April 2007 Archives

Hoards of insipid movies are made every year, but Hollywood is reluctant to distribute movies that challenge the elites' perception of the world. Indoctrinate U is one such film, and it probably won't get wide distribution unless you follow that link and indicate your interest by filling out the form.

In 2004, the American Film Renaissance festival selected Indoctrinate U as its "most anticipated documentary." We include here a sampling of the "buzz" about the film and its short film predecessors, Brainwashing 101 and Brainwashing 201.

"one of the most horrifying and hysterical documentaries I have ever seen."
- Ain’t It Cool News, On Brainwashing 101

“If any of the films shown at this festival are going to breakout and become huge mainstream hits, it's either going to be Michael Moore Hates America or Brainwashing 101 [the short-form precursor to Indoctrinate U]. Directed by new, sharp-witted, gonzo-journalist Evan Maloney, 101 is an unbiased look at censorship and P.C. run amuck on college campuses. This is one of the most horrifying and hysterical documentaries I have ever seen.”

"For those who haven’t been on college campuses recently, Maloney’s documentary is eye opening. "
- American Enterprise, On Brainwashing 201

"Non-left academics are harassed for their political views. Students who show a conservative bent are threatened... Campuses are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas where issues stand and fall on their merits. Brainwashing 201 [the short-form precursor to Indoctrinate U] demonstrates effectively that this is now far from the case."

I've seen the short films, and I can't wait to see the long version in the theater, so go sign up. You won't get any spam or anything, but you will be notified if and when Indoctrinate U is playing in your area.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Price-optimization software is helping retailers price discriminate and capture more value from shoppers.

A large retail chain had a problem. It sold three similar power drills: one for about $90, a purportedly better one at $120 and a top-tier one at $130. The higher the price, the more the store profited.

But while drill know-it-alls flocked to the $130 model and price-fretters grabbed its $90 cousin, shoppers often ignored the middle one.

So the store sought advice from a new breed of "price-optimization" software from DemandTec Inc. What followed offers us a clue about important shifts that technology is bringing to retail shopping.

After analyzing an array of variables, including sales history and competitors' prices, the software suggested cutting the middle drill to $110.

That might have made the top drill seem more expensive. But drill aficionados still were fine shelling out $130. Sales of that drill didn't change. However, now that the $90 version seemed less of a bargain, the store sold 4 percent fewer low-end drills - and 11 percent more of the mid-range model. Profits rose.

My prediction is that 10-20% of the recommendations made by this sort of software are actually profitable, and that the store manager acts like a gatekeeper by rejecting bad ideas and recognizing good ones. My prediction of a low success rate isn't a criticism of the software! Artificial intelligence is great for augmenting human decision-making, even when humans can't be replaced entirely.

And consumers shouldn't fret that retailers are getting the technological upper-hand. After all, they've got to respond to increased competition and consumer-friendly technology like craigslist, Froogle, and Frucall. I think consumers are getting the best of the revolution so far.

(HT: Nick.)

Barack Obama has a very strange "Christian" heritage.

CHICAGO — Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.

Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.

I've never heard of "Afrocentric theology", and I can't really conceive of what it could mean within a Christian context. Other than Egypt, Africa doesn't feature prominently in the Bible (though mentioned a dozen or so times), so I can only assume that "Afrocentric" teachings aren't really about theology at all, but rather modern racial politics.

Few of those at Mr. Wright’s tribute in March knew of the pressures that Mr. Obama’s presidential run was placing on the relationship between the pastor and his star congregant. Mr. Wright’s assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate who says he was only shielding his pastor from the spotlight, said he respected Mr. Wright’s work for the poor and his fight against injustice. But “we don’t agree on everything,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics.”

A major presidential candidate who doesn't discuss politics with his closest spiritual adviser? I find that hard to fathom. In fact, the article goes on to describe a relationship between Obama and Wright with a very explicitly political foundation.

Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

The article portrays Wright as a left-wing nut masquerading as a Christian minister. He'll reap the rewards for his own heresy in the end, and it's tragic that he's leading so many followers into the maw of hell; more than anything, this article highlights the importance of digging deeper into the beliefs of those who claim the name of Christ. The world is full of charlatans like Mr. Wright. Obama may recognize the lunacy of his spiritual mentor, but no Christian could in good conscience associate with such a man or his church.

(Side note: I love that the NYT has started offering an option to view their articles as a single page. Thanks!)

Researchers at IBM have used a giant parallel computer to build a high fidelity model of a mouse brain that runs at 1/10th real time.

Neurobiologically realistic, large-scale cortical and sub-cortical simulations are bound to play a key role in computational neuroscience and its applications to cognitive computing. One hemisphere of the mouse cortex has roughly 8,000,000 neurons and 8,000 synapses per neuron. Modeling at this scale imposes tremendous constraints on computation, communication, and memory capacity of any computing platform.

We have designed and implemented a massively parallel cortical simulator with (a) phenomenological spiking neuron models; (b) spike-timing dependent plasticity; and (c) axonal delays.

We deployed the simulator on a 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer with 256 MB per CPU. We were able to represent 8,000,000 neurons (80% excitatory) and 6,300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB main memory of the system. Using a synthetic pattern of neuronal interconnections, at a 1 ms resolution and an average firing rate of 1 Hz, we were able to run 1s of model time in 10s of real time!

Very cool stuff. I predict a future (perhaps 50 years hence?) when we can build realistic artificial human-like brains but still can't figure out how to imbue them with consciousness. (I'm a subscriber to the weak AI school of thought, which boils down to a belief that knowledgeable observers will always be able to distinguish between real and artificial intelligences.)

(HT: BM, BoingBoing, Open the Future.)

Thousands of Japanese were tricked into buying sheep that were shaved to look like poodles.

Flocks of sheep were imported to Japan and then sold by a company called Poodles as Pets, marketed as fashionable accessories, available at $1,600 each.

That is a snip compared to a real poodle which retails for twice that much in Japan.

The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

This. Is. Hilarious. I love the Japanese.

Japanese police believe there could be 2,000 people affected by the scam, which operated in Sapporo and capitalised on the fact that sheep are rare in Japan, so many do not know what they look like.

"We launched an investigation after we were made aware that a company were selling sheep as poodles,'' Japanese police said.

"Sadly we think there is more than one company operating in this way."

Be careful! Someone find me a picture of these sheep-poodles so we can see how good the scam is for ourselves.

(HT: SW.)

RD passes on this list of 301 useless facts, but I put "facts" in quotes because just scanning the first few I already see one that's wrong.

3. The “57″ on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of pickle types the company once had.

Actually, Heinz saw a similar claim in a shoe ad on a train and decided to take the idea for his own.

I'm skeptical of several other "facts" as well, but hey, that leads to a whole new use for the list: a mistake scavenger hunt.

Another SmartMoney article, this time explaining why renting is better than buying because stocks are better investments than real estate.

Shares of businesses return 7% a year over long time periods. I'm subtracting for inflation, gradual price increases for everything from a can of beer to an ear exam. (After-inflation or "real" returns are the only ones that matter. The point of increasing wealth is to increase buying power, not numbers on an account statement.) Shares have been remarkably consistent over the past two centuries in their 7% real returns. In Jeremy Siegel's book, "Stocks for the Long Term," he finds that real returns averaged 7.0% over nearly seven decades ending 1870, then 6.6% through 1925 and then 6.9% through 2004.

The average real return for houses over long time periods might surprise you. It's zero.

There are a few factors that Jack Hough under-weights in my opinion (being a homeowner) such as the value of diversification. (Of course, one could buy shares of a real estate holding company instead of an actual house....) Still, I essentially agree with him, which is why I'm not eager to buy investment rental property. However, I'm not going to sell my house and rent an apartment; I enjoy the lifestyle of living in a house and the security of owning my own property, and those are worth something to me.

I hate junk mail... and it's bad for the environment too! So here are a few easy steps you can take to reduce the quantity of junk mail you receive.

Most senders of unsolicited junk mail get your name and address from one of three sources: Abacus Catalog Alliance (catalogs), Direct Marketing Association (fliers, brochures, etc.), or the credit bureaus (credit card and insurance offers), says Paul Stephens, a policy analyst with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a consumer advocacy group. If you do nothing else, take the time to wipe your name from these lists. "That'll get rid of most of your junk mail," he says. Here's how to do so:

Abacus Catalog Alliance: Signing up permanently halts the catalog mailings from association members. Email optout@abacus-direct.com with your full name and current address.

Direct Marketing Association: Stops direct mail marketing from association companies for five years. There is a $1 fee. Access forms here for online or mail-in submission.

OptOutPrescreen.com: This joint venture of the three credit bureaus puts a stop to prescreened credit and insurance solicitations. Sign up to halt these mailings for five years, or stop them permanently. Call 1-888-5-OPTOUT, or fill out a form here.

(HT: SoundMindInvesting.)

Here's a neat article in Wired about CIA efforts in 1979 - 1980 to sneak six Americans out of Iran after the seizure of our embassy. A fascinating look behind the scenes of a successful covert operation.

(For some reason I feel like I read this story years ago, but I can't remember where.)

(HT: Nick.)

What's the most money you've ever found? I found two $20 bills on the sidewalk in front of my house when I was nine. One of my friends from church in Los Angeles once found a satchel with over $100,000 in cash inside, and he turned it into the police. A family was planning to use it to buy a house and they somehow lost it out the window while they were driving in the rain.

I'm not Catholic and I often criticize the Roman Catholic Church and its leaders over doctrinal disagreements, but I'm very pleased to read that the Vatican is denouncing the evils of abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia in the strongest terms I can imagine.

[Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] listed these as abortion clinics, which he called "slaughterhouses of human beings," euthanasia, and "parliaments of so-called civilized nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex ..." ...

After denouncing "abominable terrorism" such as that carried out by suicide bombers, he condemned what he called "terrorism with a human face," and accused the media of manipulating language "to hide the tragic reality of the facts."

"For example, abortion is called 'voluntary interruption of pregnancy' and not the killing of a defenseless human being, an abortion clinic is given a harmless, even attractive, name: 'centre for reproductive health' and euthanasia is blandly called 'death with dignity'," he said in his address.

It's important to speak up and confront evil, not only to save the victims but also to save the perpetrators. No one is beyond God's grace and mercy, but unless people recognize their need they will never accept them.

Clayton Cramer always has great coverage of the intersection of mental health and public policy, and today he linked to an editorial in the WSJ that gives the history of deinstitutionalization in America and how it contributed both to homelessness and crime.

When I entered graduate school in 1972, so pervasive was the push to deinstitutionalize that a newly minted course was added to the mandatory curriculum: Community Psychology, a cobbled-together travesty that stood apart from all my other coursework due to its emphasis on polemics and aversion to science.

The basic premise of Community Psych--that severely mentally ill people could be depended on to show up for treatment voluntarily--never made sense to me. The core of the most common and debilitating psychosis, schizophrenia, is degradation of thought and reason. So the idea that people with fractured minds could and would make rational, often complex decisions about self-care seemed preposterous.

One day, I voiced that opinion in class, questioning if any mechanisms were being set in place to prevent a flood of schizophrenics from ending up on the streets, homeless, helpless, victims of crime and, in some cases, victimizers. The Community Psych professor--one of the liberationists--responded with a patronizing smile and a folksy account of the success of a program in rural Belgium or some such place, where humble working folk created a therapeutic milieu by volunteering to house psychotics in their humble homes and everything ended up peachy.

I didn't challenge what amounted to flimsy anecdotal data, but I did question its relevance to the plight of thousands of severely mentally disabled individuals set loose in vast urban centers. The professor's smile tightened and he changed the subject; and I resolved to get through this joke of a prerequisite and concentrate on becoming the best psychologist possible.

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built--predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

To which Mr. Cramer adds:

This Texas Law Review paper by Bernard Harcourt examines institutionalization--as measured by both prison and mental hospital inmates. He makes the shocking discovery that if you combine both measures and plot them against U.S. murder rates for the period 1928-2000, there is an almost perfect negative correlation: as institutionalization (in either prison or mental hospitals) goes up, murder rates go down, and vice versa.

As I wrote myself in the wake of the Virginia Tech slayings, our society of "tolerance" bears some responsibility for the massacre because we were too idealistic to stop Cho Seung Hui before he struck. The problem is that there seem to be so few adults left in the world, and few of them want to sacrifice their lives and reputations to lead our public institutions.

I'm glad I've stayed behind the television technology curve and haven't spent thousands of dollars on a large LCD or plasma TV. I've considered buying an HD projector, but my 1995 Hitachi projection television is still working just fine... and hopefully I'll be able to hold out till I can buy a laser tv next year!

IT'S being hailed by its developers as the next revolution in visual technology - a laser television that will make plasma screens obsolete.

Soon-to-be-listed Australian company Arasor International and its US partner Novalux unveiled what they claimed to be the world's first laser television in Sydney today, with a pitch that it would be half the price, twice as good, and use a quarter of the electricity of conventional plasma and LCD TVs. ...

With a worldwide launch date scheduled for Christmas 2007, under recognisable brands like Mitsubishi and Samsung, Novalux chief executive Jean-Michel Pelaprat is so bold as to predict the death of plasma.

“If you look at any screen today, the colour content is roughly about 30-35 per cent of what the eye can see,” he said.

“But for the very first time with a laser TV we'll be able to see 90 per cent of what the eye can see.

“All of a sudden what you see is a lifelike image on display.”

(HT: Reader JV.)

The WHO has already lifted its ban on DDT but environmentalists are poised to celebrate what would have been Rachel Carson's 100th birthday -- the woman who caused the hysteria that led to the original ban and who is partly responsible for the millions of resulting deaths.

Considered a secular saint by some, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century and is the posthumous recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A book due out on Earth Day (when else?), called "Courage for the Earth," is composed entirely of glowing tributes. Front and center is an essay by Mr. Gore, actually a reprint of the introduction he wrote to the 30th-anniversary edition of "Silent Spring." In it he admits that he is a Carson fanboy--he says that he has a portrait of her hanging in his office and that, "in spirit, Rachel Carson sits in on all the important environmental meetings of [the Clinton] administration."

With all the birthday hullabaloo, now seems as good a time as any for a re-examination of Carson's legacy. ...

Partly as a result of Carson's work, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, around the same time as most of the developed world. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty, banned DDT as part of a "dirty dozen" of agricultural chemicals.

The convention contains a tightly circumscribed exception for continued public health use, but even that exception almost didn't make it into the final document. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and more than 300 other environmental groups fought tooth and nail against it. In recent years, many such groups tried to get a complete ban on all DDT uses by 2007--in time for Carson's birthday.

To what effect? The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments.

The rest of the editorial explains how Carson's research was devoid of scientific evidence and has been completely discredited over the past decades. Perhaps some futuristic solution to malaria will one day be available, but in the meantime DDT could save millions of lives per year at negligible cost to people of their environment.

This early example of the precautionary principle in action will likely be followed up in coming years with the rapid discrediting of anthropological global warming theories and the accompanying environmentalist panic... hopefully before too many millions of people have to die.

Full Disclosure reports on an advancement by law enforcement in California that they claim might provide an ultimate solution to the gang problem. Good luck implementing it under a wave of ACLU lawsuits.

The biggest break ever in the war against gangs is ready to be employed. So says 20 year veteran prosecutor Steve Ipsen, all that is needed is for law enforcement and judicial officials is to endorse the use of new technology available for a GPS tacking system and a few modifications to the California Penal Code. Sky Detective, Inc CEO Thompson confirms the technology is here and already being deployed for similar uses.

Among the novel uses for the device in fighting gang crimes and a proposal on how to pay for it:

* Change Penal Code: Adult gang members found using juveniles would be guilty of a felony
* Send juveniles gang members to a 2 week boot camp to learn about “Three Strikes Law”
* Send juveniles to 1 week boot camp to learn how GPS tracking systems sounds alarm to monitors when curfews are violated, they skip school, fail to show up for work assignments or even wander into rival gang territory
* The cost of the GPS devices and monitoring service could be paid by taxing released criminals and parolees $50 per year for Drivers Licenses
* Parolees could be monitored as well, so if suspected of a particular crime their location could be verified and they could be arrested or removed from suspicion

It sounds like a promising avenue, and my only question is why it took so long to pursue it? Any technophile could have proposed it years ago.

Soldiers aren't yet fans of the new Land Warrior gear that Raytheon has been developing for 15 years.

There's a half-billion dollars invested in the gear hanging off the heads, chests and backs of the soldiers of Alpha company. Digital maps displayed on helmet-mounted eyepieces show the position of all the men in the unit as they surround a block of concrete buildings and launch their attacks. Instead of relying on the hand signals and shouted orders that most infantrymen use, Alpha company communicates via advanced, encrypted radio transmissions with a range of up to a kilometer. It's more information than any soldiers have ever had about their comrades and their surroundings.

But as Alpha kicks in doors, rounds up terror suspects and peals off automatic fire in deafening six-shot bursts, not one of the soldiers bothers to check his radio or look into the eyepiece to find his buddies on the electronic maps. "It's just a bunch of stuff we don't use, taking the place of useful stuff like guns," says Sgt. James Young, who leads a team of four M-240 machine-gunners perched on a balcony during this training exercise at Fort Lewis, Wash. "It makes you a slower, heavier target." ...

The hope is that Land Warrior will perform so well under fire that the Army's chiefs will have no choice but to keep funding the system. "It's kind of a Hail Mary pass," one Pentagon insider tells me. Give guys like Gelineau and Starks a few months with Land Warrior, the thinking goes, and they'll grow to love it, saving the 15-year effort.

So far, no dice. "Oh yeah, I can't wait!" an Alpha company soldier writes sarcastically in an e-mail months after I visit Fort Lewis and just before he's due for deployment to Iraq. "We still aren't fans."

That attitude could change — quickly — with a single good combat experience.

The older soldiers won't like it, but the younger ones and the future soldiers who are spending their teenage nights playing Halo will love this sort of system. Land Warrior may be too heavy, too cumbersome, and too buggy at the moment, but either it or some future replacement will fill the niche and connect our soldiers each individually to the net. It's inevitable, and I'm glad we're working on it now.

(HT: Nick.)

Everyone knows that tall people make more money (and get more girls) than short people, so Greg Mankiw is right to wonder how much we should tax height.

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities. Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

In other words, if you're against taxing tall people based on height, then your view of "distributive justice" is flawed and you should reconsider your support for tax policies that take from the rich and give to the poor.

(Also, tall people may earn more simply because they're smarter.)

Peggy Noonan echos my earlier post laying some of the blame for the Virginia Tech massacre at the feet of the dozens of people who knew of Cho Seung Hui's insanity but did nothing to stop him.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the c