Intellectual Pornography - Arousing Curiosity

One O'Clock Daily - Recession Analysis, Part 2 - A Different Model for the Future

2010-03-09T13:00:00-08:00

For a while now, some of the talking heads have been predicting that this recession marks the end of an era. That the United States will be hereafter a fundamentally different country, where things don't work like they should. But I've never seen anyone explain quite how or why our current way of life will change. There can be no effect without a cause.

I do think that the world will be different hereafter. But while this recession is a useful marking stick, it's not as though old trends are reversing themselves, and the global economy is changing direction. Instead, the global economy is marching along in the same way it has for the past three hundred years, but we humans are sometimes slow to realize the true nature of things, and so this recession is the result of demographics catching up to economic trends.

It all starts with manufacturing, and a funny idea that I haven't been able to discredit.

For years, people have been complaining about the decline of US manufacturing capability. The problem is that that's just not true. If you're measuring output, US manufacturing is now stronger than it's basically ever been before. We are producing more things within the borders of this country than we ever have prior to the year 2000. The trick is that the number of US manufacturing jobs has never been lower. Improved efficiencies from automation technology and economies of scale have allowed fewer and fewer people to do more and more. The result is layoffs, and vocal unemployed.

But what if that was true on a global scale? The general idea is that technology allows an increasingly small subset of the population to fulfill the total manufacturing need. Clearly as we proceed towards perfect automation, we'll see wave after wave of displaced workers, continuing the trends begun in the England of the Industrial Revolution.

But where will all those workers go? For decades, the answer has been "creative jobs".

But that's where the internet gets us into trouble. Free communication brings with it the same problem that better automation did. There is only a finite number of hours in the day available for the consumption of creative works, and in an increasingly linked world, the first thing anyone does is tweet about their latest favorite youtube video. As the ease of sharing grows, the diversity of consumed creative works drops, as the world heads towards a homogeneous composition of top-ten lists. This brings with it a rapidly decreasing marginal value for creative workers, and an inability to soak up the job losses in manufacturing.

Even the service sector is in trouble, with online advertisements taking the place of telemarketers, and smart, online checkouts making salespeople slowly extinct.

And what then do you do in a world where 10, or even 50 percent of the population can produce all that is needed by the rest? A world with a large cohort of the permanently unemployed, unable to find work at all, for there is no one left to consume the fruits of their labor.

One O'Clock Daily - Recession Analysis, Part 1

2010-03-08T13:00:00-08:00

I'm going to have a few pieces this week about the current recession, and some of its potential effects. These'll include some more detailed analysis about long term trends in the economy. But let's start off with a great in-depth introduction from The Atlantic about the effects of recessions on those who live through them. Check it out here.

Back on Monday

2010-03-05T13:08:23-08:00

Sorry guys, no one o'clock daily today. I'm traveling down to Los Angeles. I'll see you all again on Monday!

One O'Clock Daily - An Homage To Fantastic Machines

2010-03-04T13:00:00-08:00

There is beauty in motion, in machines. And so, in honor of the new, and fantastic Rube Goldberg machine that premiered in OK Go's latest music video (included below), I've put together a small video collection of fantastic, hand made machines from around the internet. This is physics. These are machines.

One O'Clock Daily - Wednesday Science Links

2010-03-03T13:00:00-08:00

Wired exclusive on the nature of Google's Pagerank

Giving research grant money to older scientists, good or bad?

Morphing helicopter blade cuts rotor noise in half, entering production soon

Photosynthesis discovered to rely on quantum effects

Compressed sensing algorithm offers new hope for imaging techniques

NASA revises moon water estimate, up from "buckets" to 600 million tons

One O'Clock Daily - The Curse of Second Place, Part 2

2010-03-02T13:00:00-08:00

And now for some science! If you remember from yesterday, we're looking at the possibility of a 'second place curse'. A proposed, psychological effect that comes from winning second place in a head-to-head sport. The hypothesis suggests that the bronze medal winners, who had just won their last game, should be in better spirits, and have a higher morale at, and immediately after the awards ceremony, than the silver medalists, who had just lost their last game.

Let's take a look at the methodology we'll be using to tackle this. Since we started this discussion with ice hockey, let's end it with ice hockey. We'll go through the records from the ice hockey tournament at each of the Winter Olympics in which it was held, and look at the results of the previous Winter Olympics silver and bronze medalists. Then, if the previous bronze medalists consistently do better in the next Olympics than the previous silver medalists, we can safely say that there is some sort of effect that favors the bronze medalists.

And the results?

In 20 Winter Olympic Games, the previous silver medalists outperformed the previous bronze medalists exactly 60% of the time.

So that's it? No silver medal curse?

Well, not so fast. Let's talk for a moment about what this very simple study doesn't do. First of all, there's no real control here. There's nothing accounting for the long time-lag between Olympic Games. Perhaps the bronze medal effect only persists for a short period of time after the event in question (anyone have suggestions for other sports to try this out on, with more closely spaced tournaments?). And this also doesn't preclude the existence of a larger, more dominating effect, that covers up the appearance any bronze-medal morale booster. Of course, it could also be that there is no bronze medal boost; but that's science for you, all we know is that if it's out there, then we haven't found the right way to look for it yet. Kind of sounds like dark matter, doesn't it?

----- ----- ----- -----

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. See Part 1, here.

One O'Clock Daily - The Curse of Second Place, Part 1

2010-03-01T13:00:00-08:00

As many of you surely know, yesterday, Canada won the gold medal match against the United States in men's ice hockey. This left the US with silver, and Finland with bronze. But it was during the awards ceremony that a friend of mine noted in a tweet: "olympic hockey: bronze and gold medalists smile. silver medalists look unhappy. it's almost as if bronze is better than silver."

Now, there's an easy explanation for that. Both the gold and bronze medalists won their last games. The silver medalists are the only ones on the podium who just lost. But, as my friend pointed out, that still leaves us with an interesting question, "which leads me to ask: would you rather feel victorious with the bronze or defeated with the silver?" And that, I don't have an answer to, but with the power of science, we can find out!

I'll be compiling statistics on second and third place teams in Olympic ice hockey tonight, and tomorrow we'll see if there's a mathematical correlation between whether the teams take silver or bronze, and their performance the next year. Do you think we'll find anything? My money says we will.

Real life bureaucracy tries to find and fine pillow fight flash mob organizers, fails.

2010-02-26T15:42:50-08:00

"The Department of Public Works is fuming after the clean-0up cost for this year's annual flash pillow night at Justin Herman Plaza came out to $35,000. And now they want the fight's organizers to pony up the money. Trouble is no one knows who exactly the organizers are. Because, you know, it's a "flash mob" event."

via sfist.com

The Internet: 1
Old School City Officials: 0

Is anyone surprised by this?

One O'Clock Daily - Ethics in the Age of Spacefarers, Part 2

2010-02-26T13:00:00-08:00

The problem with space-based industry, as Brother Consolmango points out, is its effect on the economies of the Earth. Mine an asteroid for iron, and put Africa out of work, all in the name of profit. In a sense, it's the age-old conundrum of technological advance: as new technologies become available, automation takes over some of the old jobs, thereby increasing unemployment. The counterargument is that while new technologies do eliminate some jobs, they also open up new ones—after all, the robots will need programmers.

There's the kicker; before the robots, you had assembly line workers; after the robots, programmers; the new jobs are fundamentally different from the old ones. The increased skill demanded by the newly created jobs is the source of the societal friction that surrounds technological advancement. The advent of robotic manufacturing techniques saw the creation of a displaced class of assembly-line workers, who suddenly realized that their old skills were worthless in the new world.

As technological change comes faster and faster, we'll see ever-increasing numbers of the educationally-unemployed: those workers with antiquated skills, stranded in society even as they try to learn something new, something relevant. Yesterday it was American assembly-line workers. Today, marketers and salespeople are being replaced by the algorithmic efficiency of Google Adsense. Perhaps tomorrow asteroid mining will put African iron ore production out of business.

But what happens next? Sure, the unemployed might try to learn new skills, but that's hardly a guarantee that their journey will be either quick or successful. Even in today's recession, some of the newly unemployed are returning to community colleges and night classes to learn vital computer skills, only to find out that a year of study hardly makes up for a youth spent before the internet, as those industrious studiers find themselves competing with recent twenty-something graduates, for whom AIM, Excel, and email are as natural as breathing.

And there's still another kind of failure: one of capability. Not everyone is suited to study quantum mechanics, or if they are, our education systems are doing an awful job at teaching. And so the combination of personal and systemic limitations is especially likely to leave many behind as our society marches relentlessly onwards, demanding ever greater technical skills from its workers.

Perhaps one day we will have a strong ecosystem of continuing education programs, and new skills will be had for the taking, but any such day is still at least a few years off, and the meantime will be a rough ride for many.

----- ----- ----- -----

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. See Part 1, here.

One O'Clock Daily - Ethics in the Age of Spacefarers, Part 1

2010-02-25T13:00:00-08:00

Author's note - Whoops. I made a mistake with the post-scheduler, and this didn't go up at 1:00pm PST as planned. My bad, guys!

We're coming up on what's bound to be a peculiar stage in human development: that moment when we first begin to establish ourselves as a spacefaring race. Sure, NASA, the ESA, JSA, and the Russians have sent people and satellites into low Earth orbit for years, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm referring to the kind of spacefaring that will take us across the empty void between planets—to Mars, the asteroid belt, and beyond. And what will we do when we get there? Or, more pertinently, how will those of us on Earth react?

In space, no one can hear you scream. The upside of this is that your industry can be as noisy as you like. There are no endangered wildflowers living on asteroids to stop you from strip mining them for metals, There are no oceans to pollute, no air to turn brown with smog, and robots don't complain about working overtime. An industrial paradise.

The trick, though, lies in the effect this will have on the Earth's economy. That's where this piece, from Discovery News comes into play. Give it a read-through, and we'll be back tomorrow with a detailed discussion.