Adrift In the Happy Hills

Japan is Changing

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:24:00 +0000

And not just in terms of demographics or child births. I started reading Japan Echo Web, a government-funded site that translates dry Japanese commentary on economic and diplomatic policy. Once you get used to the plodding style you can learn some interesting stuff. A roundup of what I learned-

Japan is developing a structural trade deficit, and thanks to the increased popularity of foreign smartphones, will even lose its status as a net exporter of *electronics*(p.6). In other words, it will now consume more Samsung and Apple gadgets than it makes itself for the outside world. Now that's a sea change.

You know how Japan has the highest public debt in the world, at something like $13 Trillion? The Bank of Japan owns approximately ¥70 trillion (20%) of that debt, and is buying even more under the official purpose of spurring inflation. But some Japanese analysts say the government debt-buying is "largely in response to a political pressure" In other words, the government is pushing the central bank to pay for their debts with newly printed money.

Despite saying he will keep up that ultra-loose monetary policy, Bank of Japan Governor Shirakawa says that reckless government bond buying could cause financial instability. Okay, I'm gonna go back to using the internet to look at cat pictures now...

Drinking Coffee When You Suffer From Acid Reflux / Heartburn

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:13:00 +0000

Noticed the posts here that get the most traffic are ones that solve little "niche problems" that aren't so well-covered elsewhere on the internet. Now that I'm posting again, I should give my two cents on solving such a problem- how to drink coffee when you suffer from indigestion, whether you label it acid reflux, GERD, heartburn or any other name. If you're coming here from google looking for an answer, hopefully this advice will be as useful for you as it has been for me.

It's widely accepted that coffee is one of the worst things a person who suffers from acid reflux can imbibe. The common advice is simply to avoid it altogether, period. If you're a coffee junkie like me, this has probably been a hard rule to stick by. Fortunately however, there are things you can do to prevent the associated symptoms. I make use of all six of the below tips together, but if your acid reflux is less severe than mine you may find that even following step one is enough to solve your problems.

The tips below are ranked from simplest to most complex/most inconvenient. Try each one, and if it isn't enough to prevent your symptoms, add another strategy.

1. Only drink dark roast coffee (French roast).

I know people with otherwise bad GERD who handle their symptoms with this alone. Studies show that dark roasting produces a chemical compound that keeps stomach cells from producing the excess acid often caused by coffee drinking. Researchers are now developing a coffee designed to be rich in the active chemical, so with luck in the future we'll have blends that are even more soothing. I order a big bag of Starbucks French roast from Costco and keep the beans in the freezer in an airtight container for freshness.

2. Cold brew your coffee.

Don't worry, you can still drink it hot! Using hot water allows coffee to be brewed quickly, but at a price. Apparently much of the acid release from coffee grinds into your brew is the result of interaction with the heat. You can also brew coffee with cold water, but it takes 12+ hours of soaking the grinds in order to extract flavor and caffeine.

Fortunately, this isn't much trouble with the Toddy cold brew system. Brew a big pot of coffee using it in the evening, and in the morning you'll wake up to a big jug of cold-brew coffee concentrate (think espresso) that will last you 1-2 weeks. You pour a little concentrate in the bottom of the cup, then add hot water to dilute it and heat it up. Doing this will reduce the acid levels by 70%. It's true you get a bit less caffeine too (about 2/3 as much), but you get far less acid, so you still come off far ahead in terms of acidity/buzz ratio.

Best of all, cold brew actually tastes great, and is used by coffee aficionados more than by GERD sufferers. With so little acid, the coffee's more appealing flavors come out, and it begins to taste more like cocoa or chocolate. So damper your acid reflux, and get a cup of gourmet coffee to boot! (Actually, the chocolate taste is more apparent with medium roast coffee, because the french roast coffee you'll be using as per step one chars out a lot of the flavors in the roast process, but oh well, you can't win them all. The flavor quality of French roast is still better under cold brew).

3. Reduce coffee consumption.

An obvious but important point- if you're drinking 5 cups a day, you may find that no number of tips will help your heartburn. The good news is if you go cold turkey a week or so your tolerance to caffeine will lower, and even one cup will give you a pick-me-up. So practice moderation.

4. Dilute.

Drinking water dilutes the acid concentration in your stomach, making it easier for your body to manage. The obvious solution is to dilute your coffee and cut the espresso. But even drinking water after you've enjoyed a cup will help.

5. Try JAVAcid, or its ingredients a la carte.

JAVAcid is a blend of natural ingredients that reduces heartburn associated with coffee. Testimonials suggest that it is particularly effective for people suffering from Interstitial Cystitis. The company is doing quite well, offers one-time free samples and has a subscription service that delivers new boxes of it to people's doors monthly- not typical signs of a fly-by-night placebo. Unfortunately, they don't seem to sell outside of the USA, and they ignored my emails asking how I could go about getting it. So I took the liberty of tracking down all the active ingredients, so I could make my own-

a) Calcium and Vitamin D.
Calcium is likely the major active ingredient (same ingredient used in Tums). You could get the result from taking a couple tums tablets before drinking your coffee, but taking vitamin D as well will help it absorb. Since Tums are hard to get in Japan I take supplemental calcium tablets like in the link above, chew them to make digestion faster and wash it down with water.

b) DGL Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice Root Extract (200mg)
Alleged to protect the lining of the stomach. There have been concerns that taking licorice extract in excess causes problems. but even critics seem to grudgingly agree the deglycyrrhizinated variant does not seem to produce adverse effects. They caution you shouldn't take more than 400mg (1 tablet) a day even so, but fortunately the JAVAcid recipe only calls for 200mg, so you're fine. I just break the tablets in half.

c) Fibersol 2 and Inulin (pre-biotic dietary fibers) Generally, intake of fiber seems to ease indigestion altogether. (Incidentally I also experience less indigestion when I eat lots of unsalted/unfried nuts, which contain lots of soluble fiber. It's true they're fattening, but that protein and energy is welcome now that I've cut beef from my diet. You need to get your protein from somewhere).

6. Try Gasmotin.

Gasmotin is a medication developed in Japan for gastritis. It is also available in the west. The official literature is dense and difficult to penetrate, but states that it is "confirmed to enhance digestive tract movement". My doctor simply says that it tightens the entrance to the stomach so that less acid can pass into the esophagus. Whatever the reason, it noticeably helps overcome indigestion and acid reflux, particularly after coffee. I've seen warnings in English literature not to take it indefinitely (though so far without justification for the statement), but my doctor assures me it is taken indefinitely in Japan with no problems. In my own experience, it has no obvious side effects.

So that's everything I know. In my experience, doing all this makes coffee extraordinarily more drinkable.

Vancouver Riots and the Era of "facebook Surveillance"

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 06:51:00 +0000

Just wanted to say a word about the Vancouver riots following the Canucks-Bruins game. I was disgusted by it. I want to see rioters brought to justice and prosecuted. But beyond the immediate damage to Vancouver, the incident raises some interesting questions about privacy in the digital age.

You've probably heard that many of the rioters have been identified via facebook. In an age where everyone has a camera in their pocket in the form of a cellphone, and where everyone routinely uploads photos and tags faces, it was inevitable that the worst of the rioters would be caught in image form for the world to see. While the riot was originally blamed on a small group of armed thugs prepared to cause trouble before the game even started, facebook photos have shown that most of the rioters were middle class males that just took the opportunity to unleash when it seemed like the regular rules no longer applied.

Websites with pictures of rioters caught in the act have sprung up asking people to anonymously identify their friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Some social media experts have pointed out that while this may be the first time this has been done, it is very unlikely to be the last. We may be entering an era of "mutual surveillance", where everyone is watching everyone else, all the time.

Some people are uneasy about the online lynching taking place before due process or fair trials. Other see facebook and online photos as an emerging weapon of the police state.

The interesting thing to note is that we, the citizens, have become the police state. Orwell envisioned a centralized form of surveillance that only those in power would have the money and infrastructure to make use of, leaving the ordinary person with nowhere to hide. Instead, the cameras are held by all of us.

It should be pointed out that until now, many publicized uses of cameras have been to expose abuses of authorities, not citizens, the first being Rodney King's beating in Los Angeles in the early 90's. The consequence of this is that authorities are every bit as susceptible to surveillance. You can see the ubiquity of photographs and video in the public domain as analogous to the wikileaks philosophy that in a world where nothing is private, those who are the most honest have the most to gain. For example, suppose you are a food company that routinely checks your product for problems, despite the fact your competitors do not. Either you must abandon the practice yourself, or face difficulty in competing them due to the costs they cut by behaving that way. Only if their secrets are brought to light is it possible for you to behave ethically and still survive as a business.

Since the taping is decentralized and distributed amongst the population, it is unlikely it can be stopped at this point. Attempts to prevent it by law run the risk of making things more Orwellian, not less. It should be noted that attempts to curtail public videotaping will likely do more to empower the authorities. When videotaping is challenged legally, it is usually by the police who attempt to cover up abuse by pressing bogus charges on the tapers.

The best possible solution may be to see to it that if public taping and photographing is going to happen at all, legal protections should be put in place to enforce the right of people to do it, to prevent the power from falling on one side. Whether we like it or not, a bargain along the lines of "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" has been forced upon us. And we just have to hope that if we are more ethical, we will have more to benefit from the arrangement.

Beating the Japan Jetlag

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 11:19:00 +0000

I'm from East coast, which has a time difference from Japan of 12 hours, about as long as you can get before the difference begins to shrink again. The jetlag turns your body upside down. As far as your internal clock is concerned, day becomes night and vice versa.

But strangely, people that make the trip between Japan and the Eastern seaboard often notice that the jetlag coming back from Japan is much worse than the jetlag going to it. I never understood why this was- why is the gap between 11am and 11pm Monday so much harder to deal with than the gap between 11am Monday and 11pm the previous night? But for whatever reason, the qualitative experience is different. Coming to Japan, the day is bright and full when you sense it should be dark. The shining sun and flurry of activity keeps you awake, as much as you wish you could sleep. Coming back, however, the opposite occurs- as night falls, your internal clock rings, and you begin to waken. This can often result in a week or two of bleary eyed insomnia. Its a lot easier to keep a disoriented body awake at "night" than it is to convince it to sleep during the "day".

With time though, I've gotten better and better at beating the return-home jetlag. Here are my tips:

1. If you have a choice, take a red-eye flight

You should probably be doing this anyway, since traveling at night saves you from wasting a day doing it, and extends the real length of your time back. People avoid the red-eye because they hate the idea of staying awake all night. What they don't realize is that as far as their bodies are concerned, they'll be "staying awake at night" for the next few days anyway; all the red eye does is give them a head start on beating the jet lag before they even arrive. Drink lots of coffee before you leave and do what you can to convince your internal clock that its morning as you go. Soon enough, that hour truly will be morning.

2. When you arrive, stay awake for the remaining daylight hours at all costs.

If you've timed it right, it should be close to nightfall as you arrive anyway. But if not, keep awake at all costs- falling asleep during the day will make it very hard to sleep when night comes, undoing all your hard work staying awake during the flight.

Of course, staying awake after you've already been up for 24 hours is easier said than done. The key is activity. Go out with family or close friends who will understand if you're out of it for the first day, and keep talking to fight off the sleep. If you just got back, you should have lots to talk about anyway.

Avoid coffee at this point. Remember- the point is to sleep at night, not just stay awake during the day. You want your body to be at ease and ready for sleep when its time to do it.

3. Take some Melatonin before you go to bed

Melatonin gives your body that woozy, sleepy feeling that comes over you as night approaches. Aside from its obvious use in fighting insomnia, it also helps adjust your body's clock. Its likely one reason you stay awake at night during jet lag is because your body isn't producing enough of it when you need it, so help it along.

If you follow these steps, you should be feeling better by your second day back. Or even your first morning back, if you time the departure time of your flight just right.

2 problems for Japan and a simple solution

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:36:00 +0000

Problem 1:

-Japan owes 200% of its GDP in debt, the highest rate in the first world.

-Japan owes most of its debt domestically- in other words, in yen.

-The Bank of Japan controls the supply of yen. It could print its way out of debt. But normally, this is not done, because it leads to inflation as the money supply increases.

Problem 2:

-The Yen is too high. Japan's economy relies heavily on exports. The lower the value of the yen, the more money it makes selling cars overseas. Therefore, Japan has bought dollars in the past when the US dollar falls, to keep its value high against the yen.

-Right now, the end of the carry trade has made the price of the yen shoot up, making those critical exports less profitable.

Solution to both problems:

Print yen and pay domestic debt with it. Japan's economy is at the 0 bound as it is, with everyone saving. So inflation is not a major threat.

But Japan is now in a very rare situation where any resulting inflation would be a blessing. They could pay off debt and lower the value of the yen all at the same time.

But the bureaucrats in charge just sit there like deer in headlights. It's depressing.

Free society and Free markets don't have to go hand in hand

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:14:00 +0000

In Sweden right now. Stopped in Beijing on the way. It was an interesting experience, and I thought I should write something about it, as much commentary about China circulating as there already is.

China recently passed Japan as the second largest economy in the world, and people have been talking about its inevitable rise to the status of an economic superpower for years now. But it wasn't until I saw one of their major cities entering this new era that the reality of it really hit me. I've been to a number of second world countries that were supposedly on the verge of breaking through with a booming modern economy, only to be held back by the usual string of corruption, nepotism and political instability. But China already seems to have crossed a critical threshold. They may be fudging the numbers, and they may be experiencing a bubble and see a crash, but even with those things considered, its clear that China will have major influence in the world our children grow up in.

It's important to remember that for all the cell phones and sodas you see there now, China is not a free society. The government is not democratically elected, and they will disappear anyone that threatens them. They censor the internet. They forbid discussion of politics. In these respects, they are everything that the western world, particularly the United States, has prided itself in not being.

This is an interesting turn of events, because throughout the second half of the 20th century, the struggle between capitalism and communism was framed as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was billed as a triumph of freedom. But what it really was was a triumph of capitalism. Regardless of what anyone may have thought about the US, their economic system had indisputably generated more wealth than either China or the USSR could manage playing by their own sets of rules. Philosophical debates over how a government should try to provide for people aside, it had become hard to argue that East Germany was better off than West Germany by any practical measure.

The point is, wealth plays a large role in determining how happy people are with a state. In government simulations, it is wealth (more specifically, food) that plays the key role in whether or not the North Korean military will remain loyal to Kim Jong Il, or if they will finally overthrow him. Depressions are a threat to whoever is in office, but people tend to be much more forgiving if they are doing well. Free speech is a noble thing to yearn for, but it takes backseat to feeding your children on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Totalitarianism looked pretty bad when it couldn't deliver. In previous decades it seemed just that such states were unable to keep themselves from collapsing economically. When the USSR fell, it felt like Karma for its misguided ideals.

But what happens when totalitarianism makes one exception by easing up on control of the free markets, and lets everybody have a cell phone? What happens when you can get a good job in an otherwise totalitarian state, and buy a nice car?

Already, some American conservatives are starting to look toward China approvingly. One blogger I know noted with admiration how when China needed to build its Olympic stadiums, it just razed the houses in the way, without the years of paperwork, payouts and BS bureaucratic hassle that it would have taken in the states. Another liked the way Chinese police dealt with an emotionally distraught man who took a hostage. They just shot him in the back of the head, without trying to talk him down or worrying about any of that due process crap. Its sad, because now that China is poised to not only rival but eventually even surpass the US economically, those policies are the only thing that distinguish the US from China.

And its going to be a lot harder to preserve those ideals this century. Because unlike in the last one, we won't have all the cars, electronics, Big Macs and sodas to persuade people they're worth fighting for. Because all of those things are now already available in, if not made, in China.

The Status Trap

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:07:00 +0000

Came across a really interesting article on the link between self-esteem and perceived social status, not just in terms of your income, but in terms of your standing with your friends and at your job.

It's an interesting theory. This paradigm actually accounts for a lot of common, everyday behaviors that I never thought had a satisfactory explanation. We see office politics over meaningless little things all the time. These behaviors get dismissed as "petty", even though all but the best of us tend to get caught up with them at some point. This actually offers a rational explanation as to why that would be, rather than just shrugging the phenomenon off, as it usually is. It's one of those elephants in the room of human behavior, all around us, but almost never acknowledged.

The article mentions competing with yourself, and comparing yourself to where you were a few years ago, as a way of staying out of status games with people around you. I have another strategy for staying out of the "status trap"- put your focus into being capable as someone in your field, not just as someone who's capable in his/her immediate surroundings. If you focus on your own workplace, it can lead to competing with people around you. But if you focus on developing your skills to be competitive anywhere, it can lead to partnering with the people around you to become better as a group, and better teamwork.

What is g?

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:58:00 +0000

"Too long, likely won't read" summary: this is an explanation about how the concept of general intelligence, or IQ, is justified statistically, and some general criticisms about it. Tried to keep it simple, but that means keeping it long.

Took a class in multivariate statistics this spring. Among other things we learned about Principal Components Analysis and Factor Analysis, a family of procedures invented by the psychometrician Charles Spearman at the turn of the last century for the express purpose of studying intelligence. In fact the entire concept of "general intelligence", or g, is essentially founded in factor analysis.

Today, PCA and Factor Analysis have all kinds of applications that reach beyond justifications for IQ tests and conservative policies. But learning about it even in a general sense demystified what IQ is to me to some extent, and I wanted to share.

A few disclaimers- I am by no means an expert in factor analysis, and even what I know will be simplified for the sake of getting the general point across without getting mired in technical details. If you want a more involved explanation, check out this blog post by an academic at University of Michigan, and if you want to get down to the linear equations and matrix algrebra, get my teachers' text, which is apparently as loathed by past students reviewing it on amazon as it is thorough.

I was talking about with a friend today and realized you need to go back to ground 0 to really explain this to everybody, so I'll start with the basic-basics, correlation. You did it in 9th grade. Y is a vertical line, x is a horizonal one. On the horizontal axis, you might have an independent predictor variable, like the $ amount of money you sink into a theme park. On the vertical Y axis you have your dependent variable, say number of visitors to the theme park. If money spent on theme parks increases visitors, you should see a linear relationship, and a diagonal line at a 45 degree angle on the graph: for every buck you spend, one more visitor comes, etc. This would be a correlation of 1. No relationship whatsoever gives you a correlation of 0. A perfect negative relationship (each dollar spent repels an existing visitor from the park) is negative 1.

In real life, of course, the relationships are rarely this clear-cut. If you have a perfect relationship of 1, its almost certainly just because you screwed up your data and just have two different looking measures of the thing (toe size in shoes increases with shoe size, for example). In real life, even .8 is a great correlation. Even .4 can be important, though on the graph it just looks like a smear of data points angled in a general upward direction to the naked eye.

It was observed by Spearman (you can read the original paper here) that all school tests tend to correlate, geology with math, art with history, German with geology. (I see this myself: at work we look for tests that correlate with the TOEIC Bridge, a test of ability in English language. As it is, everything correlates with it, including scores on math tests).

Spearman developed a technique for studying these intercorrlelations between multitudes of tests, which begat Principal Components Analysis and later Factor Analysis.

A brief aside to explain the process: To put it as simply as I can, these procedures group things that correlate with one another together. As an example, suppose you gave people a survey about things they liked to do. Half the activities mentioned on it were things like going out to meet friends, meeting new people, etc, and half were stuff like staying home and reading a book.

You might find that the activities that involved going out and meeting new people tended to correlate with one another, and the activities that involved being alone tended to correlate with one another. Looking at how people answer these questions about activities, you might see 2 "factors" emerge: an extroversion factor, made up of the going out questions, which correlate with one another highly, and an introversion factor, of activities that involve being alone (come to think of it, you might just find that these two personalities made up polar opposites of just one big factor...but you get my drift).

Anyway: Factor Analysis is quite good at isolating groups of questions/tests etc that are correlated with one another (Group A, math problems), and therefore share some kind of relation, with groups of unrelated questions that also correlate well with one another (Group B: questions designed to measure love of food) but do not correlate with the questions in group A (because you can love food and hate math, love math and food, love math and be skinny and not care about food, etc etc. No correlation).

However, as I said, all those school tests do tend to correlate, even, say, English and science, which you would think would be pretty different.

People I talk to object to this idea. Surely, there are great writers that just don't get science and vice versa, right? Well, yes and no. And in the long run, more or less just no. We tend to look at extremes and exceptions, but as a general rule, a kid who's a great writer will tend to be not too shabby in math class either, even if he won't be the next Einstein. And the math nerd will probably be an at least competent writer, even if he never becomes Shakespeare. And conversely, to hold down the other end of the correlation, there are plenty of people that won't be particularly great at either of those subjects, too.

Spearman found one big factor that accounted for most of the variance, which came to be known as g, or general intelligence. Spearman posited that much in the same way all those intercorrelated questions about going out and meeting people represent an "extroversion" factor, the big factor of intercorrelations between various mental tests represented "general intelligence", in other words, how smart you supposedly are. The variance unique to each test that couldn't be explained by the first big general factor was presumed to be unique to each test, but what could be explained by that first factor was "general intelligence": a general tendency to succeed on paper and pencil and paper tests.

Of course, since then there have been all kinds of alterations, challenges, and more alterations to the theory, and Spearman's original methodology has been tweaked and improved upon in countless ways, with literally thousands of pages written on the subject. And yet, the theory, in essence, remains the same: one general factor accounts for success on more or less any kind of mental test. You might expect that there would be at least, say, two, one for verbal intelligence and one for mathematical intelligence. But no. Quibbling about first and second order factors aside, one essentially describes them all quite well. Tweaking that theory might improve your model fit in Confirmatory Factor Analysis (which I won't get in to here) a bit, but bottom line, one does it.

And so, IQ tests are designed to tap that general factor, that general correlation between any other test you might take. It works as a fairly good predictor of how you'll do on a test of economics, or a flight school exam, or a rock and roll trivia quiz, precisely because its designed to tap that statistical overlap between them.

So the apparently statistically unassailable correlation between IQ tests and other paper and pencil tests did a lot to justify the serious study of IQ. If there are "multiple intelligences", why can't anyone ever find them in factor analysis? At the heart of it, this is the trump card IQ supremacists like to play when they say science is on their side.

And it sounds pretty convincing. But here's the thing: I've spent this spring doing factor analyses and PCA on all kinds of data. Prices of companies on the stock market. Countries' performances on Olympic events. Various brands of cereals.

And nearly all of them can be explained to a fair degree by a large first factor.

Oh yes, I know there are all kinds of qualifications to be made here. Yes, large first factors are more common in PCA, which is now frowned upon for analysis of latent variables. Yes, maximum likelihood extraction will account for less variance (meaning smaller factors, first or otherwise) and explain more of the correlation matrix. Yes, rotations can make large first factors vanish, or at least diminish.

And yet, to only somewhat greater and lesser degrees, those big first factors loom over almost any data you subject to these procedures. In the case of stock prices, it's a "general index factor", meaning the overall health of the stock market (secondary factors are unique to specific industries such as finance, energy, etc). In the case of Olympic decathlons, its "general athletic ability".

The point is, we tend to mystify study of the mind. If we're trying to see something in our heads that can't be seen by the naked eye, say, the inspiration that led the paintings on the Sistine Chapel, we can tend to make out that first factor to be something of striking importance. And in all fairness, it may indeed be a useful method for summarizing our data. But even if it does help guide our understanding of intelligence, let's be clear about what it is, statistically speaking: Its an attempt to organize and explain the data derived from a battery of tests. And when you apply the same logic and reasoning to other things, it suddenly becomes a lot clearer, and a suddenly seems a lot less exciting and insightful.

As an example:

Suppose a small nation is about to enter the olympics for the first time. This hypothetical small nation has 3000 athletes that have only played one sport before now, but they need to pick the top athletes and assign them to different event(say 24).

So this is what they do: they each compete in the 24 sports. Times and scores are recorded, and a factor analysis is performed on the data.

A first factor that explains 45% of the data is derived. This first factor is labelled g.a, general athletic ability. It is the commonality that explains success across the board with all those sports. It correlates well with all those sports because it is, in fact, the creation of those correlations. Each athlete receives a factor score, which shows how highly they load on it.

And you know what? It works quite well, statistically speaking. Want to predict who will do well at javelin throwing? Well, lets look at who loaded highest on that general factor. Hey, he's good!

Want to see who will do well at the 300m swim? Check the factor scores. Not bad!
Since this data seems statistically unassailable, it is decided: athletes with high loading on that factor will get to go to the olympics, participating in randomly selected sports. Because that general factor makes the specific sport irrelevant, you see.

Just one problem: while that factor score may well be a good indicator, statistically, if you want to get someone who's really good at javelin throwing...just look at the javelin throw test you did, and see who threw furthest.

If you really want to see who will do best at the 300m swim...just check the race you held, and look who came in first.

Depressingly often, people that did best in those events may not have even have had extremely high scores for that factor at all.

The same is true of mental tests. If you really, really want to mash together an economics test with a flight test with a rock and roll trivia quiz, you can do it, statistically. But if you want to see who does best at each, that general factor is a poor replacement for the original info. By the same token- the traits that make a good stockbroker really do differ from the traits that make a good scientist, regardless of that overlap.

Everything Old is New Again

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:49:00 +0000

There's an old saying that "people laugh at the fashions and trends of the past, but follow the current ones religiously". I believe it's from the turn of the last century, but over 100 years later its still true. As cool as you think you look now, in the not too distant future, people will look at your picture and roar at the absurdity of your clothing and hairstyle. In ten years, this era, now seen as the cutting edge of cool by the young people living through it, will be universally derided as a fashion abomination, a cultural wasteland from which nothing of value was produced.

There's an interesting exception to this rule, though: When a new past era becomes targeted for derision, the previous "worst decade ever" suddenly experiences a revival in popularity. Today on the train I saw a soda ad that modified the font on the "Fanta" logo to look like the lettering on the name of an '80's hair metal band, with sharp, jagged edges, lightning bolts on either end and a color fade from shocking red to shocking purple. And it occurred to me that the 80's revival in pop culture is well under way. You see it all over the place. Movies based on 80's toys like Transformers are big. High top sneakers with neon laces are cool again. And the trend is all over the charts. Rihanna's Rude Boy video is straight up new wave punk, to choose one of may examples. (many will claim they were into the '80s before it was cool, and its true that some people were really ahead on the trend. But it seems to have hit its peak about now)

The older of us have seen this before. As a kid, I vaguely remember when the 60's was cool. By the time I was in college the movie Dazed and Confused had hit. A few years later That 70's Show was on the air, and it was a full-fledged '70s revival. It was only a matter of time before the 80's -just ten years ago despised as the lamest, tackiest most irredeemably awful decade in history- became the height of fashion.

I had always assumed it was a nostalgia trip; older people trying to relive the glory years of their youth once they get old enough to move into decision making jobs in media and fashion. But it occurs to me that most of the people leading this trend didn't live their adolescence in the 80's...they were born in the 80's, and in most cases are only old enough to remember the trends they're jumping on as vague childhood memories of the customs of older siblings.

While the much older might get a kick out of these revivals, it seems like these comebacks are initiated by the first generation not old enough to realize that that decade isn't supposed to be cool anymore. If that's the case, a 90's revival won't come until the people in their mid-twenties aren't old enough to remember grunge firsthand. Perhaps sometime in the late 2010's?

Whatever happened to Charlie Kaufman?

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:01:00 +0000

I was just watching what might be my favorite movie of all time, Synecdoche New York, which is written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, writer of movies such as Being John Malkovich, the Oscar-winning Adaptation, and the critically beloved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which starred Kate Winslett and Jim Carrey, who worked for a song just so he could say he did a movie with Kaufman.

Going by critical reviews, you might assume Kaufman was doing fine. Roger Ebert named Synecdoche the best movie of the decade, for example, and it make a lot of critics' shortlists for the same spot.

But here's the funny thing- no matter what source you check, it is nearly impossible to find any information on what Kaufman is doing right now, and what, if any, his future projects are. His fan website, BeingCharlieKaufman, mostly just updates to mention critics that have put his movies in "best of the decade" lists.

The disturbing thing is, Synecdoche failed to make any money. IMDB shows it cost 21 million, and only made 3 domestically. There were reports that it failed to find a distributor at Cannes despite its nomination for the Palm d'Or, and that the backers took a loss on it. While a successful screenwriter, Kaufman has said he is not independently wealthy; if he had an even relatively smaller stake in a money-losing 21 million dollar production, he could be in debt for a lot of money.

Now, it would be rash to say Kaufman is in trouble at this point. But its surprising to note that in an age where people in Hollywood literally can't go to a restaurant without it being mentioned online, and where there are entire websites such as IMDB devoted to carefully following the lives of even the most minor writers and directors, there has almost literally not been a word written about Kaufman in about a year now. Not his whereabouts, not his upcoming projects, nothing.

Does anyone have any news on him? What happened?

UPDATE: Kaufman is down but not out! Here's an update from Mick, operator of BeingCharlieKaufman.com:

When Synecdoche came out, Charlie was pretty bummed by the mixed reviews for the film. He said a few times he might quit screenwriting, but since then he has said he's working on something new. One or two other people have told me he's currently working on a new script, too, but I have no idea what it's about or what it's called. No idea when we might get more info about it, either. Sometimes it takes him years to finish a screenplay, so it might be a while before we get more details.

Great to hear. If he quit, it would be a major loss to modern cinema.

Who wants an iPad?

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:44:00 +0000

There had been talk of an apple tablet computer for years, but the actual product was something of a let-down to me. Rather than being a full-fledged computer, something along the lines of a Macbook Air with a touchscreeen and no keyboard, it's essentially an oversized iphone, running the iphone OS, with the same memory and only a slightly more powerful processor. No installation of programs beyond the typical iphone apps.

To me, it seems to occupy a middleground between the iphone and the netbook that I don't really need filled myself. It has neither the power and flexibility of the netbook already in my bag, which is as light, as small, and cheaper, nor the portability and convenience of the iphone in my pocket.

Still, Apple fans insist it's everything it's cracked up to be, and more. Here are the arguments for it that I've heard:

1. First generation products are always a bit lacking. Give it time, and it will be revolutionary.

I accept the possibility. But the future is another matter, and something that can be said about virtually any product that's currently lacking. Do I want what they have to sell now?

2. Sure, you don't want it, and neither do I. But this isn't for you or other gadget geeks, it's for your grandma who doesn't need a lot of computer power, and just wants something simple and easy to use.

On the surface, this seems like a good point. Programmers see it as a platform for end users who will consume, consume, consume their app store products. They're eager to expand their customer base, and if that means a simple computer that ignores the needs of geeks, so be it.

But I have to wonder about a computer designed for mom, pop and grandma:

1. They make up a very small share of the tech market. For the most part, they ignore it as much as they can.

2. They are the least likely market segment to buy a new fangled gadget, regardless of how cool it is. Almost none of these people even own an iphone, which was almost universally hailed as a brilliant game-changer from the outset.

3. They tend to follow the path of least resistance technologically, which does not entail a trip to the apple store for a new gadget, even one that really would be good for them. It means going to the department store and picking up a safe, generic windows box, which is as much as they can be bothered with.

There is a determination in the tech market to expand the appeal of computers beyond nerds and toward people less inclined to use them. Over the past ten years we've seen even the most technologically clueless people buy and actually use computers for basic functions. The ipad seems to continue this trend.

I propose that with the desktop PC market saturated, over the next ten years, you will see the opposite trend- the technologically illiterate segment of the market will just wither away as the previous generation shrinks, and young people that were raised on computers reach adulthood. It is them that the future of the market lies with. And ultimately it will be them that decide whether or not they need a device between a smartphone with the same capabilities and a cheap netbook of the same size with more options.

I have a final point though- as much talk as there is about how "my mom will love this", how many moms out there actually know about it, or care?

Has anyone actually asked them?

The Chinese Economic Bubble will Burst

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:34:00 +0000

Contrarian Short-Seller bets against China

For the life of me, I've never understood why when China posts all these too-good-to-be-true growth rates, investors don't consider that China might simply be lying. The government has an absolutely horrible record for honesty, transparency, ethics, and even basic human rights. It's actually a much easier call to make than Enron would have been.

People take it as a given that when countries report trade figures, they're telling the truth, and they're not accustomed to doubting them. They need to learn to make an exception in China's case. It's not a free state, and the government is accustomed to reporting what it wants to report, without being questioned. We assume a free press would call them on it, but the rules aren't the same there.

To give an example, a Canadian prof studied the numbers they posted for fish caught and sold, and figured out that if the figures they posted were actually true, they would have fished out their waters by now. And that's just one example. The government does that with everything.

Fudging numbers almost seems to be cultural at this point. This summer I saw someone I knew from high school who's a marine biology student now and works at a research lab in Vancouver. They hired a Chinese immigrant to look after the fish and help with the experiment on a routine, clerical basis. One of his responsibilities was to record the fatalities each day.

But a funny thing- no fish died on his watch. Ever. Months went by without a single death, which is funny, because a given number would be expected even under entirely natural conditions. It put the data of the whole experiment in doubt. What was this guy, the fish whisperer or something?

They confronted him, and finally he admitted to it. When they asked him why he lied about something so routine, he said he didn't want to lose face. As far as he knew, he wasn't supposed to report deaths, because that would make him look like a bad worker. Just keep the official numbers looking good and everyone's happy, right?
...what? You mean you guys don't work that way?! You mean you just want me to record what really happened?!

Saudi Arabia and "Art Rehabilitation Centers"

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:05:00 +0000

Interesting story about the Al Qaeda plotters here. Two of the plotters were released from Guantanamo Bay and handed over to Saudia Arabia. Be sure to check out the video, filmed about the main plotter before the attack even happened, on the left.

American officials agreed to send the terrorist from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where he entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and was set free

Um, What?

"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees.

Yeah, pretty much sounds like it. And if you watch the video, where terrorists fingerpaint while an instructor theatrically tells them to "put all that anger in the paper!" (in a scene clearly staged for American media, since he's doing it in English), that's pretty much what it looks like, too.

The media theme seems to be "should we be closing Guantanamo in light of all this?" Whatever geographic locations prisoners wind up at, or whatever basic human rights they may be afforded under the Geneva Convention, I think a much better, more fundamental question would be "should we be handing over suspects to Saudia Arabia, who apparently just pay quick lip service to rehab, and then put them back on the street?"

Despite being at the historical center of a lot of the attacks of the past decade, Saudi Arabia seems to have gotten an inexplicable pass throughout this whole war on terror. I think it's important to remember that the original 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia, and that Saudi Arabia got a pass in the blowback because of Bush's oil ties to them.

From the sound of it, the "art rehabilitation program" just sounds like a front to help the Saudi government get their citizens out of Gitmo, but make it look like they were handling them responsibly (which they weren't). Who wants to bet it'll turn out that the Bush admin's ties with Saudi Arabia made this breach of security possible?

Questioning IQ

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 12:23:00 +0000

Hi all. I've been reminded it's been 3 months since I posted anything. Been so busy...the down time I used to spend watching TV or blogging is now spent with a book in my hand. I've been reading about psychometrics lately, which led me to learn more about IQ tests, the grandaddy of all psychometrics, and the reason many major statistical analyses were even invented. Thought I'd write something about it to break the blogging lull.

The nature of human intelligence is a fascinating topic. What's dangerous is the notion that it can be reduced to a single number that works as a stand-in for a persons' fundamental worth, and that people can then be ranked hierarchically by this single quality, with certain races ranking lower on the scale than others. This ranking is then used as a scientific rational for political decisions, such as getting aid for minorities, under the reasoning that they're born stupid and nothing can be done about it.

Even before I started studying IQ tests in more detail, I had my doubts about the claims. There are problems with claims blacks have lower IQs, and therefore lower intelligence, for example. A century ago, Jews lagged whites by the exact same proportion. Persecuted minorities have a funny way of doing this, and studies show that around the world, minorities of lower socioeconomic status almost invariably have "lower IQs" (and grades, and other standardized test scores) than the dominant majority.

Ever heard of the Flynn effect? It shows that IQs have been steadily rising for 60 years, once you anchor scores so that the average doesn't float upwards. Funny thing is...the difference in scores between blacks and whites is well within the Flynn effect range. So even psychometricians agree that IQ is malleable enough to account for the difference without having to bring genetic differences into it.

There was a study where adopted black kids brought into white homes were tested for IQs. Their IQs did rise...but still lagged their white parents, usually floating in the high 90's.

A problem with this though...one of the first charts you see when you study IQ is one that shows that low IQ people are far more likely to have children out of wedlock. So by the IQ crowd's own research, the parents of the black adoptees likely had IQs in the 80's. So it's not a representative sample.

And finally...with a lot of black kids it's culturally unacceptable to do well in school/on tests. It's generally accepted that this accounts for lower grades in school...but it's not allowed to help account for lower scores on paper-and-pencil IQ tests administered under the same settings?

Even putting the malleability of scores aside, how do we even know that IQ scores are an accurate predictor of anything other than success in entering an institution that requires you have good test scores to get in? Like most people, I assumed the conservative line that IQ scores were a reliable predictor of life success had to have at least some truth to them. So I was surprised to find that for all "the Bell Curve" extolled the virtues of them for 800 pages, when you check the stats in the back, as a predictor of life success they only had an r-squared of .16. It's a good thing the authors put out the book for mainstream consumption. Because those results wouldn't even be publishable in a credible journal.

The truth about Japanese politics

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:51:00 +0000

If you've worked in Japanese company, you know that official power and actual power are separate things. The nominal heads get the salaries and outward respect you would expect them to get. But meanwhile, other people usually run the show behind the scenes.

While you wouldn't know it by reading the Economist, which treats the goings on of Japanese elected officials in the same narrative as western politicians, the same is true of Japanese politics. Most of it is just for show; the bureaucrats run the show, and the elected officials count on them to do it. They don't even really delve into their matters much unless they involve money or re-election. Which is why you see Japan's finance minister speaking drunk at a press conference. Wonder how the world's second largest economy can have such an incompetent person in power? The answer is quite simple, really: he isn't actually expected to do anything. The bureaucratic machine has essentially run Japan since 50's.

Anyway, that's why I usually don't pay much attention to Japanese politics, and why I'm paying so much more now. If I had to bet, I would say the DPJ will fail at what it's trying to accomplish. But it's trying, and that's worth some attention.
Press home and read what else this guy is saying. He knows of what he speaks.

Japan's new first lady says she was abducted by aliens

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:58:00 +0000

Lots of attention being paid to this.

People here just don't seem to mind much. When I ask about it they just laugh it off and go "Yes, she's a little strange, isn't she?". When I ask if it would have changed how they voted, they pause and say no. Not in a partisan, "This is jolting, but I still have faith," way...more of a, "no, why do you ask?" way.

2 points- one, she's a tv personality, and they're expected to say ridiculous stuff to keep people entertained.

Two, most people in Japan believe in ghosts, so there's actually a fair amount of leeway for superstition, so long as you can go about your day after you tell your story. There isn't much religion here, so all kinds of little things fill the void. When you think about it, a sizable portion of the population in the US believes that the earth was created after 2 people talked to a talking snake, and that in the near future a man from the sky will descend and judge us all, one by one.

Not bashing Christianity, but let's face it...people all over believe some pretty outlandish things. But we sanction some of those beliefs as normal, and call others crazy. Elsewhere the distinctions differ.

The Big Election

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:54:00 +0000

The LDP, the political party that has run Japan almost undefeated since the 1950's, just lost in a landslide.
Background here.
More on last night and DPJ policy here.

I've covered it before, so I'll just recap. The LDP has had 3 Prime Ministers in 3 years, all of them around seventy, socially conservative and unwilling to enact any real reforms. The party just couldn't seem to get it in their collective head that people wanted some real changes. They just kept picking the same type of people with the same opinions from the same stock of cabinet members.

Japan's birth rate plummeted in the early 90's. Young people are too fearful to have children in these times of economic uncertainty, especially with the astronomical prices attached to raising children (you even have to pay for junior and senior high school here). The tax base is shrinking, and Japan is running out of laborers to fill its factories and maintain its economy.

There are two options in the face of this problem: allow foreigners to immigrate to Japan to make up the difference, or expand the social safety net so that young couples can afford to have kids. Xenophobic and socially conservative, the LDP has steadfastly refused to do either of these things for going on 20 years.

Traditionally, people in Japan have been indifferent to politics. When I arrived no young people took any interest in them. The LDP shelled out enough pork to keep key constituents happy and drum up some votes via the political machines, and everyone else just stayed away from the ballot box in indifference. But since the departure of Koizumi, the party's only credible reformer, The LDP has seemed to be do everything in it's power to get kicked out of office. They have done nothing to protect the newly emerging class of working poor. Instead of offering aid, they have chastised unmarried Japanese women as "baby making machines that refuse to meet their social responsibilities" (No, that actually is what one official said).

The prime ministers, usually from extremely wealthy families and the grandchildren of former prime ministers, seem incredibly out of touch with the concerns of the general population. When asked, the departing Prime Minister Aso had no idea how much a cup noodle cost, for example. When asked why a recent tax cut seemed to benefit the rich more than anyone else, he complained that the rich (him), needed tax breaks to, and that they shouldn't always just be for poorer people.

To top it off, the LDP was stupid enough to insult its only reliable voting base, the elderly. A few years ago they lost millions of pension records. Recently Aso whined that the elderly contribute nothing to society. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

As a result, people here have become angrier and angrier, and large numbers of young people voted in this election. Kana went to vote yesterday expecting a quick stop, but faced long lines.

Our new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama isn't as much a break from the past as you might expect. Like Aso, he is from a rich family, and the grandson of a former prime minister and founding member of the LDP. But he became disillusioned with the LDP and founded the Minshuto (DPJ) along with progressives. He is described as a centrist, but that may be for the best. Japan moves slowly, and I suspect a truly radical party would be toppled quickly. The DPJ is in for a vicious fight with the bureaucrats that really rule the country as it is.

Still, the DPJ advocates immigration reform, giving parents $250 a month to help raise children, and making junior high school tuition free. How they plan to pay for all this in the face of Japan's huge debt while cutting taxes remains to be seen. But its refreshing to see a political party pushing policies that at least try to deal with these very basic, urgent issues of the day. Its remarkable how long things have gone on without even seeing that.

Scaling Michelle Malkin: A response to Krugman's challenge

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 03:18:00 +0000

Paul Krugman writes on his blog:

When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it’s true.

I don’t want to be like Bill O’Reilly, who considers anyone he disagrees with a “far-left” activist. So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin’s right? Would somebody with an equally small number of people to his or her left get on a Sunday morning panel?

The trouble, of course, is how to measure that. In principle, it shouldn’t be hard. What I’d like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters, such that almost everyone who gave the “liberal” answer to question 7 also gave liberal answers to questions 1-6, while almost everyone who gave the conservative answer to question 7 also gave conservative answers to questions 8-13. And we’d want population shares associated with each point on the scale. So we could then take known positions of public figures and place them on the scale: say, we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore.

But if there are any such data available, I don’t know about them. Anyone care to put them together?

It's an interesting challenge. I have my own scaling procedures to worry about, but as a lowly soon-to-be grad student mired in these kinds of concerns, this is how I would start to go about it....

Go to somewhere like Gallup and collect data on general public opinion on a number of political questions (e.g: "I support a public option"), and the likert scale replies that follow.

Use that data to draw out a tentative map of liberal and conservative opinions by general popularity and make a new questionnaire using them. Give that questionnaire to a number of people.

Run factor analysis on the results to see what responses correlate. There should be at least two distinct dimensions, liberal and conservative, but I suspect you would also see a libertarian scale in there, and quite possibly other items that fall less on party lines than you would expect, and don't fit the model.

You can use those results as a filter to isolate items for your liberal and conservative scales. You could also combine them into one scale by reversing the scale on the conservative items before analysis, so that everything moves in the same direction.

Test the refined questionnaire, and run rasch analysis on the results using winsteps. In IRT, questions are assigned a "difficulty" measure. In this case, "difficulty" would refer to the likelihood that an average person would agree. Winsteps will also show you what opinions "fit" the model, and which items (for example, "I think noise pollution is a problem"), don't. It will scale them in a guttman fashion, but in a way that estimates probabilities of agreeing to certain opinions rather than deterministically (as in,"woops, 10% disagreed, guess theres no scale to be found here"). This is usually a more robust model in general anyway, but when it comes to political opinions, which get particularly murky and complicated, I think that approach would be critical to getting a decent model up and running.

For predictive validity, you could run your item "difficulties" (likelihood of agreeing) against the original gallup poll results, and see if they correlate well. That could help demonstrate that the estimated likelihood of agreeing with a given opinion on your survey at least roughly matches the public at large.

Finally, try to estimate malkin's responses on your scale by picking through her writing and making educated guesses as to how she would reply. Putting her on likert scale would be difficult, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to score her answers as dichotomous data (simple yes/no responses)

You could also run an analysis on congressional votes to start the scale, but that would get tricky because there are so many different reasons to say yes or no to a given bill, and so many special interests swaying votes and polluting the raw ideologies.

The sound of the top 40 in 2009

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:15:00 +0000

In front of our big 40" TV in the new place. I've been in Fukuoka for 5 years and I'm seeing the American MTV top 50 for the first time in a long time.

It's funny...when you think about the music of 2009, or whatever the current year happens to be, you think of the cutting edge, of vocoders, auto-tune and fashions that piss off old people. You think of Lady GaGa and Kanye West and the rock album Lil Wayne is supposed to be making. You think of the 80's revival, techno and the fusion of hip-hop and club music.

That stuff is definitely out there, and becomes more common the further up the chart you go. But there's a whole other style of music on the charts that beats out the flashy urban sound by an almost 3:1 ratio. On one level, its so timeless, uneventful and generic it almost doesn't seem worth mentioning. But its so different from what you would have seen on MTV 5, 10, or 20 years ago that it deserves some notice.

Who are these artists? It's hard to say, I've never heard of most of them. The most famous artists I can think of that approximate it are maybe Kelly Clarkson and the newer Nickelback stuff. Kings of Leon, The Frey, that guy Daniel something or other. Jason Mraz? They're a bit more rock, but if you played that stuff next to what I'm talking about on the radio they would fit pretty well.

Thematically, the music almost has more in common with top-40 heartland country rock than it does with classic rock and roll or hip hop. If you turned the sound off the videos would look like country videos, even if the actors were younger and had longer hair. The singers are always white and the action is set in small heartland towns in the flyover states. No disco balls, flashy silver rooms or CG effects. No video chicks shaking their thang, save for a blond girl-next-door type that the singer weeps over. Like most genres the songs are usually about love, but they also tell stories of guys that are having trouble paying the bills and teens trying to tell their parents that their life is their own and they want to pursue their own dreams.

The music is guitar based, but strings often back the standard 4-piece band. They usually start out with an acoustic guitar or piano, and then break out into a harder chorus that puts a but of fuzz on the chords. There are absolutely no synthesizers or electronic elements.

A main difference from country rock is that the singers are pros that belt out the vocals with an intensity and passion you wouldn't normally here in country; it has the angst of rock even if the music itself is more conventional. Often in bands, the lead singer/guitarist gets to where they are off the strength of their songs or sex appeal, and the singing itself is just "good enough" level; in contrast, these singers often seem to have gotten to where they are off their pipes first and foremost.

In its own way its uniquely American. Its catchy and driving in a safe, unoffensive way. It doesn't conjure up images of nights of hard drinking on the road or loose groupies like an old Aerosmith or Big Star song would. It has the charge of rock without containing any of the darker messages that would make a politician single it out as what's wrong with society. It's a sound that seems permanent, even though its actually quite new as an MTV phenomenon, when you hold it up against the Backstreet Boys, Eminems, Nirvanas, Guns 'n Roses and Michael Jacksons of MTV past.

What do you call it, exactly? The best name I can think of is American Idol rock. Its top 40 music at a base denominator that has a shot at pleasing people in their 20's and farmers in their 50's at the same time. Its a uniquely appealable form of rock designed for play on major network television.

It may seem like its been around forever, but when you think about it, it didn't really exist at all until this decade.

I'm so glad my netbook came with Windows Vista!

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 04:38:00 +0000

I needed a light, cheap computer to take with me to Canada for work. What I really wanted was the exact same laptop I got 4 years ago for about $750, a cheap HP laptop with a 40GB hard drive, 1.6ghz processor and a 750 megs of ram, but in a smaller package (the current one weighs a ton) and for less money. Seeing how fast technology moves, that shouldn't be a problem, should it? AFter all, 4 years prior to that, I paid three times as much for a dell with a smaller screen, half the processor power, a 1/4 the hard drive space and 1/8th the ram.

But cheap computers are hard to come by in Japan. Stores push $2000+ monstrosity laptops with HD screens, and almost seem to deliberately not stock the low-end computers that dominate the market in the US. It's true netbooks have introduced a new, low-end market, but they seem like overkill on the form factor end of things. How much work can you really get done with a ten inch screen and a 5-centimeter track pad?

I went to Yodobashi camera and finally found a "Dell mini" which is halfway between a budget notebook and a netbook. It has a 12" screen, big for a netbook, a 1.33 processor, a 60GB hard drive, and 1GB of ram. In other words, it's about what I got for 750 4 years ago, but small and light...about what I was looking for going in the store.

But for how much? The one with XP was $600, a bit out of my price range. But there was an otherwise identical notebook with Windows Vista which was $400, making it easily the cheapest in the store. I asked the clerk if I could just get that one without Vista, and he told me Vista was the whole reason it was so cheap. They couldn't sell any.

I told him I would take my chances and got it. It was easy to see why no-one wanted it- the thing barely moved. Just turning it on ate up close to 80% of the RAM. So I wiped it clean with a copy of XP from my old computer and now it works great.

So in the end, Vista knocked the price of my computer down by a third. Thanks, Microsoft! Vista rules!

New Place

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:23:00 +0000

Wow, it's been so long I don't even know where to start. Got into a Phd program. Taking lots of stats classes. Preparing for finals with the classes I teach rather than take, and getting the curriculum set for next semester. Busy in a way I've never really known...when I get free time from my job I get excited because I can read up on fit statistics and test equating. Yay! That's what counts as downtime now.

Anyway, I'm moving in with my girlfriend and we got a bigger place. Its near Takamiya, in the same range of hills I live now, but a lot bigger. Here's a floor map-

Looking at it now, it wouldn't be a big deal in Canada. But by Japanese sizes, 90m2 like this is enormous. Most places like this in the city go for at least 1000 a month, on the low end, and up to 2500 and 3000 on the high (and those are Fukuoka prices out in the Kyushu wilderness. In Tokyo? Forget it!)

We had one thing going for us though...one, its 25 years old, which in the lifespan of Japanese apartment buildings is ancient people want to live in places no more than 10. In the 80's, it was probably a really swank place. It has an electric toilet with a warm seat, bidet, etc, and a professional gardener comes by to work on all the plants surrounding it. But it's been rendered obsolete by the newer steel and glass buildings with electrically heated floors, and so down goes the price.

More importantly, some houses had been built in the area behind this building, blocking the incredible view and casting the east end into shadow. And the tenants, who as far as I can gather are mostly old people with a lot of time on their hands, FREAKED OUT. They put up protest signs outside their balconies threatening people thinking of moving into the houses and telling them to contact their lawyers. It doesn't seem to have done much to stop the building of the houses (which is totally legal), but they did an excellent job keeping new tenants from moving in to their own building. This new place has been vacant over a year.

The original price was 900 a month, probably down from 1000 earlier. It was a bit out of our budget, so I asked for 800, and they agreed. To top it off when we said we wanted to move in August, they said "Well hell, its vacant now, so you might as well start moving in in July, a free month of rent on us!" So that saves us the stress of having to move in on the very last day of our current leases.

Its gonna be great, shaded back yard or not. I actually like the privacy it gives. See that long balcony on the left? I want to put out beach chairs and little tables for coffee, and lie there in the morning reading the paper on my laptop. We've got a proper living room for guests, a master bedroom, a den for the projector when we do some serious movie viewing, and a guest room when people come in from out of town.

PhD

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:35:00 +0000

Where've I been? I've been busy. Looking to start a PhD soon. The University I have my sights on read one of my papers, and off the strength of that seems to want to squeeze me in to the cohort starting in October (it would be a very late registration). Failing that, they'll let me in next year. Which is fine by me, because I need the time to prepare.

Aside from Thailand spent the spring learning statistics. Started with single variable and worked up to ANOVA and multiple regression. This summer I'll be doing Rasch Analysis and MANOVA and factor analysis courses online. So much for my vacation...I'll have to take my texts with me to Canada when I go back and do the readings during downtime.

Then, between this fall and next spring, I'll be learning data mining through more online courses (probably). The neural networks I was interested in have commercial applications for marketing researchers now (they feed the models reams of data about their customers and try to get the networks to figure out, say, how many of them would be likely to buy a sit-on lawn mower), which means there's lots of books out now to teach people without PhDs in mathematics how to do it, and relatively user-friendly software with graphical interfaces that don't involve command lines.

That isn't to say I don't need to have a firm handle on statistics to do it (logistic regression, multivariate stats, etc), but working with and understanding the models in a basic way has moved from something over my head to something that will be manageable with a lot of work. I think I can find some interesting applications for text and data mining in my own field, and perhaps even for my doctoral thesis eventually. You never know. But putting that aside, I'm interested in learning it for the sake of it.

About a year ago, I wrote about age and limitations, and about reaching that point in your life where you've gone as far as you can without hard work. To my surprise, I've been crossing that threshold and moving beyond what I thought was the peak of what I was capable of. It's been good, and I have a pretty good idea of how much further I can go, and what I need to do to get there.

But it takes up all my time.

Bartering in Thailand

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:09:00 +0000

Went to the Chiang Mai Night Bazaar and got a wood elephant sculpture for Kana. You learn pretty quickly that prices here are higher for foreigners at the markets. You can get it down a lot by speaking Thai, or even just by asking “how much?” in Thai, partly because they appreciate the effort, and partly because they know you must know your way about a little more. But the bottom line is, if you’re visiting you’ll often be paying a lot more for things than the locals.

I think a reaction from some people is to try to “win” at bartering. They feel like they’re being taken advantage of or being played as fools, so they try to hardball negotiations a bit. This just doesn’t work, particularly if you give off the vibe that you think the seller is trying to scam you. It’s insulting, and everyone goes away just feeling terrible. Most people here will take offense to the insinuation they were trying to cheat you, and stubbornly keep to the first price out of pride.
The goal of bartering isn’t to win, it’s to come to an agreement that you’re both happy, or at least satisfied, with. Here’s what I suggest-

-In a market, don’t come to them, let them come to you. Just by starting the bargaining you’re showing you already want it, which puts you at a disadvantage. Just stand around idly looking at the goods as if it’ s more scenery. Make it look like you’re about to move on. (Obviously, this won’t work if there are other people the seller can stay busy with who do seem interested. In that case, come back later, or wait until you get to another stall selling the same thing).

-When they ask you if they can help you, ask how much what you want is in thai, as if its just one of many things there, and you’re just curious about a price since they asked. When they reply, whatever that price may be, just sort of look at it doubtfully. Don’t look insulted by the cost or complain it’s too much, and don’t do anything to suggest you’re entering negotiations with them. Just give off the vibe that it’s not really your kind of thing.

-at this point, they’ll either come back with a testament to the items’ quality, at which point you can repeat step two, or ask you how much *you* want to pay for it. Look like you’re thinking about how much its worth to you for a minute, and offer a fifth what they asked for. Plan to pay about two fifths, but make it look like its give and take when you meet around that range.

-Finally, keep in mind you don’t necessarily need to get the cheapest possible price, just a price that’s cheap for you. Sure, maybe a Thai girl could walk in and get something that you paid $3 for for $2. Well guess what? She probably earns about $150 a month, and the seller knows that. At that point it’s just nitpicking for the sake of it. Relative to your income, you’re getting a better deal, So let it go.

Thailand again

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:55:00 +0000

Back in Chiang Mai. From Fukuoka flights here cost $700-1000, as opposed to $500 for Bangkok. Seemed like a lot for an extra 1000km/1:15 of flight time. I suspected that once I was in Thailand, things would get cheaper as usual. Kevin agreed and told me to just buy a ticket at the airport.

So I got through immigration and customs (completely walked by it actually, without any check whatsoever- They seemed to have other things on their minds) and went up to the domestic departures area. Bought a ticket from Air Asia for the next flight out...for 45 dollars, $60 with tax! Unbelieveable. It was like buying a bus ticket. But cheaper.

So if you go to Thailand, and that beautiful remote little beach is so much more expensive to get to than the nearest smog filled city, don't even worry about it, just deal with it once you're here, in the pricing twilight zone.

Two Train Station Stories

noreply@blogger.com (jeffjrstewart) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:38:00 +0000

On the way back from an Onsen with my girlfriend, then I pack and head to Thailand. Yesterday while I was waiting to meet her at the train station, I saw a man, maybe mid 30s, dressed as a school girl, with one of those short brown plaid skirts. Mannish face, though with a wig, and very mannish legs, though shaven. It wasn't completely obvious it was a guy, but clear enough with a second look.

That kind of thing isn't so common in Fukuoka, so I looked at people passing him expecting expressions of shock. But there weren't any. So uncommon is it that no-one did a double take. They just took it at face value that it was a not very attractive woman.

Kana came a moment later, and I mentioned it in passing. It turned out that at about the same time, she had seen something interesting on the other side of that station. When she was waiting at the crosswalk she saw an old man waiting on the other side of the road with a pigeon perched on his shoulder, like a parrot. This was getting a reaction from passersby. He stood with such confidence, such poise...as if it was perfectly natural for one to have a such a magnificent pet at ones' side.

Then the walk light turned green, and the man began to move, the pigeon flew off, and the man recoiled and flailed in terror, unsure of what was happening. He had been completely oblivious that it was there. That was a better story, as people watching stories go.