.

Although the court decision and regulation in question are not formally about antitrust, the last sentence quoted above reveals the essence of antitrust – from its 1889 inception in the United States and throughout its history.  That essence is cronyism.  That essence is an effort to suppress competition – an effort that, of course, occurs also through regulatory channels, such as the Federal Communications Commission, other than ones that are formally “antitrust.”

Antitrust began in 1889, with the enactment of a dozen or so state statutes, as an effort to protect economically inefficient but politically influential producers (chiefly, local butchers) from the competition of more economically efficient but politically less popular producers (chiefly, the newly emergent Chicago meatpackers with their newfangled refrigerated railroad cars).  (See also here.)  The 1890 Sherman Act, at the national level, reflected this populist reaction against market-unleashed creative destruction.  The absurdity of antitrust reached its legislative zenith with the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act.

Of course, because it’s good p.r. for government (and for its cronies) to portray competition-suppressing intrusions as being pro-consumer – and because clever minds can always spin ingenious hypotheticals in which voluntary consumer actions today lead to consumer harms tomorrow – antitrust and other competition-suppressing exercises of government power almost always are served up with proclamations about how these or those government prohibitions of capitalist acts among consenting adults will protect consumers from being devoured by various species of nasty devils.

….

Read again the last sentence quoted above from the New York Times report:

Federal regulators had tried to prevent those deals, saying they would give large, rich companies an unfair edge in reaching consumers.

Translation:

Federal regulators had tried to prevent those deals, saying they would give large, rich companies an edge – earned through, and evidenced by, these companies’ past successes – in pleasing consumers.

If you worry that content providers such as Netflix and Amazon, now that they are “large” and “rich,” possess some “unfair” ability to rig markets in their favor at the expense of consumers, ask why internet service providers would go along with efforts by these companies to profit at the expense of consumers.  Internet service providers have every incentive to keep their products as attractive as possible to consumers.  Even if individual consumers have neither the incentive nor the ability to act today in ways that prevent “large, rich” companies from screwing them tomorrow, internet service providers certainly have such incentives and abilities.  (Andy Kleit and I wrote on this matter, in the context of predatory pricing, years ago.  See also here.)  But internet service providers also have incentives and abilities to craft deals with “large, rich” content providers such as Netflix and Amazon that improve consumer welfare even if such deals make life more difficult for less able and less successful content providers.

Government involvement in this matter will almost certainly rig the market in anti-competitive ways for political cronies.  The history of regulation in general, and of antitrust, in particular, gives no reason to think differently.

…

I would be remiss if I failed to mention here the pioneering work on antitrust by Dom Armentano.

Google Play Music and Movies has come to iOS. Rather than keeping to Android, Play Music and Movies have made their way to the App Store. This is another in many steps for Google to become agnostic about OS, and more concentrated on services.

While Play Music and Movies pale in comparison to media content from others, specifically Apple’s own ecosystem, it offers up a compelling reason to make it an option for iOS users. With the new app comes Chromecast suppport. Like third party apps on iOS, Play Music and Movies offers the ability to stream to a Google product.

Google has long maintained they are concerned more with services than operating systems, and this move — maybe more than any other — highlights that. The app itself is pretty much like the Android version, so those who use both operating systems will see little difference between the two. Of course, as mentioned, you can Chromecast with this one.

Aside from Netflix and HBO GO, we’re unaware of another Chromecast app for iOS. This could be the first media rental/purchase service which allows Chromecasting on iOS, so groundbreaking in its own right for that. The app is available for download now, bringing the mobile world that much closer together.
VIA: Google

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Jay Cross.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with the ancient “college savings tips” so-called experts keep force-feeding us:

• “Fill out the FAFSA before senior year to maximize aid eligibility!”
• “Buy used textbooks, you’ll save hundreds!”
• “Apply for scholarships. Try FastWeb.com!”

If you follow this advice, you will be thoroughly and totally prepared for college…in 1995. (You know, just in case that year ever comes back.) But in 2013, these strategies will get you slaughtered by the “Student Loan Industrial Complex.”

The Stark Truth About Yesterday’s College Tips

• Many students don’t fill out the FAFSA at all, nevermind early. I didn’t. It’s long, tedious, and confusing. Even if you do, the skyrocketing cost of college makes student loans a “lose/lose” proposition. Either you don’t qualify (in which case you can’t get aid) or you do qualify (in which case you probably shouldn’t take it.) Today’s loans are causing some graduates to commit ACTUAL suicide after committing financial suicide.
• Textbooks, while 812% pricier than 30 years ago, are a tiny portion of your total college costs. Every penny helps…but buying used books doesn’t pay for college any more than clipping coupons pays for a mansion.
• Most people who apply for scholarships get nothing. It’s a near-universal waste of time.

Continuing to preach this outdated advice is worse than useless: it’s condescending. It actually patronizes how challenging it is to finance your education. Today’s students don’t need the marginal cost reducers of the past. They need to completely rethink their strategy and beat colleges at their own game.

In this post, I am going to share an uncommon approach that can help you graduate faster, avoid student debt, and jump into the job market with both feet beneath you.

Testing Out: The Best Kept Secret in Higher Education

Let’s say you’re just starting college and you need to earn all of those major-independent “general education” credits (i.e., English 101) that every student takes.

What do you do?

Option #1: Take a standard English course. You know what that means: classes, homework, tests, quizzes, projects, group assignments…ugh. 95% of students assume this is their only option.

Time: 4 months

Cost: $3,000+

Option #2: Take CLEP tests instead. These multiple-choice exams cover a full semester of material…and if you pass, you get the same credits you would have spent months in a classroom for.

Time: 2-3 hours

Cost: $80

CLEP offers 33 exams in five subject areas, is accepted for credit by 2,900 colleges and universities, and is proctored in over 1,800 test centers nationwide. Developed by College Board — the same organization behind AP courses and the SAT — CLEP measures your knowledge regardless of how you obtained it: independent study, internships, and work experience included.

CLEP is the most popular exam option, but not the only. Other formats include DSST, Excelsior/UExcel, and Thomas Edison State College (TECEP) exams. Every school decides for itself which tests to offer and how much of your degree you can test out of. At some schools, it’s 30 credits. At others, it might be 45. Still others, 60 or 90 or even the full 120 credits of a bachelor’s degree.

Regardless of the exact number of exam credits your school lets you earn, the savings potential is massive. And you don’t need to pray for scholarships or nebulous “aid” to get it. Testing out is completely within your locus of control: you just need to plan, prioritize and study like a gentleman scholar.

Even if your school only allows 30 exam credits, that’s still a quarter of your degree. You will save nearly $30,000 and graduate faster by not earning those credits in the classroom. I completed the final 30 credits of my degree via test-out and was the only person I know to graduate 100% debt-free. (Here’s my story, if you’re interested.)

Some people have heard of testing out, but most haven’t. Schools don’t shout from the rooftops about their test-out allowances. Why would they? Higher education is a business: the longer they can “keep you in the store” with costly courses, the more money they make. But this information is buried in your academic handbook under “alternative credit policies” or “transfer credit allowances.” Look for it.

Sadly, even students who have heard of testing out tend to use it for just one or two courses, not the majority of their degrees.

I believe students owe it to themselves to figure out the fastest and most affordable graduation path at their disposal, even if they don’t test out of absolutely everything.

Case Study: Earning a $139K degree for $47K at Sacred Heart University

Enough theory. Here’s a real analysis I created to illustrate how powerful your test-out savings can be. In this example, we’ll assume you want a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Sacred Heart University, a small, expensive, highly-ranked private university in Connecticut.

Here is the research necessary to calculate how much time and money you can save by testing out:

1. Determine the “full sticker price” tuition of a four-year degree at SHU (roughly $139,000)
2. Determine which exam formats SHU offers (CLEP, DSST, Excelsior/UExcel)
3. Determine how many exam credits SHU allows students to earn (90)
4. Determine the course requirements of a psych degree at SHU (degree chart)
5. Determine how many of those required courses have CLEP, DSST, or Excelsior/UExcel exams for you to take instead (25)
6. Determine the costs of each of those exams ($80/each for CLEP and DSST, $100/each for Excelsior/UExcel)
7. Assume you can study for and pass a new test every 2-3 weeks

I’m building an app to crunch this data automatically, but it can all be done by hand. If you wanted to test out of as much of a psychology degree as Sacred Heart will allow, here are your potential savings:

Every school should post an analysis like this on their website. Since they never will, you need to perform the analysis yourself.

Again: nothing says that you HAVE to test out of every subject a school will allow. There are valid reasons for taking a course in person: class discussions, mentorship from a professor, or simply not feeling comfortable studying for a tough subject on your own (I’m looking at you, fellow non-math people!)

Rather, the point of running an analysis like this is to figure out your options. With college being as costly as it is today, there is no excuse for not giving yourself the opportunity to say “yes” or “no.”

The “Moneyball” Approach to Cutting College Costs

Here’s a useful analogy for how testing out fits into the overall picture of your college career.

Think about Billy Beane, GM of Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics (and the protagonist of Moneyball.) Back in 2002, Beane knew the A’s could only spend a fraction of what richer teams like the Yankees had on hand.

So instead of trying to copy those clubs, Beane figured out a brand new way to build a baseball team.

Oakland used cutting-edge statistical analysis to find “misfits” — players who were overweight, or threw the ball side-armed, or couldn’t run quickly — and constructed its entire roster with them. The other teams laughed, but here’s the best part: the A’s wanted their bargain-priced “misfits” even more than the stars they couldn’t afford.

These oddball players had undervalued talents that led to scoring runs and winning games. Most importantly, they were cheap.

The Yankees — and all the teams attempting to emulate them — were asking, “How can we buy the biggest stars?”

The A’s asked a totally different question: “How can we buy WINS (and runs, the building blocks of wins) for pennies on the dollar?” Beane didn’t care who his individual players were as long as the team was winning.

2002 was the perfect season to compare these approaches because the Yankees and A’s each won 103 games. The breathtaking difference? New York spent $1.5 million per win. Oakland, using their unique approach, spent just $250,000.

Here is a cost-per-credit analysis I created using average tuition figures at public and private four-year universities, as well as the cost of earning a “test-out” degree:

Sources: CollegeBoard and DIY Degree

Testing out is a “Moneyball” approach to higher education. “Cost per credit” is to college what “cost per win” is to baseball: the number you want to intelligently optimize. In college as in baseball, the way to win an unfair game is by taking a new approach to get the same results more efficiently.

Why You Should Look at College Like an Investment

If this post makes it sound like you’re “Frankensteining” your education, cobbling various exams and credit sources together to form a degree…you’re right. That’s exactly what I’m advocating.

This might seem strange at first, but I encourage you to look at it differently.

Why do we see college as this magical guarantee of financial success? It’s because of these oft-cited studies on how much more graduates earn over their lifetimes than non-grads. We hear sweeping statements (“people with bachelor’s degrees earn $1 million more!”) and assume that it MUST be a great investment, no matter what it costs.

Actually, we don’t just assume it — we’re explicitly told that it’s true:

“Over a lifetime, the gap in earning potential between a high-school diploma and a bachelor of arts is more than $800,000. In other words, whatever sacrifices you and your child make for [a] college education in the short term are more than repaid in the long term.”

That’s from CollegeBoard, the organization that makes the SATs. They’re basically telling you to just pay whatever a degree costs.

It’s horrible advice.

You don’t make huge financial decisions with simplistic rules like “whatever sacrifices you make are worth it in the long-term.” How is that any different than telling you to shoot first and ask questions later? No — you make huge financial decisions is by running the numbers.

Which brings us back to these studies on college graduate earnings. They aren’t “wrong,” but they are misleading.

Here’s why: earning a higher income doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting ahead. You can earn $20,000/year before college, get a $60,000/year job afterwards, and still be no better off. If you spend $100,000 for a degree (and take four years off of work to do it) you have incurred a huge financial and opportunity cost.

You took out a loan against your future earnings which must now be repaid over five, ten, maybe even fifteen or twenty years. Even then, once all the loans are repaid and you’ve earned back all the income you lost by not working, guess what? All you have done is break even!

You’re back at square one. Finally, after years of repaying loans and interest, you can start actually benefiting from the higher income you earned your degree for. Most college students don’t realize that this is what they’ve agreed to until after they graduate. They just see college as a magical guarantee of financial success. Yet whether they realize it or not, their student loans often chain them to a life of indentured servitude.

The return on an investment is inversely proportional to the time and money invested. In plain English: the longer it takes you to graduate, and the more you pay, the less valuable your degree ultimately is.

Testing Out Actually Delivers What Colleges Falsely Promise

Fortunately, the reverse is also true. The less time it takes you to graduate, and the less you pay for your degree, the more valuable it is.

By testing out, you are doing what so many students never do. You’re being strategic. You’re treating your degree as an investment, rather than a collegiate shopping spree. You’re being efficient by extracting the most value for the least cost.

Consequently, you actually will reap the rewards of higher postgraduate income. Since you didn’t take years off or incur costly loans, all of that extra money goes straight into your pocket.

If you are struggling to figure out how to afford college, I hope the test-out strategy is a breath of fresh air and a new lease on academic life. Please leave any questions in the comments. I’m happy to help anyone who needs it!

____________________

Jay Cross runs DIY Degree and helps students learn more, spend less, and graduate faster. His college acceleration strategies have been covered by Fox Business, Huffington Post, Popular Mechanics, Brazen Careerist, The Personal MBA, and I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

Orega Lara y Santiago Abascal durante la manifestación convocada por DENAES en apoyo a las víctimas del terrorismo | LD

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Amazing! According to a Reuters Report, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York William Dudley admitted that the Fed does not know how Quantitative Easing policies work to help the economy and that they don’t have a well developed model of the economy that incorporates a “realistic” financial sector.

Yet “we still don’t have well-developed macro-models that incorporate a realistic financial sector,’ William Dudley, president of the New York Fed, told an economics conference.

“We don’t understand fully how large-scale asset purchase programs work to ease financial market conditions, there’s still a lot of debate …” he said. “Is it the effect of the purchases on the portfolios of private investors, or alternatively is the major channel one of signaling?”

El Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) anunció el día de hoy la implementación de la “Inflación Fuerte”, un sistema que correría dos ceros las cifras oficiales de inflación del país. Eso convertiría la inflación acumulada de 45% en apenas 0,45%.

“Si hay un Bolívar Fuerte, tiene que haber uan inflación fuerte, por eso ahora en vez de haber 50% de inflación, habrá 0,5% ¡SOMOS UNA POTENCIA Y ESTAMOS BLINDADOS!” Exclamó Eudomar Tovar mientras hacía señas a los periodistas para que no vieran cómo sacaban oro de las reservas para venderlas en el Centro de Caracas. “Creo que por el 2013 estamos listos: Logramos bajar los precios por decreto, ahora le corrimos la coma a la inflación y para el 2014 simplemente vamos a dejar de decir los números económicos porque ya se acabó la inflación de por vida y si les parece que eso no tiene sentido, pues váyanse del país. Ya van a ver, los envidiosos dirán que es mentira, pero el año que viene no habrá inflación de 1000% sino de 10% como toda Latinoamérica.”

Intentamos contactar a algunos economistas para saber su opinión sobre estas medidas, pero recibimos la visita de un representante de la fiscalía que nos prohibió dar cualquier información sobre economía básica. “La economía es algo subjetivo, no es una ciencia como todos creen. Por eso les queda rotundamente prohibida la publicación de información económica de esa que la burguesía llama ‘lógica’. De ahora en adelante, van a ir comiquitas de Gaturro, Pepita y Olafo en las secciones de economía de los medios ¡Así que pónganse a dibujar ya!” Manifestó el representante de la fiscalía mientras pegaba caritas felices en todos los ceros de los precios.

Yesterday we talked about the “skillset” needed by new dads. Things like changing a diaper and burping a baby will come pretty easily with practice. Keeping a positive mindset is harder, and much more important. Here are my suggestions for maintaining a healthy perspective and preserving your sanity after a baby bomb drops from the sky and blows up your old life.

New Dad Survival Guide: The Mindset

Realize you were made to do this. There’s a popular perception that being an involved dad is an entirely modern phenomenon — and that primitive men just deposited their seed and went on their way. But recent research on the neurological and physiological changes men experience before their baby arrives shows that male parental involvement is in fact deeply ingrained.

Three weeks before your baby is born, your testosterone levels will fall by about a third in preparation for you taking on a more nurturing role. (They’ll rise back to pre-birth levels about six weeks after your baby arrives.) At the same time, your brain will actually change too – becoming more adept at homing on a baby’s cries. As the researcher who discovered dads’ drop in T put it: “Raising human offspring is such an effort that it is cooperative by necessity, and our study shows that human fathers are biologically wired to help with the job.”

Contrary to the popular cultural stereotype of the bumbling dad who has to constantly be rescued by Mom, men can be just as competent at childcare as women.

Realize there’s no “normal” way to feel. People love the image of the man — especially one who’s typically tough and stoic – who cries upon first seeing his progeny. And guys will often talk about the overwhelming love they felt for their newborn as soon as it emerged from the womb. And if that happens to you, great. But realize there’s a whole host of different emotional reactions you might experience. I didn’t cry when either of my kids were born. I was just like, “Whoa, cool, there’s my baby!” I did feel a surge of love and pride when I first held them, but you might not even feel that. Instead your baby might seem like a weird stranger — a tiny alien that suddenly beamed down into your life. That’s okay too.

The feelings you have for your baby can be compared to a romantic marriage versus an arranged marriage. In the former, you fall in love first, and then make a commitment; in the latter, you make the commitment, and then fall in love. Both kinds can and do work just fine. So don’t worry about or think something is wrong with you if you don’t feel over the moon about your kid right off the bat – as you involve yourself in his life, your love for him will grow deeper and deeper with time.

It’s also very normal to have fluctuating feelings about your child after you take her home and as she grows up. I feel like there’s this idea out there that you’re going to love your child intensely every moment of every day. That’s decidedly not the case. You’ll always have a steady, unchanging love for them, but sometimes you’ll feel incredibly angry at them or just plain ambivalent. You’ll even have moments where you don’t really like them. Your love for your kid is like a little ember that’s always there, and sometimes explodes into a fire of overwhelming joy and pride, and sometimes smolders very faintly. All very normal.

Get hands-on right away. If you’re feeling awkward or unsure about being a dad, the best thing you can do is to ignore that feeling and spend as much time with your baby as you can. If you heed that awkward feeling and avoid the kid, it turns into a cycle where you feel more awkward so you avoid him more, making you feel more awkward, and so on. On the other hand, the more hands-on you get, the more comfortable and bonded you feel with the baby, and the more time you want to spend with him, and that becomes a virtuous cycle that keeps on increasing your confidence.

Be empathetic. A crying baby can be incredibly frustrating. One of the things that helped me stay calm was trying to put myself in my baby’s tiny, tiny shoes. I would think about the fact that these were their very first moments, days, and weeks on this planet, and that every single sight, sound, and smell was brand new. There’s plenty for a baby to be disoriented and upset by.

Even more importantly, I’d think about the fact that when something was bothering them, they had no other way to let us know except crying. Imagine if you felt sick or had an itch or had something scratching you, and you couldn’t do anything about it or ask anybody for help. It’s hard out there for a baby.

Realize they only get more and more interesting. Ernest Hemingway once said, “To be a successful father . . . there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.” Now I don’t endorse Papa’s tip, but it is true that while many women love babies, men generally enjoy their children more as they get older. Babies are cute, and sometimes I even have those moments where I wish I could keep them that little forever, but let’s be honest, they’re kind of boring. They’re these cute, but super stoic, unsmiling creatures who only sleep, eat, and poop.

But the good news is that they steadily get more interesting by the week. It’s amazing to watch them gain a personality and begin interacting with you bit by bit. The more they’re able to engage with you, the more enjoyable they become. (On the downside, the more they’re awake, able to control their body, and verbalize, the wider their arsenal of exasperating antics!).

Manage your expectations. Anger and unhappiness of all kinds generally have one root: a mismatch between expectations and reality. The more you think fathering is going to revolve around happily tending to a calm, smiling baby, the more frustrated you’re going to be every time she starts hollering. The more you set your mind that it’s going to be tough, the more you’ll be able to calmly roll with the punches.

This is especially important when it comes to their sleep schedule. Once they start sleeping through the night, it’s tempting to think, “Whew, this is great. Now things can get back to normal!” All goes well for a few months…then they wake up in the middle of the night because they’re teething or sick or who knows why. If you’re not prepared for this to happen, it can really bum you out. Count on it, and you’ll find it easier to deal. Don’t worry, they’ll get back on track again. (But don’t count on it!)

Embrace the challenge. I’d recommend going even further than the recommendation in the point above; rather than just accepting that it’s going to be hard, relish that fact a little. There are so few challenges in our modern life, that I really enjoyed and appreciated getting to weather this one. The more you see fatherhood as a challenge that will test your mettle and give you a chance to rise to the occasion, the easier it will be to maintain a positive mindset, and the more satisfying the experience will be.

We’re you’re feeling tired and rundown, it helps to keeps things in perspective. Being a new dad is hard, but it’s not say, Iwo Jima hard.

Keep it all in perspective. While it’s good to expect the worst, also realize that in the grand scheme of things, it’s really not that hard. There will definitely be times when you’re going to feel super tired and rundown from the late nights. To keep myself from sinking into despondency at such moments, I would think something like, “Well, at least I’m not tired from trying to stay awake in a freezing cold trench at the Battle of the Bulge….Right, this isn’t so bad. I can do this.”

Embrace this season of your life. When it comes to minimizing your frustration and maximizing your happiness with fatherhood, I cannot emphasize this point enough. It’s completely normal to have moments where you miss your childless life after you have a baby. But the more you concentrate on what you can’t do during this season of your life, instead of what you can do, the more unsatisfied and restless you will feel. Sure, you can’t go out with your friends as much, and doing pretty much anything involves a lot of rigmarole, but, you get to watch a human being’s development moment by moment and play a role in shaping that development. You’re holding a living legacy in your arms. That’s pretty awesome.

Realize that your kid is not going to “make” you happy. Studies showing that having a kid decreases your happiness get passed around a lot these days, but other research has in fact shown the opposite, and the results are actually inconclusive. If you’re worried about how your new baby is going to affect your happiness, keep two things in mind.

First, happiness is overrated. I realize this is a loaded statement that requires a lot more unpacking than I have room for in this post, but suffice it to say that your moment-to-moment feeling of well-being is much less important than your overall sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. If you asked a man who was in the middle of climbing Everest – a man in the midst of an incredibly painful and strenuous challenge — whether he felt “happy,” the answer would probably be no. But despite the pain, the climb is probably bringing him a deep satisfaction, and for the rest of his life, he will experience the fulfillment of being able to say, “I climbed that mountain.” Such is parenting.

Second, happiness is a choice, not something compelled by circumstances or your children. Blogger and dad Matt Walsh recently penned a brilliant piece on this truism. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a choice excerpt:

“My kids don’t make my happiness. That isn’t their job. My happiness isn’t a responsibility that falls on their tiny little shoulders. Kids come into this world helpless, naked, and needing, yet so many of us immediately shove them into the Happiness Factory and bark commands. “Get on the assembly line and build me some happiness! Quick! Do your duty, sir!” …

The joy and happiness of parenting is like the joy and happiness that can be found in many good things: it comes from sacrifice, self-denial, and self-giving. It comes with work and effort. I have to be the sort of person who finds happiness in giving, and I will not automatically be that sort of person just because I had sex and made a couple of babies. In other words, my kids don’t make me happy to be a parent; I have to make me happy to be a parent. And I am. I am beyond words. But that happiness will decrease if I become more selfish, and it will increase if I become less selfish. If you want your kids to make you happy, you are asking your kids to make you less selfish. That is a demand that is, all at once, incredibly stupid, laughably absurd, and profoundly abusive.

And then maybe we should stop worrying so much about this happiness thing, anyway. I think the happiest people are the ones who spend the least amount of time whining about their desire to be made happy. They do a thing because it’s right, or because they have a duty to do it, or because it is interesting, or beautiful, or enlightening. They choose to find happiness amidst it all, but that was never the point. They aim beyond mere enjoyment, pleasure and satisfaction. If your own happiness is the Alpha and Omega of your life, you’ll never do anything important or become anything significant in this world. Ironically, you’ll also never be happy.”

Keep doing the things you love. While trying to replicate your childless life once you have a kid is a recipe for frustration and poor parenting, you shouldn’t entirely give up the things you once loved either. Have a couple non-negotiables that you make it a priority to keep up, at least after the craziness of the first few months subsides.

Last month when I was rock climbing I saw a couple who brought along their 2-month-old and were happy as can be. I felt like shaking their hands.

Fitness has been something I’ve taken a lot more seriously this year, and I was back going to the gym every day two weeks after Scout arrived. I was super tired from the late nights, but it’s something I love to do and hate to miss. It helped buoy my sense of well-being, and it gave me a small sense of routine when the rest of my life was a little chaotic.

Isolating yourself in your house with just your baby and your wife and a cabinet full of junk food is not going make you feel good about life or fatherhood.

Keep up your relationship with your significant other. Speaking of holding on to the things you love, don’t let your relationship with your wife/girlfriend go to pot either. Your energies will definitely turn away from each other and towards taking care of the new arrival, and you won’t have much time to just hang out and enjoy each other’s company. And because much of your willpower will be depleted in restraining yourself from throwing the baby out the window, you’ll have less of it for controlling your behavior towards each other. You may find yourselves bickering more and being more prone to losing your patience with each other.

So it’s important to empathize with your partner’s state of willpower depletion, be more tolerant of their foibles, and carve out time — however short — to re-connect each day. If you work and your wife stays home, take the baby off her hands as soon as you come in the door. Watch some TV and do some cuddling and talking when the baby sleeps at night. Remind yourselves to stop and hug. Once her doctor gives her the greenlight after six weeks to resume sex, try to fit that activity in when you can. After a couple months, find a babysitter and have a date night.

The best possible thing you can do for your kid is to have a good relationship with his mother. Don’t neglect it.

This too, shall pass. Adopt this as your motto during this time. When you’re in the trough of the newborn phase, it can feel like the tiredness and stress are going to last forever. But of course it doesn’t.

A child demolishes the old structure of your life — the one that revolved around you — and it takes some time to build a new structure in its place – one that revolves around your child. Until the new structure is complete, life can feel a little shaky.

For my money, the lowest time is around the 6-7 week mark. You’ve had a month and a half of greatly disrupted sleep, the rush of having a newborn that kept you going the first few weeks has evaporated, and while the baby requires a ton of care, she isn’t giving much in return, unless you count blank stares and dirty diapers. You really have to run on duty and commitment rather than pure affection during that time.

But then things turn a corner. With any luck, your baby will start sleeping through the night around 8 weeks. Once you start consistently getting a full night sleep, you can handle any fussiness that arises during the day. She’ll start smiling around the same time too, and the first little hints of personality will emerge.

Around 6 months, the new structure of your life will have tenuously been erected. You feel much more confident and less awkward. Being a dad starts to feel like your new normal.

A year out, you feel like a pro, and being a dad is your new normal. As more and more months go by, you, your wife, and your son or daughter find a really happy groove and routine.

But by that time of course, it’s time to have another baby, throwing everything back into chaos! But next time around, you’ll be a seasoned veteran.

Best of luck to you on this incredible journey.

No related posts.

by Seb

Nota previa: Traduzco esto por encargo del jefe (le voy a matar). Está escrito en tono de broma (y tiene mucha coña), pero tanto Nova como Sherrington saben muy bien de lo que hablan, y cada uno de los puntos que hacen es perfectamente defendible en serio. De hecho son puntos que suelen ser defendidos muy en serio. Es un gran resumen de cómo -jugando con las palabras- el IPCC puede engañar sin mentir. Si te va la marcha, aquí tienes otro más técnico que sobrepasa la linde del mero juego de palabras: ¿Soportan las observaciones que usa el IPCC las afirmaciones que hace el IPCC?

Traducido de joannenova.com.au.

• http://joannenova.com.au/2013/12/ipcc-spin-translated-between-the-lines-in-their-leaked-synopsis-97-of-models-fail/

–

El IPCC traducido – ahora lo entiendes.

Geoff Sherrington y JoNova.

Acaban de filtrar el primer borrador del Informe Síntesis del PCC    (gracias Tallbloke) . Es parte del gran 5º Informe ( las otras partes filtradas aquí). El Informe Síntesis se supone que resume la ciencia. En el mundo real el tema de moda es “la pausa”, o hiato en el calentamiento, que el IPCC ya no puede seguir ignorando. En cambio, los maestros de los mantras alcanzan nuevas fronteras diciendo cosas son a la vez técnicamente correctas, pero evitan señalar lo obvio. Con un poco de suerte, les echaremos una mano.

Traduciendo el cuento IPCC:

“The rate of warming of the observed global-mean surface temperature has been smaller over the past 15 years (1998-2012) than over the past 30 to 60 years (Figure SYR.1a; Box SYR.1) and is estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over the period 1951–2012. Nevertheless, the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record (Figure SYR.1a).”

Traducido: Sí, las temperaturas no han subido tanto como decíamos, a pesar de que hemos emitido CO2 más rápido que nunca. Olvidemos que esto indica que los modelos estaban mal. Lo importante es usar las frases “más caliente” y “récord” lo más posible.

“The radiative forcing of the climate system has continued to increase during the 2000s, as has its largest contributor, the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Consistent with this radiative forcing, the climate system has very likely continued to accumulate heat since 1998, and sea level has continued to rise. The radiative forcing of the climate system has been increasing to a lesser rate over the period 1998-2011 compared to 1984 to 1998 or 1951-2011, due to a negative forcing trend from volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the solar cycle over 2000-2009. However, there is low confidence in quantifying the role of forcing trend in causing the surface-warming hiatus, because of uncertainty in the magnitude of the volcanic forcing trend and low confidence in the forcing trend due to tropospheric aerosol. {WG1 8.5; WG1 Box 9.2}”

Traducido: A pesar del hecho de que el calentamiento es más lento de lo que venía siendo, el CO2 en teoría nos está calentando más rápido. Esto es una contradicción fatal, pero esperamos que no lo notes. Te distraeremos diciendo que la tasa de de incremento en el forzamiento teórico ha disminuido en nuestras estimaciones de los volcanes y la cosa solar, y apostamos a que suene como que coincide y como que sabemos de lo que hablamos. Pero admitimos que realmente no tenemos mi idea de por qué no está habiendo calentamiento. Lee entre líneas – sabemos que el CO2 es importante porque nuestros modelos no funcionan sin él – pero nuestros modelos no funcionan en cualquier caso, no entendemos los otros factores. La ciencia está establecida, excepto por las inconvenientes, impredecibles partes que no están establecidas. Danos dinero.

“For the period 1998–2012, 111 of the 114 climate-model simulations show a surface-warming trend larger than the observations (Box SYR.1, Figure 1a). There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable internal climate variability. Variability sometimes enhances and sometimes counteracts the long-term externally forced warming trend  (Figure Box SYR.1). Internal variability thus diminishes the relevance of short trends for long-term climate change. There are also possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic factors. {WG1 2.4, 9.3, 9.4; 10.3, 11.2, 11.3, WG1 Box 9.2}

Traducido: la certidumbre del 95% se parece a esto: el 97% de nuestros modelos está mal. (Mira aquí también). Lo achacamos a las partes que son impredecibles de lo que hay en el clima. Tal vez también estemos equivocados en lo del sol, los volcanes y el polvo.

“In summary, the observed recent surface-warming hiatus is attributable in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in external forcing (expert judgment, medium confidence). {WG1 8.5, Box 9.2}

Traducido:Esta frase ofrece gran confianza porque atribuimos “la pausa” a algo. No mires de cerca, es un enfriamiento que no previmos de antemano, seguimos sin poder predecir, y no lo podríamos medir aunque lo pudiéramos predecir. La “variabilidad interna” es el nuevo comodín que cubre todo aquello que no sabemos. Es el maquillaje multiuso para cualquier ocasión. Esperamos que nadie pregunte si la “variabilidad interna” podría haber causado el calentamiento antes de que causara el enfriamiento.

Añadido: Nos encantan las expresiones como “juicio experto”. Nos hace sentir importantes.

“Footnote: The connection of the heat budget to equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is the long-term surface warming under an assumed doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, arises because a warmer surface causes enhanced radiation to space, which counteracts the increase in Earth’s heat content. How much the radiation to space increases for a given increase in surface temperature, depends on the same feedback processes that determine equilibrium climate sensitivity.

Traducido: Las realimientaciones son la ruina de todo el cuento, así que solo usamos el término una vez, y en una nota a pié de la página 21, en un documento de 99 páginas (en el que ahora mismo figura “Prohibido citar, copiar o distribuir” en todas las páginas). No esperamos que ningún periodista entienda lo que significa este párrafo, ni que pregunte sobre él, pero si los escépticos pretenden que negamos que las realimentaciones determinan el resultado final, podemos señalar esta parte escondida y decir que somos completamente transparentes.

Una mirada a los clásicos mantras del IPCC:

“….. la década de los 2000 ha sido la más caliente del registro instrumental …”

Traducido: No podemos hablar del calentamiento en los últimos 17 años, así que esta es una buena frase mete-miedo para usar a cambio. No diremos que el calentamiento empezó hace 300 años, mucho antes de que empezaran nuestras emisiones de CO2. No diremos que nuestros registros de temperatura son patéticamente cortos, ni que el mundo estaba más caliente durante la mayor parte de los miles de años desde le revolución agrícola [neolítica -pm]. ¿Quién necesita saberlo? Tampoco mencionaremos que muchos de los registros de temperatura dependen enteramente de nuestros ajustes. Todos aquellos termómetros antiguos marcaban demasiado alto.  Tuvimos que ajustarlos. Es extraño que llevara 70 años “corregir” esas mediciones. (Tomar las temperaturas no era algo muy riguroso  en los días de la bomba atómica y la llegada a la luna. No se puede esperar que los científicos hicieran algo tan complejo como medir la temperatura del aire con precisión, si un modelo de computadora)

“….. su principal causante, la concentración atmosférica de CO2 ….”.

Traducido: El CO2 es la causa principal de calentamiento porque nuestros modelos que no funcionan lo dicen así. Lástima que no haya un estudio aceptado y replicado que proporcione un enlace cuantitativo entre el CO2 y la temperatura atmosférica. Es aquí donde mencionaríamos un estudio así, si lo pudiéramos encontrar. A cambio, damos un amplio rango de posibilidades, y de hecho el CO2 podría no tener efecto alguno, es algo que no se ha demostrado. Pero no hace falta que aclaremos todo eso.

“….. el sistema climático muy probablemente ha continuado acumulando calor desde 1998 …”

Traducido: De hecho no estamos absolutamente seguros de que el sistema climático se haya seguido calentando. Esta es nuestra manera de decir que es posible que no haya habido calentamiento desde 1998.

“….. el mar ha continuado subiendo …”

Traducido: Muchas cosas causan subida del nivel del mar, de las cuales muchas no tienen relación con calentamiento global o con CO2, pero no lo mencionaremos. Tampoco diremos que mucha de esa subida puede deberse a los ajustes de los datos de los satélites. Siempre que podamos filtrar unos datos muy ruidosos, podemos decir que continua una subida. Un filtro de diez años se puede convertir en un filtro de veinte, y este en uno de 20.000 si hace falta.

” ….. produce radiación ampliada al espacio, que contrarresta el incremento en el contenido de calor de la tierra …”

Traducido: Ver Stefan Boltzmann 1879.

…………………………………………………………………………..

Los modelos se encuentran con la realidad.

La realidad es que la temperatura de superficie que se suele mostrar en los mapas de temperatura global no ha cambiado significativamente de 1997 a 2013. Esta pausa no estaba prevista por los modelos climáticos existentes. Fallo. Los modelos climáticos ajustados siguen yendo más calientes que la realidad. Fallo.

Gracias a los escépticos, el IPCC se ha visto forzado finalmente a admitir (en un lenguaje retorcido) que sus modelos don funcionan porque no entienden el clima.

Docenas de modelos, millones de datos, más CO2 emitido que nunca, y los modelos se calientan y arden.  | Graph: John Christy. Data: KMNI.

Ver este post para mayor información sobre el fallo de los modelos.

El cuento y las relaciones públicas seguirán engañando a cualquier periodista crédulo que quiera creer, y el IPCC  proporciona un montón de frases citables convenientes. Tratemos de ayudar a esos periodistas …

Google has just pushed out an update to its Google Play Books app that brings in a couple of improvements and new features. In particular, it has now added support for uploading books to Google Play directly from the device itself.

The performance of Google Play Books has been improved in this release. The changelogs claim that books will now open faster and smoother. It also tries to improve the reading experience by setting a lower floor limit for brightness settings and offering support for landscape mode, which would be a good fit for larger tablets. Performance and stability have also been improved across the board.

One particular new feature that might interest Play Books users is the new upload support. In the past, you can only upload your own books stored on your computers via the the Google Play Books web interface. Now users will be able to do so straight from their device. Simply tap on the file from an email or from downloads and you will be offered an option to upload to Play Books, which will make the book available across all your Android devices. Supported file types are, however, still limited to EPUB and PDF.

The new version of the Google Play Books app is now up on Google Play Store. As always, it will take some time for the update to arrive on all regions, so don’t panic if you still don’t have the new upload feature.

Download: Google Play Books on Google Play Store

Once you have kids, you no longer have the luxury of spending hours playing video games. That is, unless you get them to play with you...but not really.

Read more...

In early October of this year, online Bitcoin marketplace and ‘the eBay of drugs’ The Silk Road was taken down by the FBI. Just after the black vans took Silk Road head honcho [Dread Pirate Robberts] away, a new Bitcoin marketplace came onto the scene called Sheep Marketplace. Sheep Marketplace closed after revealing that 5400 bitcoins – or $5.8 million USD were stolen by the user EBOOK101 by exploiting a bug in the Sheep site.

Over this last weekend, it was revealed this bug in the Sheep Marketplace site wasn’t responsible for the loss of 5,400 coins, but instead 96,000 BTC, or $100 million USD, making this one of the largest thefts of all time.

Whoever was responsible for this theft didn’t make a clean getaway. Because the Bitcoin block chain records the history of every transaction, laundering bitcoins is harder than it seems. The most common method is to ‘tumble’ the bitcoins – sending them through multiple wallets, combining and recombining them, until tracking groups of bitcoins just becomes too hard.

[sheeproadreloaded2] over on Reddit managed to track these bitcoins to this bitcoin address, an amazing feat that also means there are 96,000 coins in a wallet somewhere that can’t be spent or cashed out without the thief telling the world who he is.

As far as crimes of the century go, this one is at least in the top ten. Unless the thief behind this heist is extraordinarily smart, though, his identity will most likely be found out eventually.

I've been asked by my technical readers to stop writing so much about politics, but I cannot help myself, and this week I have the perfect opportunity to apply my technical skills to a local political topic.

History and Background

Like Britain and the USA (and very few other jurisdictions anymore), British Columbia has a first-past-the-post representative electoral system. The province is divided up into "electoral districts" (also known as "ridings" in the British tradition) and each district returns a single member to the Legislature. In each district, the candidate with the most votes wins the district, even if they only obtain a plurality. In the Legislature, the party with most seats forms government.

In such a system, the geographical layout of the districts has a great deal of importance, because it is possible for a party to win a majority of votes in the province, but a minority of seats in the legislature, if the votes are concentrated in particular seats. This actually happened in British Columbia in 1996. It also happened in the USA in the 2000 Presidential election, since their presidential Electoral College effectively acts like a weighted version of a first-past-the-post Legislature.

In a representative democracy, it's important that everyone's vote have the same weight, which means ensuring that the each district has approximately the same number of people in it. As relative populations grow in some regions and shrink in others, districts can become unbalanced, and districts need to be redrawn. In the USA, this "redistricting" process is often driven by partisan considerations, and can lead to districts like this (try out this awesome gerrymandered districts puzzle game):

Fortunately, since 1998 British Columbia's districts have been drawn every 10 years by non-partisan "Electoral Boundaries Commissions", and the primary consideration has been creating districts that are as equal in population as possible while allowing for effective representation.

Effective Representation

BC is a big place and a place of extremes. The smallest district in BC is in downtown Vancouver (Vancouver-West End), with an area of under 500 hectares: it takes less than 30 minutes to walk across it and 48,500 people live there.

The largest district is in the north-west of the province (Stikine), with an area of almost 20,000,000 hectares: about the size of Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands, combined. Just over 20,000 people live in it. When you're dealing with areas this sparsely populated "effectiveness of representation" begins to have some concrete meaning.

On the other hand, the principle of "one person, one vote" is the corner-stone of democracy, and the goal of an electoral boundary re-distribution is to try to achieve it, as far as possible. There is a tension inherent in the process.

2008 Commission Catastrophe

Population growth in BC over the last generation has been concentrated in the south: mostly in Vancouver and its suburbs, with some in Vancouver Island and Kelowna. Commission have dealt with this growth by a combination of increasing the number of seats in the Legislature, and slowing increasing the size of the rural districts.

In 2008, this process reached a tipping point, as the Commission recommended two new seats, and the transfer of three seats from rural areas to urban areas. Rural BC exploded in anger, and the government of the day rushed in legislation directing the Commission to add more seats than recommended and to avoid removing seats from certain rural areas.

At this point, though process remained non-partisan (both parties in the Legislature supported the new plan), it had become thoroughly politicized (the carefully considered deliberations of the Commission had been hastily overturned by politicians for public relations purposes).

Formalization of Politicization

No doubt remembering the tumult of the 2008 experience, the current government of BC has released a proposal for the rules governing the next Electoral Boundary commission. The proposal aims to avoid a messy politicization of the process at the end, by politicizing quietly it in advance:

• The Commission may not recommend adding any further seats to the Legislature
• The Commission may not remove seats from three protected regions: North, Columbia-Kootenay, and Cariboo-Thompson

The protected regions look like this.

Note that the Okanagan region is isolated from the rest of the "unprotected" areas of the province, making it impossible to juggle population into or out of the region. That means the Okanagan can either gain or lose a whole seat, but never lose a "half" a seat by having population juggled in or out via boundary changes.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with BC electoral geography will recognize that this proposal entrenches an already large and growing deviation from the principle of one-person-one-vote, but I want to calculate just how large, and also to measure the "fairness" of this particular proposal.

Population

The electoral district boundaries of BC are readily available as GIS files online, but do not have population information attached (and would be out of date if they did, since they pre-date the most recent census).

Similarly, the StatsCan boundary files can be downloaded, and the attribute file giving the census 2011 population in each block is also available. There are about 500-800 blocks in each electoral district, making for a very fine-grained profile of where people are concentrated in each district.

I loaded the GIS files into a PostGIS spatial database for analysis. Once the electoral districts (ed) and dissemination blocks (db) were loaded, calculating the electoral district population in PostGIS was a simple spatial join query:

SELECT ed.edabbr, ed.edname, sum(db.popn) as popn
FROM ed, db
WHERE ST_Intersects(ed.geom, db.geom) 
AND ST_Contains(ed.geom, ST_Centroid(db.geom))

The results of this calculation and others in this article can be seen in the redistribution_bc.xlsx spreadsheet I've placed online.

A quick summary of the population results shows that, among other things:

• The current distribution is extremely lopsided, with the most heavily populated riding (Surrey-Cloverdale, 73042) having well over 3 times the population of the least populated (Stikine, 20238)
• The current provincial average population is 55804
• The average population in the "protected" regions is 35609, 31% less that the provincial average
• The average population in the "unprotected" regions is 55804, 8% higher than the provincial average
• A vote in the protected regions will be over 1.5 times more "powerful" than one in the unprotected regions
• Of the 85 ridings, 26 are below average and 59 are above average, indicating that the problem of underpopulation is concentrated in a minority of ridings

There is no doubt that the government proposal will enshrine the regional imbalance in representation, and further worsen at as continued migration into the south pushes the balance even further out of line.

"Fair" Imbalances

Legal challenges to imbalanced representation have resulted in court decisions that indicate that it is constitutional within limits, and with reasonable justification. The limits generally accepted by the courts are +/- 25% of the provincial average, and the starting point of this proposal already exceeds that on average--some individual ridings (like Stikine) will be much worse. Political commentators in BC are already musing about whether ridings built under this scheme would survive a court challenge.

Of more analytical interest is whether the scheme of selecting "protected regions" is a good one for choosing which ridings should receive preferential treatment.

"Representing" a riding involves being available to your constituents, meeting with other orders of government in your riding (cities, school boards), and attending local events. Representation is very much tied up with being where the people are.

• If the people are all in one place, near together, then representing them is easy.
• If the people are spread out, in many different localities, then representing them is hard.

Can we measure the "spreadoutness" of people? Yes, we can!

Each riding contains several hundred census dissemination blocks, each of which has a population associated with it. Imagine measuring the distance between each block, and all the other blocks in the riding, and weighting that distance by the population at each end.

For Vancouver-Fairview, the picture looks like this.

The blocks are fairly regular, the population is all very close together, and the dispersion is not very high.

For Skeena, the picture looks like this.

The population is concentrated in two centers (Terrace and Kitimat) reasonably far apart, giving a much higher dispersion than the urban ridings.

In mathematical terms, the formula for "dispersion" looks like this.

In the database, after creating a table of census blocks that are coded by riding, the calculation looks like this.

WITH interim AS (
 SELECT 
  a.ed,
  max(a.edname) AS edname,
  sum(b.popn * a.popn * st_distance_sphere(a.pt, b.pt)) AS score,
  sum(b.popn * a.popn) AS p2
 FROM popn a, popn b
 WHERE a.ed = b.ed
 GROUP BY a.ed
)
SELECT ed, edname, score/p2/1000 AS score 
FROM interim;

Taking the ratio of the distance scaled populations against the unscaled populations allows populations that are far apart to dominate ones that are close together. Scaling the final result down by 1000 just makes the numbers more readable.

As before, the results of this calculation and others in this article can be see in the redistribution_bc.xlsx spreadsheet.

Is Regional Protection "Fair"

Using the measure of dispersion allows us to evaluate the government proposal on its merits: does protecting the North, Kootenays, Cariboo and Thompson protect those ridings that are most difficult to represent?

In short, no.

The regional scheme protects some difficult ridings (Stikine) but leaves others (North Island) unprotected. It also protects ridings that are not particularly dispersed at all (Kamloops-South Thompson), while leaving more dispersed ridings (Powell River-Sunshine Coast, Boundary-Similkameen) unprotected.

Among the larger ridings, Skeena is notable because even though it is the 10th largest riding by area, and 10th sparsest by population density, it's only the 17th most dispersed. There are many smaller ridings with more dispersion (Powell River-Sunshine Coast, Nelson-Creston, Boundary-Similkameen). This is because most of the people in Skeena live in Terrace and Kitimat, making it much easier to represent than, say, North Island. Despite that, Skeena's population is 43% below the average, while North Island's is 5% above.

Kamloops-South Thompson is the least dispersed (score 15.2) protected riding, and it's worth comparing it to the similar, yet unprotected, Nanaimo-North Cowichan (score 16.2).

Kamloops-South Thompson (protected) consists of a hunk of Kamloops, and a string of smaller communities laid out to the east for 50KM along Highway 1.

Nanaimo-North Cowichan (unprotected) consists of a hunk of Nanaimo, and a string of smaller communities laid out to the south for 45KM along Highway 1 (and some settled islands).

What is it about Kamloops-South Thompson that recommends it for protected status along with truly dispersed difficult ridings like Stikine? Nothing that I can determine.

Let the Commission Work

The intent of the government's proposal to amend the Redistribution Act is clearly to avoid the firestorm of protest that accompanied the 2008 Commission report, and it's good they are thinking ahead.

They need to think even further ahead: the consequences of having the boundaries enacted, then reversed in court, will be far more disruptive than allowing the Commission to proceed with the necessary work of redistributing BC's districts to more fairly reflect our actual population distribution.

The end result of an unconstrained Commission will be fair boundaries that still reflect the representation needs of dispersed ridings by giving them lower populations within the limits already acknowledged by the courts: +/- 25% with a handful of exceptions (I'm looking at you, Stikine).

I encourage you to explore the data on dispersion, and how it relates to the regional "protection" scheme, in the redistribution_bc.xlsx spreadsheet.

One standard explanation for the increase in measured inequality over the last few decades is that innovation has enhanced the productivity of highly educated people more than the productivity of less educated people. That in turn has increased the wages of college graduates relative to those who have only graduated high school. In the New York Times, Eduardo Porter refers to Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute who is skeptical of this phenomenon. Porter writes:

This rendition of history suggests that improvements in technology — coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in the 1980s — have been principal drivers of the nation’s widening income gap, leaving workers with less education behind.

But critics like Mr. Mishel point out that this theory has important blind spots.

For instance, why have wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as innovation continues at a breathtaking pace? Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year. Between 2008 and last year they fell a further $3,500. Though somewhat less pronounced, the pattern is similar for women.

This seems to refute the claim that technology gives college graduates an advantage. Surely there was technological change between 2000 and 2008, yet earnings of college grads fell. This calls into question the relationship between technology and inequality, but it’s alarming in its own right. It suggests that the rules of the game are rigged in some way. People are doing the right thing–they are going to college–and yet their salaries are falling. Here’s the key claim:

Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year.

What does that mean? It seems pretty straightforward. But it’s easy to misinterpret. Here is what it does not mean. It does not mean that people who had a college degree in 2000 found themselves with lower income eight years later. Let me say that again. It does not mean that people who had a college degree in 2000 found themselves with lower income eight years later. It COULD mean that. But it doesn’t have to.

Why not? Because the people who were sampled in 2000 and 2008 are not the same people. What the statement does mean, is that if you take the median income of people with at least a bachelor’s degree in 2008, that number is lower than the median income of all the people with at least a bachelor’s degree in 2000. (This assumes that prices are measured correctly. All of the income comparison in this post correct for inflation using standard methods. There are problems with those methods, but let’s put that issue aside.)

You might think that this is a nit-pick. How much can the population of highly educated people change in just eight years? Sure, some people retire or die. Others enter the labor force. But those effects must be small.

They’re not. They’re potentially huge and they make the comparison meaningless for trying to figure out if it’s a good idea to go to college or if the economy is rewarding college graduates. Stick with me and you will learn one of the coolest things there is to learn about statistics and data and the elusiveness of truth. Sometimes something that looks like a fact isn’t close to a fact. And you’ll discover something pretty amazing that happened between 2000 and 2012 that you might not know about.

If you want the details, go below the fold…

Comparisons between 2000 and 2012 might not show what you think they show because there could be changes in not just who is working but in how much they work and when they work. So it’s possible that the proportion of the work force that works full-time is different, or all year vs. part-year. And even when you hold those things constant, men make more than women. So another variable that can change over twelve years is the proportion of the work force that is male vs. female. So to hold all those factors approximately constant, I’m going to look at just women who work full-time, year-round and who are over 25. I pick the age point just because that’s how the Census lists it.

I’m going to use a slightly longer time horizon, 2000 to 2012, so I can use the latest data. It also makes the point I want to make a little more dramatic.  But if I did it for 2000-2008, I’d get the same effect. The bottom line is that you can’t draw simple conclusions from what look like simple transparent changes.

Between 2000 and 2012, here are the changes in real median income for women 25 and older who were defined as working full-time, year-round by education level. The data I’m using are census data from here.

Less than 9th grade                    -3.7%

9th-12th but didn’t finish          -6.7%

High school graduate                 -3.3%

Some college but no degree       -3.7%

Associate’s degree                     -10.0%

Bachelor’s degree or more        -2.7%

Looks like a pretty bleak 12 years, doesn’t it? And sure enough, these numbers echo the Mishel claim listed above–college grads seem to be doing worse.

Given those numbers, what do you think happened to the median income for all women, regardless of education level? If you don’t think about it very much, you’d take an average of the six decreases in the data for each income group. Remember, those six categories are exhaustive–they cover all women 25 and over who work full-time year-round in the workforce. The average change across all groups turns out to be almost exactly 5%. So if you didn’t think about it much, you’d guess that for all women 25 and over who worked full time, income fell about 5%. You’d think that might be a pretty good approximation. But you’d be wrong.

Or maybe you’d realize that all the groups aren’t the same size, so maybe you shouldn’t just take the average. Maybe you should take a weighted average. But you’d be pretty confident that the overall change in the median income of women would be somewhere between -2.7 and -10, the range between the smallest change and the biggest change.

But you’d be wrong. The income of women over the age of 25 who worked full time actually increased between 2000 and 2012. It went up 2.8%. (Again, all these numbers are corrected for inflation.) Not a great twelve years. But very different from a 5% drop.

Now that seems impossible. I must have made a mistake. If every sub-group went down, how could the total for the whole group go up?

But it is possible. How? The answer is that the women in the full-time workforce 25 and over in 2000 were not the same women in 2012. In particular, they were a lot better educated. But how much better educated could they be in twelve years? Or a better way to put it, how much could the educational composition of the full-time female labor force change in a mere 12 years?

A lot. More than I would possibly have come close to guessing. In 2000 30.5% of all female workers who were 25 and older and who worked full-time and year-round had at least a bachelor’s degree. In only 12 years, that number had increased to 41.8%. That’s an enormous change, a 37% increase in the proportion. And it’s the category that has the highest overall pay of all six categories. So if you increase the proportion of the population in the highest paying group, the overall average can go up even when each group, including the group that pays the most, goes down.

Here’s another way to see it. In 2000, 11.6 million women 25 and over who were working full-time had at least a bachelor’s degree. Twelve years later there were 17.2 million women 25 and older working full-time with at least a bachelor’s degree.

That’s incredible. Between 2000 and 2012, the number of women with at least a bachelor’s degree increased by 48% in absolute numbers. That’s a silent revolution in the work force. (This phenomenon is called Simpson’s Paradox by the way. Floyd Norris of the New York Times has a similar example here.)

And now you can understand the complexity of claiming that college grads are doing worse than they did before. They’re not the same people. When a lot more women are going to college and entering the labor force with a college degree, you wouldn’t expect them to necessarily have the same income as the people who have already been to college. For one reason, they’re likely to be younger with less experience. But as the number of people going to college increases, you might expect their starting salaries to be lower than workers from before. The pool is less selective. And of course, there are a hundred other reasons their salaries could be lower–maybe they major in different things than people did in the past.

My point is that you can’t prove much by observing that salaries for people with a college education are going down over some period. It doesn’t mean that people who already have college degrees are doing worse. They could be doing better, but the starting salaries of the newcomers can pull down the median and the average as well.

The bottom line is that the “stagnation of college grad salaries” is misleading as a measure of the health of the economy and even of the health of being who have already graduated and who are working. It can actually be an encouraging measure–one of the reasons college grad salaries can stagnate is because more people are going to college and the new grads have lower salaries than the existing median. But the new grads are better off than they would be than if they had not gone and their salaries do not necessarily mean that those who would have gone no matter what are doing worse.

The YotaPhone, an odd experiment at dual-screen compatibility, is finally going to see a launch. Set for December of this year, Russian OEM Yota is set to bring the two-faced device to the world. The launch will be “international”, and the YotaPhone will come out before Christmas.

The device pairs a run-of-the-mill color screen on one side, and a Kindle-esque eInk display on the other. We first saw the device at CES this year, then again at MWC in Berlin. Now that Yota has lined up their supply chain, it seems they’re ready to bring the YotaPhone to the masses. While we’re excited to see if the concept has real-world merit, we’re not excited at the potential price. Early estimates put it at about 500 Euro, or $750.

If you’re looking for a spec-heavy monster, the YotaPhone won’t help you. It’ll sport a dual-core 1.7GHz chipset on the back of 2GB RAM. The main screen (color) is a 4.3-inch 720p display, and the battery is a disappointing 1,800mAh. With such a diverse set of hardware, we wonder why — or how — it’ll keep up with itself. Clearly meant for lesser tasks, the price tag doesn’t seem to make the stretch worth it.

We’ll hold out judgement until we get a look at it, but even with all that Android can do for lesser devices, we’ll have to see just what this is capable of. The dual screen throws us off a bit, but mostly because we wonder why it’s there, and what we would want to do with it. More to the point, what apps or services can use it? Even with today’s confirmation, we’re still confused by the YotaPhone.

IDC has released its figures for smartphone shipments for the third quarter of this year and Android is yet again at the top of it all. The market intelligence company attributes this lead, as well as the rather surprising growth of Windows Phone devices, to steadily declining average selling price in the market.

Compared to the same quarter last year, the smartphone market grew by 39.9 percent, shipping out 261.1 million units in the third quarter of 2013. Unsurprisingly, majority of these, about 81.0 percent or 211.6 million units, all run Android. The Android market has grown by as much as 51.3 percent from its 74.9 percent market share from the same period last year. This covers all Android devices in all prices and sizes.

What is perhaps remarkable is the performance of devices carrying the Windows Phone OS. While still far below 5 percent, Windows Phone devices have managed to climb up to third spot with 3.6 percent, a remarkable 156 percent increase from last year, displacing BlackBerry. iOS also saw a slight decline from 14.4 percent last year to 12.9 percent. IDC, however, predicts that the fourth quarter might bring in a growth surge if the market reception of the newly launched iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c is any indicator.

According to IDC, this growth in Android’s and Windows Phone’s shares can be attributed to both platforms’ capability to address the low-price smartphone market, a segment that Apple’s iOS is probably not interested in. Average selling prices or ASPs of smartphones declined by 12.5 percent this year at $317. Another factor to consider, says IDC, is the rising popularity of phablets, smartphones sporting sizes of 5 to 7 inches, with almost all major Android vendors and even Nokia jumping on the bandwagon. Apple’s refusal to play in that arena might have caused iOS some shares in the third quarter as well.

SOURCE: IDC

PSOE,IP,PNV,CIU,UPyD, a las puertas del Congreso I @tasarobinhood.

[Karl Lunt] has come up with a simple circuit for protecting data you have stored on SD cards. As is relatively well-known, the little lock switch on the side of most SD cards really doesn’t do anything more than the switch on floppies or the tabs on VHS or cassette decks. It’s up to the reader/writer to check the status of the tab and decide if it should write to the card or not. Not a very safe system. However, it’s not the only write protection system built into SD and SDHC cards. As part of the standard, cards have three protection methods: A TMP_WRITE_PROTECT bit, a PERM_WRITE_PROTECT bit, and a PWD register.

The PERM_WRITE_PROTECT bit permanently write protects the card. The bit can not be reset, so you should be really sure you want to keep the data on the card forever. The PWD register is a password register. The card will not allow any access (read or write) unless a password is provided. The TMP_WRITE_PROTECT bit is a temporary write protect. This is the bit that [Karl] is working with. When TMP_WRITE_PROTECT is set, the card can be read but not written. Note that there is no true protection here, as anyone can modify the bit. However, this should stop grandma from accidentally deleting your wedding pictures.

[Karl's] device is very simple. A card is inserted into an Altoids tin enclosure. One button locks the card, another unlocks it. Three LEDs return status – power, card locked, and card unlocked. Under the hood, he’s using an Atmel ATmega328 to set and clear the TMP_WRITE_PROTECT bits. Power is provided by two AA batteries, and regulated with a Pololu 3.3v boost regulator. [Karl] has also included a serial port for control and debug information. We think this is a great hack, however one thing we’re not sure of is how or if these features are implemented in all cards. We’re relatively sure the name brand cards stick to the SD/SDHC spec sheet, but what about all the knockoff and no name brands from overseas?

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

Besides the images sent out by citizen-reporters in Valencia, the picture that best captures the essence of what is happening is the one tweeted by a government minister who tried to justify the measures. The photo shows a washer/dryer that, in the words of the minister, “cost 39,000 VEF on November 1 and today costs 59,000 VEF, a nearly 100 percent rise in a week...”

Yes, minister, that is precisely what happens when you are on the verge of hyperinflation! The inflation rate is now nearing 60 percent and, as anyone who has lived under those conditions (including yours truly) knows, going from 60 percent to 1,000 percent is a lot easier than going from 3 percent to 40 or 50 percent.

For many years Venezuela has produced nothing but oil (in decreasing quantities) and has therefore had to import pretty much everything the population consumes. The artificial level at which the government has kept the bolivar in spite of the massive outflow of hard currency required to meet those import needs has, of course, caused a severe drop in foreign-exchange reserves. Government controls and the militarization of the economy have not prevented the black market from taking the real exchange rate to a level ten times higher than the official one. No wonder people who have to obtain US dollars to import even the most basic stuff sell it at much higher prices than the government Wonderland economy dictates.

But that is not all. Since 2002 the money supply (M1) has grown at an annual rate of 54 percent while real GDP per capita has risen at an annual rate of just under 4 percent. The socioeconomic model based on producing nothing and consuming everything at subsidized prices, printing colossal amounts of money to paper over the government’s yawning fiscal gap, and waging literally a war on private businesses has led to a stagflation—minimal growth and skyrocketing prices that have turned ministers into photographers. A few weeks from the local elections that will be the first test of Maduro’s support since the rigged presidential election, the political consequences are already serious—he faces the possibility of such a big defeat that the numbers will simply overwhelm the government´s ability to commit yet another electoral fraud.

This explains Maduro’s desperate move over the weekend. The man who openly encouraged people to loot and ordered the military to takeover several stores around the country in an attempt to lower consumer prices understands all too well that he is in danger. He lacks Hugo Chavez’s charisma, he is presiding over a regime that exhibits growing cracks, and he is fast losing support according to the few polls one can trust in that environment.

We don’t know if he will be able to rig the next election at this point. But we do know this: He cannot win the war on inflation (soon hyperinflation) no matter how many stores he takes over, how many managers he throws in jail, and how many businesses he allows the masses to loot. Sooner or later, price inflation will cause his demise.

Increment and decrement. They sound like simple functions. But even the simplest functions can get quite complex in a microprocessor design. Ken Shirriff has written up a great blog post about his reverse engineering of the Z80′s 16-bit increment/decrement circuit. The Zilog Z80 was one of the most popular microprocessors of the 70’s and 80’s. It was used in many classic computers such as the Osborne 1. These machines would often use the Z80 to run the popular CP/M operating system.

The increment/decrement circuit is responsible for updating the program counter register during normal (non branch) operations. The increment/decrement circuit also handles the stack pointer register during stack operations, as well as several other functions. One might wonder why a separate adder would be used when the microprocessor has a big ALU available to it. The answer is twofold. First the ALU is already in use handling user math operations. Secondly the increment/decrement circuit has to be fast. A generic ALU just won’t be fast enough.

One classic adding circuit is a Ripple Carry Adder. Ripple Carry Adders get the job done, but they are slow. Note slow is measured in nanoseconds here – there are no clocks involved in the circuit. The whole thing becomes a classic combinational logic optimization problem. Each layer of logic adds a gate delay to the circuit. As the carry has to ripple through all 16 bits, there are 16 gate delays before the final result is available at the outputs. Delays like these are what limits the maximum clock speed for a given circuit.

The Z80 uses some tricks in its increment/decrement circuit. The first is Carry-lookahead. A carry-lookahead circuit will calculate the carry values directly from the inputs. This reduces the gate delays significantly, but it requires more real estate on the die. A second trick is the carry-skip circuit. Carry-skip calculates the result for groups of bits rather than each bit individually. Again, it will reduce gate delays, at the cost of real estate. The actual Z80 implementation uses a mix of both circuits. Several other “helper” circuits are also used. Surprisingly the Z80 has specific logic just to check for 1 (0×0001) on the internal address bus. This circuit is used during memory move loops to inform other parts of the chip that a loop is about to complete.