Also, yes, that’s right, I did both the yellow circle image and the tight-roping stick figure. And the tiling, I remember being so happy about the marble tiling.

Finally, there’s an end-of-year picnic in West Wilshire park. It’s on May 4, 1996. Please RSVP.

This year, I suspect I’ll just miss out on a ton of freaked out Democrats, outraged racially-tinged Republican attacks, based-on-whatever-this-second’s-data-almost-says prognostications about markets, breathlessly reported Sarah Palin tweet-farts, and the like

And so I come back, and find that nothing in the world has changed. Earthquakes, floods, miners trapped. This is expected, and tragic. I am surprised to see so little about the BP Oil Spill, which was the MOST IMPORTANT THING before I signed off the newswagon. And of course I am surprised and unsurprised by the mosque-thing. That squeaked past my news embargo. It is exactly what I mean by nothing happens in August. And now apparently Democrats are doooooooooooomed!1!! But the truth is, nothing has really changed since early summer though, so I think that’s a little overblown as well. I guess we shall see.

I did catch the Cee-Lo song, courtesy of WITW, natch. Anything else I missed?

But this means that I run into the problem of some students dominating discussion, with others hanging waaaayy back. And as anyone who has been in the Q&A of any sociology talk on any level, an often-talker is not necessarily a thinking-talker. So how to get lots of high quality discussion across the board. This semester, instead of the normal guesstimating points for participation, I’m going with the League of Discussion Awesomeness. Being in the LoDA guarantees you full marks for participation. And so much more!

Initially, getting into the LoDA for a class means just speaking up in class. But then, a couple weeks in, I’m going to make getting into the LoDA something that requires nomination from your fellow students. When someone makes a ‘LoDA worthy’ comment, students can respond by putting their finger up against their nose. A floor of 3 votes (or something, I’ll calibrate as we go) to start, maybe with the number of votes going up as the semester progresses.

This (hopefully) will have three effects. One, it will create a positive incentive for participation – LoDA gets grades, accolades, maybe even a cash prize or something. Two, it will allow fellow students to have a hand in shaping participation. A big complaint at places like Barnard/Columbia is that everyone thinks they are smart and everyone else talks about trivial, personal, or not-on-point stuff. The voting for high quality discussion – a ‘smart’ comment – allows students to vote for quality over quantity. And three, it will send a signal to the high-quantity, low-quality discussants that their comments are not being received as godly wisdom. Hopefully, this will encourage students to participate more, and participate smarter.

I’m still working out the details, but does this sound like a viable plan? Am I missing something gigantic?

If you let me know, and I refer you, they give me more space (yay!), which would be nice. But I don’t even care if you are referred or not, just go try it.

And if that isn’t bad enough, I made the mistake of going to the Washington Post to see if I could, you know, find out what the substance was. Here is a screen cap of their current political page:

Good lord, what happened to the Washington Post? Tracking Palin’s mama grizzlies, indeed. Virtually nothing on this entire page is substantive. At the very bottom, EJ Donne asks ‘Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?’ Can newspapers stay alive if this is the best they can do?

• A good story, well told. You should read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. And read Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series. Oh, and the first 20 minutes of Up. Boy, every time I see that I laugh, and cry.
• Anachronistic hobbies. Mine include writing letters (and sometimes writing them on my Hermes Featherweight typewriter!), baking bread, and listening to big band music (and sometimes even dancing a little Lindy Hop). But by all means, cultivate some orchids, do jigsaw puzzles (and if you love, love, love me, buy me a Stave puzzle), paint model airplanes, build a Wimshurst Machine.
• Stevie Wonder’s I Believe (When I Fall in Love).
• That moment when you realize that your friends are doing something specifically because they want to help you. And accepting that help in the spirit in which it is given.
• Unbridled enthusiasm. Find something at which you can direct some non-ironic, genuine passion. With full-on gusto.
• Singing out loud, preferably with a group.
• My wife. Never thought I would be in a long-term relationship, much less married. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the experience (see Enthusiasm, unbridled).
• Mondays. I love Mondays, with its whiff of blank page and anticipation. I know, I know, Fridays (Eddie from Ohio’s Blue Jeans makes the case). But I still love me some Mondays.
• Structure. Agency is for psychologists, economists, and suckers. Give me structure any day.

What do you love?

Superstar prices would ruin artists’ integrity; superstar dealers “trample the morals of the market, treating an artwork overtly as a commodity, with status as well as investment overtones” (151). These dealers potentially further destabilize the art market, resulting in negative effects on everyone else.

That artists themselves would bear the brunt of the suffering as a result of lower prices was a feature, not a bug. True, these lower, more slowly rising prices for an artist’s work benefit collectors much more than artists. Prudent pricing would make artists more responsible. Velthuis also argues that “for most artists pricing prudently means that they cannot make a living form their work” (155). But for dealers, this moment of purification allowed them to re-establish control over art prices more broadly, and to do so within a moral framework.

There are parallels to the so-called Pain Caucus, so named because in the face of massive unemployment, these policy-makers and federal reserve chairpeople think that short-term deficits are the crises on which we should focus. There is a moral element here as well: that after the profligate borrowing and spending of the early ‘aughts, workers need to suffer some. Why it is workers who need to bear the brunt of this suffering, I leave to your own political imagination.

Oh, and explaining to a financial planner that you don’t really want or need insurance, for instance, feels about the same as explaining to your dentist that flossing is for suckers. You may be able to assert yourself, you may be better off for taking your own advice, but you’re certainly going to feel like a moron.

Though as a total aside, the recent May incident where P&G dumped 1/3 of its value, then rebounded (from $60 to $40 back to $60) in 4 1/2 minutes seems more complicated than an accidental trade. In fact, the joint SEC-CFTC report (that’s a .pdf) is something of a doozy:

The quantitative evidence presented above suggest that a confluence of economic events, market forces, and trading system functionality led to a significant dislocation of liquidity in the June 2010 E-mini S&P 500 futures contract sometime between 2:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. on May 6, 2010.

Prior to that time, a number of economic events and market developments led to a broad-based market desire to lessen risk exposures. This translated into a downward movement in prices across financial markets in conjunction with significant trading volume. At or about 2:30 p.m., the electronic limit order book in the E-mini S&P 500 futures market exhibited a significant imbalance of sell orders and buy orders. In the backdrop of declining prices, this imbalance appears to have contributed to a sudden liquidity dislocation despite increased trading volume. At approximately 2:45 p.m., several sell orders executed deep into the limit order book, which coincided with a significant loss of depth, triggering the Stop Logic functionality. The Stop Logic functionality in the E-mini S&P 500 contract has been triggered a number of times in the past few years, including several times during the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, when market conditions may have resembled those seen on May 6, 2010. Activation of the Stop Logic functionality on May 6, 2010, initiated a five second pause in trading in the E-mini S&P 500 futures contract. After the five second pause, the limit order book became more balanced, which is its typical state, and the price of the E-mini S&P 500 futures contract recovered.

This is being called the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010.

Anyhoozle, the ATP Oil & Gas Corporation. The analyst for JP Morgan who covers the company, named Joseph Allman (in case you want to know whose work you can’t trust down the road), calculated that the company would need $500 million in additional capital, more than its entire market capitalization. You can see what happened, on June 13, 2010:

That’s end of trading day Monday. On Thursday, JP Morgan put out a second note, as Salmon quotes: “In our July 13 note, we stated that it appeared that ATPG would need $500MM of external capital. This model corrects that error and reduces that need to $50MM.”

Oops.

The lessons Salmon draws are things like, yep, people read sell-side research and act on it, and yep, stocks are hella volatile nowadays, and you betcha, listening to sell-side research without doing your own homework is hazardous to your wealth.

To me, what’s amazing here is how time horizons are highly shortened, and market reflexes are hair-trigger, and trading technologies are tightly coupled. Add people, mix, and there will inevitably be periodic blowups.

I look forward to writing more letters, writing more everything really, reading more, less TV, and more free stuff in Brooklyn.

Which leads me to Pepsi, Scienceblogs, John Gruber, and Apple’s iPhone 4.

Scienceblogs is a community of science blogs (duh), hosted by what was once Seed Magazine (and what is now Seed Media Group). In early July, 2010, Scienceblogs began hosting a new blog, called Food Frontiers:

As part of this partnership, we’ll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy. In addition to learning more about the transformation of PepsiCo’s product portfolio, we’ll be seeing some of the innovative ways it is planning to reduce its use of energy, water and packaging

(this quote comes from an article by Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review, the original announcement having been taken down at Scienceblogs and replaced with an apologetic note). But yes, the Scienceblog in question was not just sponsored by PepsiCo, but actually would be a science-based nutrition blog written by PepsiCo. You can catch up at Bora Zivkovic’s (who as a result of this actually left Scienceblogs) massive linkdump.

As a result of this move, in fact, Scienceblogs seems to be falling apart. I would like to take this opportunity to look at the practice of corporate blogging, corporate-sponsored blogging, and well, corporate blog-whoring, all with a jaundiced eye. Seed Media Group’s CEO Adam Bly wrote a confidential letter to contributors (helpfully posted by the Guardian):

We have also hosted blogs on SB from research-based companies like Shell, Dow, Schering-Plough, GE, Invitrogen, L’Oreal (in Germany), and now PepsiCo. I want to address the logic and strategy behind this.

ScienceBlogs has consistently maintained editorial excellence. We syndicate content to the New York Times, National Geographic, and are indexed by Google News. So respected is our platform that the US State Department recently published a post on 3.14. We should all be very proud of what we have achieved in four short years. We have ensured editorial excellence not by editing your posts or telling you what to write – a first principle unique to SB that we will never change – but by learning over four years how to create an environment that encourages your best. We believe that one vital aspect of this SB environment is its intentional diversity. You are all expert at different things, care passionately about other things, and come from different backgrounds and countries. We think this is a good thing and we think it help makes SB tick for our readers. We also think that you cannot have a real conversation about science and its place and role in society unless you pursue and protect this diversity. It’s why we believe that all serious voices in science should have a seat at the table (and we’ve been consistent about what’s serious and what’s fringe or worse).

We think the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society. It is our hope that the Xeroxes and Bell Labs of the future will have a real presence on SB – that they will learn from our readers and we will learn from them. That they will break stories on SB and engage our readers in the issues that concern them. The bloggers who blog on ‘corporate blogs’ on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.

Let me address PepsiCo in particular. Of course we recognize – and of course so does PepsiCo! – that they’ve made a lot of money selling soft drinks and chips. But they also recognize that their future will be troublesome and time-limited without addressing the real and connected issues of obesity and under-nutrition in the world. PepsiCo employs thousands of scientists working on these problems and they are led by some very serious scientists – eg. their chief scientist worked at the Mayo Clinic and serves on the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences. (PepsiCo is the same place that makes Tropicana and Quaker Oatmeal.)

PepsiCo comes off like Nick Naylor in Thank you for Smoking: Though these lobbyists would like to see Cancer Boy die to prove their point, it is in Tobacco’s best interests that he LIVES, to continue using our product!

Seriously, read that whole memo. Basically the CEO says that 1) there are scientists at for-profit companies; 2) lots of places including the New Yorker and Atlantic give prime access to companies who pay for it; and 3) we need the money.

Now, there is a relatively interesting discussion here to be made about the ways that capitalism intersects with opinion, and the long, historic dependency of news media on paid advertisement. But I would also strongly suggest that for-profit actors are now (and perhaps have always) mobilized the form of more ‘objective’ outlets in order make more credible claims. For me, at its most base level, it comes down to this:

People are more inclined to believe you if they see you as an impartial observer than if they see you as a partial advocate. If you are on the corporate (or political) payroll, you can not be trusted and your opinion is suspect. Impartiality doesn’t even quite get at this, though. Maybe transparent. But not quite, since transparent can be easily dismissed as obviously unable to form a helpful opinion. Fair-minded. That’s more what I am talking about.

This is the fact on which 99% of the complaints and justifications are based. PepsiCo can not be trusted to speak on science issues because they can not be believed to be fair-minded.

And here is where John Gruber comes in. Recently, Apple has had some problems with its recently released iPhone 4. Apparently, its antenna is constructed in such a way that holding it in a particular way attenuates the signal. Consumer Reports called this a design defect in one place and an antenna problem in another. The NYT article calls it a ‘design flaw’.

Apple held a press conference to push back against these criticisms, where Steve Jobs personally spoke and answered questions about the phone’s antenna, its performance against other phones, and Apple’s remedy for the problem (giving away phone cases to physically prevent users from bridging the antenna gap and triggering the loss of signal).

Gruber runs a (wonderful) blog called Daring Fireball, where he both curates and commentates on the internet, with a strong preference for Apple products and a clearly insider-y take on all things Apple. He is not on the payroll, which he jokingly comments about. But still, he seems to have been one of a members of the press who got to tour Apple’s Antenna Testing Lab after the press conference (I don’t know him, and I don’t know this for certain. But that first ‘jokingly’ link notes at the end that some members of the press got to go, the second notes that ‘this is the lab a few of us got to tour in person’).

And here’s the thing. During the press conference, Jobs was at pains to show that other phones had a comparable flaw, and that this was a ‘weak spot’. Early on, Gruber uses quotes around “weak spot”, noting that it is Apple’s parlance, or that it is “Jobs’s term for the infamous lower-left gap in the antenna frame”.

But then a funny thing happens. After a slew of posts about other manufacturers’ phones (and running snide commentary about their lack of attention, as well as how his checks from Apple should keep rolling in), Gruber comes to some conclusions, an Antennagate Bottom Line. Here, he begins:

What is not in dispute: the iPhone 4 antenna has a weak spot in the lower-left corner of the frame, marked by the black line in the frame. When covered by your hand, this antenna suffers from attenuation. This is much like other smartphones.

After running through the evidence and opinion, including Apple’s $100 million dollar remediation effort for something Gruber himself considers a fairly minor trade-off for a great phone, he concludes:

Anyway, bottom line on the iPhone 4 antenna: it has a weak spot but there’s no evidence that it’s a significant, let alone catastrophic, problem in practice. It’s telling that the criticism surrounding this issue has shifted, quickly, from speculation about a technical defect in the iPhone 4 hardware to criticism over the tone of Apple’s response to it.

What certainly could be described as a design flaw, a design defect, or an antenna problem is magically transformed into a weak spot. A weak spot implies a small flaw in an otherwise ‘working’ device; a design flaw implies a ‘broken’ device. And the truth of it is, I do not know which of these is the case here (or both, depending on you, your network, your other options, your disposition towards Apple, etc). But I do know that Apple is deeply, deeply invested in it being the former. “Weak spot”, turns into weak spot, turns into insignificant problem.

It is equally apparent to me that by co-opting Gruber and other journalists, bloggers, and opinion makers, whose credibility precisely rests on their reputation as unbiased observers, Apple is doing just what PepsiCo was doing when it signed on to create a Scienceblog. And of course Gruber knows this. The whole sarcastic schtick about his payola checks suggests that he knows that if he really was on the Apple payroll, his opinions would simply. matter. less.

I’m not really sure what to do with this problem. But in an era of increasing information-by-the-many, it’s one that is likely to get much worse before it gets much better.

I thought Kay Scarpetta would be doing better, maybe some people don’t like Angelina Jolie? And once my Untitled Cameron Crowe Comedy (UCCRO) gets a name, that sucker will go through the roof.

Now for my IRA..