Pramod Subramanyan's shared items in Google Reader

Paul Krugman: The Joy of Sachs

2009-07-17T07:42:00Z

What can we learn from the fact that Goldman Sachs earned record profits despite the stagnation in the broader economy?:

The Joy of Sachs, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has ... made another crisis more likely.

Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared...

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? ...

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. ... Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. ... You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong. ... Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

Now, the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

The other reason we are more vulnerable is, as this story points out, is that "two giants" are emerging from the financial crisis, and they are "starting to tower over the handful of financial titans that used to dominate the industry." Thus, if other competitors cannot recover similarly, and if the government does not use regulation and other means to level the playing field, the banking industry could end up even more concentrated and vulnerable than it was before (a point I wish I'd made here).

Comic for July 18, 2009

2009-07-18T07:00:00Z

wwf_paper.jpg (JPEG Image, 1000x523 pixels)

2009-07-16T12:05:00Z

via http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/images/wwf_paper.jpg

K'taka bribe table

2009-07-06T09:24:21Z

Source

07/15/09 PHD comic: 'Nature vs. Science, pt. 1'

2009-07-17T10:01:34Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Nature vs. Science, pt. 1" - originally published 7/15/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Harry Potter and the Tremendous F***-up. [Built on Facts]

2009-07-15T15:00:59Z

Or: Deconstructing Dumbledore.

(Major and serious spoilers for Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows follow. In fact if you haven't read them this will make very little sense.)

There's a lot of villains in the Harry Potter series. They are young and old, male and female, human and otherwise, magical and muggle. They range from indolent and reformable pests to soul-sucking embodiments of death personified. Not all of them set out to be bad. Some are good people who made bad choices; some are power-mad petty bureaucrats. But if you want to pick out the single person who caused the most damage, it's an easy task.

He is, of course, Albus Dumbledore.

You think I'm joking? On the contrary, through a combination of staggering incompetence, dereliction of duty, and wholly unmerited hubris he managed to spend his entire life busily nurturing minor problems into world-ending catastrophes.

Let's start at the beginning. Like most young English wizards, Dumbledore learned of his talents early in life and entered Hogwarts as soon as he came of age. While there he rose to seldom-seen levels of magical skill and along the way befriended another young wizard named Gellert Grindelwald. Grindelwald was a German expat wizard, having been kicked out of Durmstrang (the German equivalent Hogwarts) for being a dangerous nutjob. If you accept the author's word as canonical, the situation is even weirder: Dumbledore was not merely a friend but actually in love with Grindelwald. The books themselves contain no real indication that Dumbledore batted for the other team, nor does the author give any indication that Grindelwald returned the interest. But however you slice it, they were certainly very close. Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas, and soon enough Grindelwald had Dumbledore solidly radicalized. The two of them plotted to take over the world and rule the muggles for their own good. Dumbledore's younger brother Aberforth had more sense and confronted the two over their plans. Their other sister, the brain-damaged and disabled Ariana, was also there. It would have made a great Jerry Springer episode, what with the gay/racist/disability trifecta. Well, except being wizards they had considerable magical firepower at their disposal and Ariana was killed in the ensuing fight. Good job, Dumbledore!

All that was tragic enough, but things were just getting warmed up. Grindlewald went off and started a massive wizarding war. Dumbledore dithered ineffectually for several years as his former friend / gay lover wrecked Europe. Apparently he didn't want to be reminded that he was at least partially responsible for the death of his sister. Presumably he didn't worry too much about also being at least partially responsible for the FREAKING HOLOCAUST. Because let's be honest about Grindelwald: evil German, interested in a master race ruling the rest of humanity, beaten in 1945, tried and imprisoned in Nurmengard (hmm)... he was either Hitler or the magical power behind the Fuhrer. We do know that the real Hitler was pretty darn interested in the occult, after all.

So Dumbledore finally got out of his funk and defeated Grindelwald in battle. He then retired to the countryside where he could live out his life in peace. Ok, well, the first sentence is true. Actually he went off to become the headmaster of Hogwarts (the British boarding school jokes write themselves) and shape the minds of tomorrow. Because he's clearly such an excellent judge of character.

About this time there's a young half-wizard fellow named Tom Riddle. An orphan from a horribly difficult background, he displays sociopathic tendencies, a serious red-flag magical ability to talk to snakes, and considerable but largely unexplored latent skill in magic. Dumbledore is nothing if not consistent at being a reliably dangerous fool, and so of course he immediately sends him to the one place were he can learn the most powerful abilities on the planet, and furthermore allows a talking hat to place him in Slytherin the psychopath factory. (Why no one shut down Slytherin is beyond me. The best that can be said is that while every dangerous lunatic wizard was a Slytherin, not all Slytherins were dangerous lunatic wizards. Still, they pretty much to a man abandon the good guys in the climactic good/evil battle at the end of the last book. It would've saved everyone a lot of pain if the whole house had been shut down. So obviously Dumbledore didn't.)

As you could guess from Dumbledore's success at working alongside and/or fornicating with wizard Hitler, Tom Riddle turned out pretty much how you'd expect. He declared himself Lord Voldemort, started a magic army of overtly Klan-style terrorist wizards, killed a bunch of people, and rather successfully began taking over. Dumbledore leaped into action and organized the Order of Rank Incompetence. Excuse me, I mean the Order of the Phoenix. So far as I can tell their successes were minimal to nonexistent, consisting largely of a single unsolicited defection. Under the enervated leadership of Dumbledore, a massive fraction of their membership was brutally slaughtered, the parents of the infant Neville Longbottom were tortured to insanity, and James and Lilly Potter were murdered while protecting their infant child Harry Potter. Thanks to some staggering luck that Dumbledore never planned or anticipated, Voldemort failed to kill Harry and was in fact reduced to impotent ghostliness.

Dumbledore, realizing that he was obviously as bad as humanly possible at working with young wizards, retired. Excuse me, that's what he'd have done if he had any decency. He didn't, so he stayed on at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter grew up and matriculated at Hogwarts. Long story short, Dumbledore spends most of the first five books failing to prevent the repeated infestation of Hogwarts by villains of various stripes, failing to do even slight due diligence on the applicants for the Defense Against the Dark Arts class, and failing to prevent the subsequent and repeated near-deaths of Harry and other students. In some cases like the poor unfortunate Cedric Diggory, it's actual death. There's little more Dumbledore likes better than repeating past failures, so he reforms the Order of the Phoenix. It fails to accomplish anything. Well, not other than getting Sirius Black killed horrifyingly right in front of Harry. Good thing he wasn't one of Harry's few real adult friends and father figures - oh wait, he was. And though we don't know it until book 7, Dumbledore figures out at some point that Harry and Voldemort's fates are linked. Not to put too fine a point of it, at that point he's pretty much trying to get Harry killed. His plans are cut short in book 6 by his own death.

Wanna know what kills him? I don't know if you watched Lord of the Rings, but it's pretty much Magic 101 that you DO NOT TOUCH EVIL RINGS OF POWER. Dumbledore found one, and like a retarded puppy licking a electrical outlet, he tried to use it. He survives his injuries for another year, which he spends failing to clue poor Harry in on what's going on. Finally he dies in front of Harry in the most traumatizing way possible.

Harry wins, of course. He gets killed first, but he comes back to life and kills Voldemort for good. Everyone celebrates the memory of Dumbledore because the narrative requires it. Whatever, Dumbledore you old bat. When Snape waxes you I'll be cheering in the theater.

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07/13/09 PHD comic: 'Great Tweets of Science'

2009-07-14T12:39:05Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Great Tweets of Science" - originally published 7/13/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Comic for July 14, 2009

2009-07-14T07:00:00Z

Comic for July 12, 2009

2009-07-12T07:00:00Z

07/10/09 PHD comic: 'The wrath'

2009-07-11T08:48:53Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "The wrath" - originally published 7/10/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

07/8/09 PHD comic: 'Conversation Impossible'

2009-07-09T17:22:19Z

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Conversation Impossible" - originally published 7/8/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Calvin and Hobbes for July 09, 2009

2009-07-09T08:37:24Z

API Principles

2009-06-27T01:14:54Z

Recently I've been thinking about APIs. Pause for a moment to consider the best API family you've ever used. Dreamy, wasn't it? Everything worked the way you expected, you barely needed to look at the API reference, and the resulting code virtually documented itself.

Now think about the worst. I recall when I first started doing Windows programming and came across LPARAMs and WPARAMs in Windows messages. The whole concept of passing nebulous parameters that might be pointers or might be values was quite disconcerting. Or how about this fun little tidbit in the documentation for RegQueryValueEx: "If the data has the REG_SZ type, the string may not have been stored with the proper terminating null characters. Therefore, even if the function returns ERROR_SUCCESS, the application should ensure that the string is properly terminated before using it." I wonder how many applications have been bitten by this API issue?

Creating great APIs is hard. But wow, is it important for those of us who ship code libraries to developers. When we don't get APIs right, there's nothing that can truly compensate for the failure -- not great documentation, not great sample code, not great user education.

Here are some principles my teams have been using as we think about APIs:

APIs must be intuitive and discoverable. AddToolbarButton is more intuitive than ExecCommand. A developer reading the function prototype should have a great understanding of the function without reading docs.
APIs must be simple. They should do one thing perfectly and do no more. APIs that take the swiss army knife approach are not simple. APIs with a long list of parameters are not simple.
APIs must be difficult to misuse. They should use strong typing that help developers find errors at compile time rather than runtime.
APIs must not have unexpected side effects. Functions that set globals are evil.
APIs must be consistent. Developers come to rely on certain idioms and conventions, including naming, parameter usage, parameter order and so forth. It's better to match well-known idioms than invent new ones.
APIs must be reviewed before coding. Refactoring APIs is costly. Getting them right at the very beginning is worth the upfront cost.
APIs must be reviewed by the right people. The right people typically include subject matter experts, people in different disciplines, and potential customers. For instance, an audio API should be reviewed by audio experts. Disciplines might include developers, testers and documentation writers.

If you're developing your own API set, these guidelines can help ensure that your customers have that dreamy experience developers get when using a great API. You'll also spend less time having to update documentation, write complex sample code, or staffing a large support team.

Fame vs Skill chart

2009-06-09T21:29:29Z

via

NYTimes and Wikipedia Save Reporter’s Life By NOT Reporting On His Capture

2009-06-29T04:51:54Z

This post was written by Gagan Biyani.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part - but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde’s capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban’s clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde’s escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Entire New 13-Story Building Tips Over in Shanghai [Architecture]

2009-06-30T05:30:00Z

This past Saturday, an entire apartment building in Shanghai collapsed. To be fair, the building was under construction and thus unoccupied, but it's still a minor miracle that there was only one fatality.

Sounds like there was a problem with some nearby flood prevention walls at the Dianpu River, but there's no hard evidence as to why this huge building simply fell over. Anyway, here are some sweet pictures of the architectural carnage. [Cellar.org via Twitter]

The Program Accelerator

2009-07-01T13:00:00Z

As a postgrad in the late '80s, Neil Bowers made some extra book money by acting as a helper in the computing lab. At the time, undergrads were all working on a grindingly slow VAX-11/780, and Neil and his fellow postgrads were posted there for hands-on help. This tended to be focused at the start of the year, when there were groups discovering Unix and programming for the first time.

One time, an Irish girl asked Neil for some help, saying that she couldn’t understand what was going on: she thought her program looked right, but for some reason, each time she ran it she got partial output, and varying amounts of output each time. The homework assignment she was working on involved writing a program that generated various values and wrote the results in ascii tabular form to a file.

Neil went over to her workstation and had a look at her source code. Everything looked fine. She showed him the file generated by her last run, and indeed, it looked truncated. Hmmm. "Ok," Neil asked, "can you run your program for me, so I can see what happens?".

She typed ./a.out and hit return. Her left hand darted to the keyboard and she hit Control-C. Neil was still mentally processing this when she cat'd the output, and turned to say, "See!" It did indeed contain partial output. Again.

"Um," he paused, "can you just run it again please?" Neil figured that he must have not seen right. But once again she typed ./a.out, hit return, then whap! she hit Control-C. Neil asked her why she hit Control-C every time she ran her program.

"Well," she said confidently, "I discovered that Control-C makes the % prompt come up quicker!"

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

Repel Flies with a Bag of Water [Summer]

2009-07-06T16:30:00Z

We've featured many, many, many different ways to deal with mosquitoes using DIY solutions. But what about the even more common household fly? Turns out all you need to deal with that is a plastic bag or two.

Photo by brookage.

RickyC wrote in to tell us that he recently visited a lakeside restaurant and noticed some clear plastic bags filled with water hanging from the railings. When he inquired about the bags, a waiter explained that they were used to repel flies.

Question-and-answer web site The Straight Dope gives more detail on why this trick works:

Evidently, houseflies, being highly edible and defenseless, are nervous types, and don't like to sit still when they see something moving nearby, because it could be a predator. The water bag acts a bit like a lens—try it some time—in which the movements of people in the area are reflected. Even if the fly is too far from the action to see it directly, it can see a shifting of light and dark in the water bag, which it interprets as nearby movement, and it will fly away from the bag.

So, next time you have a fly problem, grab a few plastic bags, fill 'em up, and let us know how this trick works for you. Likewise, share how you keep unwanted insects out of your backyard—including whether or not you've tried this method before—in the comments.

What's the Purpose of bags of water hanging in restaurants? [The Straight Dope]

What Are You Doing in Albuquerque, Then?

2009-07-07T17:00:00Z

Security officer, pulling out fingernail clippers from carry-on: Sir, what are your intentions with these?
Man in line, deadpan: To take over the world.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Overheard by: Zombie

Alsome | Thumbs up | Thumbs down |
Link · Email · Quote this! · Del.icio.us · Posted 2009-07-07

How (not) to appoint a University vice-chancellor

2009-07-04T07:02:01Z

Ramachandra Guha in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

“Some months ago, a news item in the Bangalore edition of a national paper carried this headline, “Three shortlisted for Mysore varsity post”. Since I am a former academic, and have known many past graduates and teachers of Mysore University, I read on further.

“The report continued to say that:

“…finally, the search committee has shortlisted three candidates for the Mysore University Vice-Chancellor’s post. The committee, headed by K. Balaveera Reddy, met on Tuesday. Sources told The Times of India that the shortlisted candidates are from Lingayat, SC and Vokkaliga communities. The candidates’ names have been placed before the government”.

“The report mentioned the names of the shortlisted candidates, from which one could discern their respective caste affiliations. Remarkably, the news report did not carry any details on the qualifications of those who aspired to be the new vice-chancellor of Mysore University.

“What were their areas of academic expertise? What were their plans for reviving a once-good university now gone to seed? Apparently, these matters did not matter to the newspaper, as they did not to the government that was to make the appointment. Perhaps they were of no concern to the candidates themselves.”

Read the full article: The chancellor’s vice

Also read: Graduates of Indian Universities need not apply

Posted in Issues and Ideas, Mysore-Bangalore Tagged: Churumuri, K. Balaveera Reddy, Ramachandra Guha, Sans Serif, The Times of India, University of Mysore