Monthly Archives: February 2011

Thoughts on plowing intersections, runs on bread, having places to turn around on major roads (like LSD), and more

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Now that the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 has stopped (though arctic wind chills are next), I have a few thoughts about the storm:

1. I drove home yesterday at about 4:45 PM. The roads weren’t too bad and the traffic was light – I assume this meant many people went home earlier. But there a problem in this sort of weather and any snow that always pops up: intersections that are difficult to move through. The roads can be quite passable but then everything bottles up at slushy intersections where people can’t start quickly and have great difficulty in turning. Someone needs to figure out a way to solve this problem. Would it be better to close an intersection for a minute or two so plows could do diagonal runs through the intersection square to clear snow? Are there people concerned about the science of plowing?

2. Why there was a run on bread in times like this is an interesting question to ponder. There are a lot of food one could buy before a storm hits that would be better in bread in that it would last longer and be more fulfilling. When did runs on bread begin and why do people still do this?

3. One of the stories in Chicago was the people who got stuck on in northbound traffic on Lake Shore Drive for hours. Why doesn’t every main road, particularly highways, have a certain number of points where people could turn around if a situation like this (or even a major crash in regular conditions) occurs? Lake Shore Drive has a number of exits in this area but those were blocked with crashes as well. Concrete barriers are helpful in separating traffic but this is an issue that someone should solve.

4. The warnings the police and state officials were giving overnight and this morning were intriguing that they must have to give these warnings because there are people who go out driving in such conditions when they don’t have to. This morning, one official suggested that if people wanted to go out, they needed to consider whether they were willing to risk their lives. This seems like common sense – but perhaps it is not.

5. When I woke up at 7:30 AM, the street in our residential subdivision wasn’t bad – perhaps 5-6 inches of snow. By 12:30 PM, a plow had done several runs on the street and it was clear. I was tempted to go drive and see what everything looks like but see point #4 above.

6. The blizzard is over – the total snowfall was the third biggest storm in Chicago history. Now it is time for the bitter cold. In the grand scheme of things, is the extreme cold more dangerous to more people than the blizzard conditions and the snow?

Exactly how many American homes are vacant?

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Two bloggers have a disagreement about how many vacant homes there are in the United States. Check out the debate and the comments below.

The moral of the story: one still needs to interpret statistics and what exactly they are measuring. The different between 11% and 2% is quite a lot: the first figure suggests 1 out of 10 housing units are vacant while the second figure suggests it is 1 out of 50. If you look at Table 1 of this Census Bureau release regarding housing figures from Quarter 4, it looks like the vacancy rate is 2.7%. But there may be confusion based on Table 3 which suggests the vacancy for all housing units is roughly 11% for year-round units. And later in the release, page 11 of the document, gives the formula for the vacancy calculation and an explanation: “The homeowner vacancy rate is the proportion of the homeowner inventory that is vacant for sale.”

There are some other figures of note in this document. Table 4 shows that the homeownership rate is at 66.5%, down from a peak of 69.2% in the fourth quarter of 2004. (It is interesting to note that this rate peaked a couple of years before the housing market is popularly thought to have gone downhill. What happened between Q4 2004 and the start of the larger economic crisis? Table 7 has homeownership rates by race: the white rate has dropped 1.1% since 1Q 2007 while Blacks and Latinos have seen bigger drops (3.2% and 3.3%).

ABA wants free trade in legal services?

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The International Business Times is reporting that American Bar Association President Stephen N. Zack is lobbying India to refrain from shutting U.S. lawyers out of the Indian legal market:

Currently, U.S. lawyers are allowed to travel to India on an “in-and-out basis” to advise their clients on non-Indian aspects of law. That “status quo” should be maintained as the [Bar Council of India] considers the broader issue of whether to allow the practice of law by foreign law firms in India, Zack said….”The ABA believes that allowing such activities is critical not only for the mutual benefit of the legal practitioners in both countries,” [Zack’s] letter said, “but also for fostering the vital and already close relationship between India and the United States and to promote the robust growth of trade and investments between our two countries. Allowing such activities is also essential in making India a preferred venue for international arbitration proceedings.”

This is a huge issue, and only going to get bigger in the coming years.  In most countries, including the U.S. and India, the legal profession is highly regulated and heavily skewed toward protectionism (i.e., preserving a pre-globalization status quo).  For example, in order to “practice law” in the U.S., one must generally graduate from college, attend law school for 3 years, and pass a state-specific bar exam.  Other countries have similarly stringent requirements.  Obviously, most people who have been through the trouble (and expense) of this process are vehemently opposed to competition from anyone else–including (and especially) lawyers licensed in other countries.

Which is what makes the ABA president’s statements so interesting.  Supposedly, U.S. lawyers currently provide Indian businesses with “consultancy legal services” (to use the article’s phrase) rather than “practice law” (which is the magic phrase to denote what one cannot do without an official license in a given state/country).  However, such verbal formulations are notoriously vague, and everyone who argues over their precise meanings are lawyers with a vested interest in either (1) expanding their own market for legal services or (2) keeping new competition out.

To date, new competition has mostly been kept out, especially here in the U.S.  It will be interesting to see whether the ABA president’s recent lobbying in India represents a first step moving toward a free trade in legal services between the U.S. and India.

How the John Edwards affair became news

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How exactly certain scandals come to light when they do is often an interesting tale. The former editor of the National Enquirer explains how his investigative team put together the story of John Edwards’ affair. The tale involves the use of technology and a profiler who provided insights into how to trap Edwards in his lies:

I knew there was no viable scenario for Edwards to confess to the Enquirer. I faced the bitter realization that another news organization would reap the benefits of our team’s hard work and get the confession, but I also knew that ultimately that confession would validate the Enquirer‘s earlier story as well as the new one.

Behind the scenes we exerted pressure on Edwards, sending word though mutual contacts that we had photographed him throughout the night. We provided a few details about his movements to prove this was no bluff.

For 18 days we played this game, and as the standoff continued the Enquirer published a photograph of Edwards with the baby inside a room at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

Journalists asked if we had a hidden camera in the room. We never said yes or no. (We still haven’t). We sent word to Edwards privately that there were more photos.

He cracked. Not knowing what else the Enquirer possessed and faced with his world crumbling, Edwards, as the profiler predicted, came forward to partially confess. He knew no one could prove paternity so he admitted the affair but denied being the father of Hunter’s baby, once again taking control of the situation.

Perhaps this story isn’t anything unusual – technology makes information gathering a lot easier. Yet it is somewhat shocking to me that plenty of powerful people, like John Edwards or Tiger Woods, think that they can get away with things in the long run. Sure, the National Enquirer had to spend months tracking down this story but in the end, it was doable and effectively changed the public perception of John Edwards forever. Is there something that happens when people are put in powerful positions that changes their perceptions of what they can and can’t get away with?

Is it even possible for the powerful to get away with things like this any more? How many “scandals” are lurking out there somewhere? It is certainly a far cry from the days of the 1950s and before when sportwriters routinely shied away from reporting on what athletes did away from home and political reporters didn’t talk about everything.

Pictures of “uncontacted” Amazon peoples

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There are still areas of the planet where people have little contact with the larger world. The country of Brazil has just released photos of some people groups with limited contact in order to draw attention to their condition:

FUNAI has released similar photographs in the past and acknowledged that Peruvian loggers are sending some indigenous people fleeing across the border to less-affected rainforests in Brazil.

The coordinator of Brazil’s Amazon Indian organization COIAB, Marcos Apurina, said he hoped the images would draw attention to the plight of the indigenous peoples and encourage their protection.

“It is necessary to reaffirm that these peoples exist, so we support the use of images that prove these facts. These peoples have had their most fundamental rights, particularly their right to life, ignored — it is therefore crucial that we protect them,” he said.

FUNAI says there are 67 tribes in Brazil that do not have sustained contact with the outside world. Some are often referred to as “uncontacted” tribes even though they have some kind of, albeit limited, contacts.

The future of a number of these groups has been threatened in recent decades primarily by people who want their land, either for its natural resources or who want to convert it into farmland. And there are some interesting discussions about how these cultures can continue to remain fairly distinct from outside influences, even if most now have had some contact with the larger world.

Line-drawing and merits in job hunting

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Although not tailored to the specifics of the legal job market, an analogous debate concerning the mechanics of the academic job market is taking place over Inside Higher Education (hat tip:  Tax Prof Blog).

First up:  Joshua A. Tucker in Academe as Meritocracy, arguing

  1. that only the paternalistic would stifle the dreams of potential Ph.D students, and
  2. that a robust meritocracy exists within the academy.

As Tucker puts it:

Like major league baseball, a successful academic career is a very good gig. Do we really owe every 22-year-old who is admitted to a Ph.D. program the right to that career solely on the basis of getting into a Ph.D. program? Or is it enough to give them a chance to succeed, knowing full well that not all of them will?…Like it or not, academia is a meritocracy. It may be a highly flawed meritocracy susceptible to overvaluing labels or fads of the day, but ultimately tenure is bestowed on those who earn the respect of their peers, and the more of your peers that respect you, the more job offers you are going to get and the more money you are going to make.

Tucker does recognize that a certain amount of truth-in-advertising is necessary, but he seems comfortable with letting admitted Ph.D students decide for themselves whether they should actually attend:

I fully believe we need to be honest with graduate students about what they are getting themselves into — the same way a minor league baseball player needs to know what the odds are of making it to the majors — but if they want to take a shot at achieving success in this kind of a career, I see no reason why we should excessively limit the number of people who have the opportunity to do so. And at the end of the day, that’s the trade-off here: the fewer students we admit to Ph.D. programs, the earlier we make the decision regarding who gets to be the next generation of professors.

While I sympathize with Tucker’s paternalism argument, I think his analysis fails to appreciate that lines must be–and are–drawn somewhere.  All of us are unfit for certain occupations, and each of us must either (1) realize this ourselves or (2) be told this by others.  Moreover, this must happen (1) sooner or (2) later.  Tucker does not escape the inevitable moment of line-drawing simply by choosing “later”, i.e., after his Ph.D. admission committee has sent out its acceptances.

Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by expanding on Tucker’s example of professional baseball.  Personally, I am objectively unfit to play for a minor league baseball team, let alone to be drafted into the majors.  Let us suppose that, for whatever reasons, I am too deluded to realize this for myself and will need to be told by others that I will never be a major league baseball player.  Should a minor league team still admit me to its roster?  What about a college team?  High school varsity team?  At what point should I be told, “Kid, you don’t stand a chance of ever playing in the majors.  You should pursue another career”?

This is a difficult question that will need to be answered differently for different individuals based on their own specific circumstances.  Tucker, however, does not attempt to answer this question or provide guidelines on how it should be answered under various circumstances.  Rather, he simply implies that Ph.D. students should be admitted first and allowed to sort themselves out later, regardless of changing job market conditions or the odds of success.

In contrast to Tucker’s faith in the meritocratic process, “Dean Dad” responds in “Meritocracy and Hiring” that the academy is NOT the sort of meritocracy that should be generating smug feelings of superiority:

As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture….In this funding climate, we can only afford to staff a few of the positions (whether faculty, staff, or administration) that we need. If the position doesn’t exist, then the relative merit of the prospective candidates means exactly zero….Of course, there’s also the basic incompatibility of life tenure with the idea of meritocracy. If incumbents don’t have to keep proving themselves against newcomers, then you do not have a meritocracy. Tenure violates the foundational assumption of meritocracy.

The key is to recognize that hiring is always more about the employer than about the employee. Employers hire to solve problems they consider important. If you’re the best darn German professor who ever walked the planet, congratulations, but I don’t need you. I don’t doubt your brilliance, your hard work, your civic virtue, or your habit of helping old ladies across the street. They just don’t matter. It’s not about you.

I think Dean Dad is onto something here.  In discussions about job markets, the “right-place-at-the-right-time” factor is far too often overlooked .  Despite, for example, evidence that simply graduating from college in the middle of a recession can permanently lower lifetime earnings.  Dean Dad helpfully reminds his readers that failure to land a job in one’s chosen profession does not necessarily have moral overtones:

I’m convinced that one reason some people won’t let themselves let go of the dream, despite years of external signals suggesting that they should, is a sense that it would reflect a personal moral failing. They’ve identified so completely with the ‘meritocracy’ myth that they feel a real need to redeem themselves within it….[T]hey see the status of “tenured professor” as a sort of validation of everything they’ve done. Leaving the academy would be admitting defeat and accepting failure; lifelong “A” students, as a breed, aren’t very good at that. It’s not what they do….[L]et’s recognize the academic job market as the uneven, unpredictable, often unforgiving thing that it is. Good people lose. Frankly, some real losers sometimes win. It’s not entirely random, of course, but it’s a far cry from a meritocracy.

Although Dean Dad is writing about the academic job market, I think this is also a helpful point for recent law graduates to remember, especially in the midst of a recession.  Things don’t always work out, and that’s OK.  Sometimes, you just have to let it go and try something new.

Comments on whether Evangelicals are generous enough

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A number of commentators, including a few sociologists (Christian Smith and Bradley Wright), weigh in on the question of whether Evangelicals are generous or stingy with their money.

Two points to take away:

1. Evangelicals are more generous than many people.

2. Evangelicals don’t come close to giving to their full capacity, let injunction the idea of giving 10% of their income.

Quick Review: Da Bears!

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Partly to commemorate the Chicago Bears’ lone Super Bowl title and also to help mourn the recent loss to the Green Bay Packers, I read Da Bears!: How the 1985 Monsters of the Midway Became the Greatest Team in NFL History. A few thoughts about this book, one of many products commemorating this 25th anniversary:

1. A main theme of the book is the ongoing battle between Head Coach Mike Ditka and defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. How exactly the team kept moving forward with this kind of tension is interesting.

2. There are claims that the Bears were the team that really helped push the NFL to the top. With their winning plus the actions and charm of their players, the Bears were a kind of media circus in an era where this didn’t happen often.

2a. The problem with a claim like this is that little evidence is presented that might conflict with this narrative. At one point, the book mentions that several teams had recorded songs as teams before the “Super Bowl Shuffle” but it was this 1985 song that really took off. Another (implicit?) claim is that the Bears really pushed athlete endorsements forward. Were other star athletes not doing commercials? In the end, how exactly do we know the Bears were something different in the eyes of the media compared to any other team of the time? I would have liked to have read more perspectives from outside of Chicago – were people across the country as intrigued with the Bears as Chicagoans were?

3. Some things never seem to change with the Bears: defense over offense, inconsistent quarterback play, complaints about the McCaskeys, an inability to follow up on success (with the 1985 Super Bowl team never getting back to another title game), fickle fans who suddenly were worried at the end of the 1985 season with less than perfect play, and more. How long can a team have the same basic identity?

4. As a cultural phenomenon, it would be interesting to track other teams that have captured the heart of a city in the same way as the Bears. While the list of endorsements and radio shows during the 1985 season was impressive, many of those guys are still around in the Chicago media. Will there be a point where the 1985 team is eclipsed by another team or was their combination of dominance and style too much to overcome?

5. It was unclear to me how much of this book was original research versus drawing from existing sources.

Overall, I’m not sure how much new material this book presents: many of the themes are widely known. There are a wide range of perspectives in this book but I think you also find this information elsewhere. I was looking for a new take on a famous team and yet you will hear the same things on local sports talk stations and other media.

The land of 100,000 lawsuits

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Some enterprising anonymous researcher has determined that almost 100,000 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. in the past year:

In the United States the judicial system is currently being overloaded with new cases, but the scope of the issue was never really clear until now. An anonymous TorrentFreak reader has spent months compiling a complete overview of all the mass P2P lawsuits that have been filed in the US since the beginning of 2010, listing all the relevant case documents and people involved in a giant spreadsheet.

The research shows that between 8th January 2010 and 21st January 2011, a total of 99,924 individuals have been sued. The vast majority of the defendants have allegedly used BitTorrent to share copyrighted works but a few hundred ed2k users are also included.

Of the 80 cases that were filed originally, 68 are still active, with 70,914 defendants still in jeopardy.

The raw data is available is spreadsheet form over on Google Docs.

As the disparity between 80 and 70,914 indicates, these types of lawsuits completely overwhelm the courts.  The U.S. justice system is simply not set up to handle this kind of volume, especially for suits as notoriously tricky to argue as copyright infringement.

Find (if ye know how to seek)

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It’s a few days old now, but I just ran across a post over on TorrentFreak describing how Google has started removing “torrent”-related results from its auto-complete search results:

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.

Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today [1/26/2011], these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.

All combinations of the word “torrent” are also completely banned. This means that “Ubuntu torrent” will not be suggested as a user types in Ubuntu, and the same happens to every other combination ending in the word torrent. This of course includes the titles of popular films and music albums, which is the purpose of Google’s banlist.

This is quite an interesting development.  Personally, I have found Google’s auto-complete functionality very helpful in finding the names of half-remembered items.  It is a disturbing reminder of just how much control Google exerts–not only over what we find, but over what we search for.