My friend (and Wolfson colleague), Jon Crowcroft has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. This news has made my day, and I hope his. Among his many merits is the fact that he’s the only computer scientist I know who quoted Flann O’Brien in his PhD dissertation.
Good to see also that Mike Burrows of Google is also now an FRS.
A Boeing 747 falls out of the sky. Literally.
And watching it, I’m reminded of Auden’s wonderful poem about the fall of Icarus.
This is a test of Dave Winer’s new outliner/blogging tool, Fargo. Can’t decide if it will be useful for me or not, but there’s only one way to find out!
And just to see if the editing facility works, here’s a fresh, updated version of the original post.
Wonder how one puts in links — say to Arts and Letters Daily? Has that worked, I wonder?
Yes it has! Hmmm… this could be useful when one wants to blog something but is pressed for time.
Bertrand Russell to the old Fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.
Provenance of the image unclear, but my guess is that it comes from the Russell archives at McMaster university. At any rate, the archive catalogue (snippet below) does list correspondence between Russell and Mosely.
Foreign Policy is a terrific journal, but sometimes even it runs out of ideas for thought-provoking copy.
Take, for example, this morning’s little feature headlined “7 things the North Koreans are really good at”.
BTW, in case you’re interested, they are:
1. Building tunnels
Apparently, the Hermit Kingdom has constructed a massive network of clandestine tunnels underneath the so-called demilitarised zone (DMZ). “Designed as a means to mount a massive military invasion from the north, the tunnels are ‘large enough to shuttle through an entire military division per hour,’ according to Popular Mechanics. GlobalSecurity.org estimates that Pyongyang has built up to 20 tunnels that snake through the Demilitarized Zone.”
2. Counterfeiting US dollars. Foreign Affairs maintains that Kim Jong-Un & Co make the best fake dollars in the world.
3. Hacking (Really? In a country with no real Internet access.)
4. Doing more with less (i.e. absence of choice. Eric Schmidt told me that during his extended visit to North Korea, no public building he entered — except for his hotel — had any form of heating. It seems improbably that a state that cannot heat its buildings would be good at sophisticated software. But then again, they’ve built rockets and nukes.)
5. Cheap labour. (No surprise there.)
6. Massive co-ordinated propaganda displays. (Synchronized swimming was made for North Koreans.)
7. Seafood (Eh??
Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis were invited to the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner this year. Here’s why.
I love this exchange in the Paris Review‘s interview of Nabokov:
INTERVIEWER
Did you learn from your students at Cornell? Was the experience purely a financial one? Did teaching teach you anything valuable?
NABOKOV
My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations. Every lecture I delivered had been carefully, lovingly handwritten and typed out, and I leisurely read it out in class, sometimes stopping to rewrite a sentence and sometimes repeating a paragraph—a mnemonic prod which, however, seldom provoked any change in the rhythm of wrists taking it down. I welcomed the few shorthand experts in my audience, hoping they would communicate the information they stored to their less fortunate comrades. Vainly I tried to replace my appearances at the lectern by taped records to be played over the college radio. On the other hand, I deeply enjoyed the chuckle of appreciation in this or that warm spot of the lecture hall at this or that point of my lecture. My best reward comes from those former students of mine who, ten or fifteen years later, write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I taught them to visualize Emma Bovary’s mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement of rooms in the Samsa household or the two homosexuals in Anna Karenina. I do not know if I learned anything from teaching, but I know I amassed an invaluable amount of exciting information in analyzing a dozen novels for my students. My salary as you happen to know was not exactly a princely one.
Those analyses of novels (collected in his Lectures on Literature
Can you imagine how he would have figured in Rate my Professors!
As Tony Hirst points out, the fiasco of the Reinhard-Rogoff correlation that evaporated under student examination is a very good argument for open data in social science as well as in the exact sciences. But I don’t think that the full import of the screw-up has dawned on enough people. After all, our economies are being destroyed by governments who believe in the economic equivalent of fairies, and the Reinhard-Rogoff correlation (of public debt with low or zero economic growth) provided the only theoretical fig-leaf that they had. And now it’s been shown to be a transparent fig-leaf.
The Atlantic had a good go at exploring what this means:
Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to “normal” even though the economy hadn’t, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn’t easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn’t go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data). Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn’t recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.
Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d’être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow — if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation — slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse — but that didn’t stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a “fact” that everybody who mattered knew was true.
Except that it wasn’t.
Austerity is back to being a policy without a justification. Not only that, but, as Paul Krugman points out, Reinhart and Rogoff’s spreadsheet misadventure has been a kind of the-austerians-have-no-clothes moment. It’s been enough that even some rather unusual suspects have turned against cutting deficits now. For one, Stanford professor John Taylor claims L’affaire Excel is why the G20, the birthplace of the global austerity movement in 2010, was more muted on fiscal targets recently.
Will this matter? Hard to say. My feeling is that British economic policy-making has been evidence-free for a long time. George Osborne & Co are driven by blind faith in nonsense, and immune to every kind of logic, including, apparently, the electoral variety. But Krugman thinks that the Excel foopah has opened a crack in their invincible ignoramce.
“My vague, unquantifiable sense”, he writes,
“is that the debacle is changing the conversation quite a lot, even among the guys in suits. And it was the coding error that did it.
Now, the truth is that the coding error isn’t the biggest story; in terms of the economics, the real point is that R-R’s results were never at all robust, both because the apparent relationship between debt and growth is fairly weak and because the correlation clearly goes at least partly the other way. But economists have been making these points for years, to no avail. It took the shock of an outright, embarrassing error to shake the faith of the Very Serious People in a result they really wanted to believe.
The point is that the next time Olli Rehn, or George Osborne, or Paul Ryan declares, sententiously, that we must have austerity because serious economists (i.e., not Krugman and friends) tell us that debt is a terrible thing, people in the audience will snicker — which they should have been doing all along, but now it has become socially acceptable.”
Yep. Sometimes laughter is the best riposte.
LATER: Sooner or later, we ought also to start sniggering whenever an economist enters the room. As a profession addicted to a pathological paradigm which wrecked the banking system, its practitioners have shown an astonishing lack of remorse about their failings. And it turns out that, having had their incompetence exposed, Reinhart and Rogoff have been displaying textbook disingenuousness, so it’s nice to see that they’re now being called out on that too.
Well, well. Not content with traversing the globe and dispatching uplifting epistles based on extensive conversations with heads of state and taxi-drivers, Tom Friedman will now have a conference all by himself. It’s called ‘The Next New World’ and for $995 you can have a whole day watching Tom “explore the complex dynamics of new-world infrastructure, especially the transformative electronic, digital and mobile environment,” impart “invaluable insights into strategies for success in today’s new world order,” and answer the question: “What World Are You Living In?”
Why does Friedman feel the need to start a conference of his own?
“It’s been a feeling of mine for a while”, he says in the introductory video, “that while we were sleeping, something really big happened over the next decade. That is, while we were focused on 9/11 and the subprime crisis, something really big happened in the plumbing of the world.”
[The plumbing btw is basically the internet.]
So what happened while we were sleeping (and therefore not reading the New York Times OpEd pages)? Well,
“The world went from connected to hyperconnected, from interconnected to interdependent, and my view is that this is changing every job, every workplace, every industry, every job. and we’re not talking about it. Yet we’re all living it and feeling it…If you don’t start every day asking, ‘What world am I living in?’ you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”
Friedman proposes to answer these questions by chatting with a set of white men on subjects including “Threats or Possibilities,” “What Happened to Power?” “What You Don’t Know Is Coming,” and “What Energy Is Going to Be.” If that weren’t enough, the website promises the presence of droves of C-Suite executives, venture capitalists, “content providers,” “hardware manufacturers,” and “service providers.”
As the New Republic astutely points out, if you haven’t got $995, you can achieve much the same result from the wonderful Thomas Friedman OpEd Generator.
Fascinating report in the Economist.
WHEN Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone Group, a private-equity firm, announced in Beijing on Sunday the $300m Schwarzman Scholars programme to send students to China to study, it was a testament to China’s place in the world as a new centre of gravity. Its gravitational pull on corporate money is already fearsome: Behind Mr Schwarzman himself, a long list of companies and individuals with substantial business interests in China have lined up to contribute to the programme: Boeing, an airplane maker; Caterpillar, a maker of bulldozers and excavators; BP, an oil company; and several large banks.
Schwarzman Scholars will fund scholarships beginning in 2016 for 200 students a year from much of the world to attend classes at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, the alma mater of President Xi Jinping and of many other top leaders (Mr Xi sent a letter to the announcement ceremony). The scholarship is to fund the studies of 10,000 students over 50 years.
As the piece goes on to point out, this idea is modelled on the Rhodes Scholars scheme, which brought bright kids to Oxford at a time when Britain was seen as the centre of the world. How times change.