The Currency of Independence

A new player has emerged in the roiling political theater of the Caucasus: the tiny, destitute Pacific island nation of Nauru, which on Tuesday became the fourth country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Abkhazia, effectively recognizing its sovereignty.

The announcement comes 15 months after Russia began lobbying its allies to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two separatist territories at the center of its 2008 war with Georgia.

Nauru, an eight-square-mile rock in the South Pacific with about 11,000 inhabitants, was no pushover, according to the influential Russian daily newspaper Kommersant. In talks with Russian officials, Nauru requested $50 million for “urgent social and economic projects,” the newspaper reported, citing unnamed Russian diplomats.

The article is interesting throughout. Perhaps this is a good way to think about the process of statehood: you have to be clever and or lucky enough to be able to buy in.

The Economist and the M&M

The ubiquitous peanut M&M, incidentally:

Mr. Vernon, the renowned student of multinationals, was once employed by a multinational-in-the-making. In 1954 he went to work for Forrest Mars Sr., who built the Mars candy empire. Mr. Vernon was placed in charge of planning, finance and new products. He oversaw the development effort that led to chocolate-covered peanut M & M’s.

The new peanut variety was a success, and, in the candy industry, Mr. Vernon was called ”the man who put the crunch in M & M’s.”

The excerpt is from the New York Times obituary for Raymond Vernon, an eminent economist whose work is important in international trade. The full article is worth a read and contains much of interest.

What I Want For Christmas

Just got an email:

Act now to purchase Mathematica 7 Home Edition at the low price
of just $249–15% off the regular price of $295. Don’t delay,
because this offer is only good until December 31, 2009:
http://url.wolfram.com/bhUjEn2/

Mathematica 7 Home Edition contains all the functionality of the
professional version of Mathematica 7 at a fraction of the cost,
giving you the same technology used by Nobel Prize winners,
Fortune 500 companies, and prestigious universities around the
globe.

With Home Edition, your possibilities are virtually endless. You
can:
* Give your kids the edge in math and science with exciting
visuals and easy-to-use interactive tools
* Examine your stock portfolio and research trends, and develop
your own models to predict changes
* Graph your social networks by connecting to APIs with web
services
* Pursue hobbies such as mapping planets or stars, modeling
weather patterns, or exploring geographic data

Leave me a comment if you would like to buy this program for me.

Walking In Circles

Jan Souman et al in the September issue of Current Biology:

Common belief has it that people who get lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles. Although uncorroborated by empirical data, this belief has widely permeated popular culture. Here, we tested the ability of humans to walk on a straight course through unfamiliar terrain in two different environments: a large forest area and the Sahara desert. Walking trajectories of several hours were captured via global positioning system, showing that participants repeatedly walked in circles when they could not see the sun. Conversely, when the sun was visible, participants sometimes veered from a straight course but did not walk in circles. We tested various explanations for this walking behavior by assessing the ability of people to maintain a fixed course while blindfolded. Under these conditions, participants walked in often surprisingly small circles (diameter < 20 m), though rarely in a systematic direction. These results rule out a general explanation in terms of biomechanical asymmetries or other general biases [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6]. Instead, they suggest that veering from a straight course is the result of accumulating noise in the sensorimotor system, which, without an external directional reference to recalibrate the subjective straight ahead, may cause people to walk in circles.

How To Solve African Desertification

From Africa News, Jan. 15th, 2008, accessed Lexis-Nexis:

But a conversation I had with someone on bus while travelling to Kitgum Town in northern Uganda shaded a new light on the reason why people do what they do. When I raised the issue of environmental impact of tree cutting on the future, my friend quickly reminded me that one worries about environment if they think there is a future. And indeed in the case of Northern Uganda people, it is not hard to believe that such is the prevailing attitude of the day. Life in camps give anyone very little hope of the future. Perhaps, that is the driving force behind desertification throughout Africa. The only solution to this problem is to provide people with alternative means of survival and to offer them basic environmental classes. Without quick change of attitude, Africa will burn and soon the rest of the world will follow. And none of the conservation on environment going on in the western world will mean a damn thing without saving Africa or any other third world continent like South America.

I guess I should file this in the ‘growth good’ file.

What Is Twitter Good For, Anyway? Probably a Lot.

It is obvious to anyone in the business of media, advertising, and promotion that Twitter and other social networking applications have been become critically important in the generation and dissemination of information. But what else could we do with this? I have a couple ideas.

1. Elections. I was at the Young Democrats of America national convention this August in Chicago where one side of the ticket led by current YDA President Crystal Strait had the election bought and paid for.  Part of why money was so influential in this election is that you didn’t have to literally buy the entire delegation from particular states; you only had to buy the state leadership because it is the state chair who tallies and reports delegate votes. State Young Democrat leadership also rents the hotel rooms and arranges travel with the implicit message that if you are not here to vote for the person they want you to support, you’re going to have to find your own way home. It is hard to maintain the integrity of a ballot when you can control all parts of that process.

How can Twitter change this? Simple. It would be a trivial exercise to have Twitter create an elections application based on their platform. You could register the phone numbers for individual delegates at registration or alternatively assign each delegate a secure ID that they use to tweet votes. No one votes who isn’t registered and cleared by the organization, since you’re able to control access to the voting mechanism, and as a (presumptively) independent and unbiased third-party organization, Twitter can maintain ballot integrity since it’s a trivial exercise for them to ensure the secrecy of the ballot. This guts the ability of state or national officials to control their voting blocs. And since everyone has cell phones anyway, the platform’s infrastructure is already in place. You get all the benefits of electronic voting and none of the disadvantages. There are a few other objections but I’ll address them without loss of generality later on.

2. GPS navigation devices. A friend and I were driving through St. Louis today and her GPS navigation system led us to a highway that was closed for construction (and had been closed for the better part of the past year) and I was reminded of a conversation I had a couple years ago with Dr. Ron Harstad, who presciently asked how we could use cell phone technology to route traffic more efficiently.

The operative principle is that the interface determines behavior. Imagine if there was a realtime integration of GPS navigation with Twitter. Instead of unique avatar names, you could identify posts with a unique identifier for the time and exact geographical navigation and scroll the most recent and most important posts along the sidebar. Crowdsourcing realtime information about traffic routes is both eminently feasible and pretty cheap, since the only additional work you’d have to do is add on a Twitter interface specific to the GPS system. Combatting things like spam or bad information is something that we’ve learned is really feasible through crowdsourcing and the only real work is to design the interface appropriately. You can take a look at Google Earth, where crowdsourcing has added incredible richness and value to an application that would be otherwise prohibitively expensive to engineer, or Facebook or Digg, where posts are subjected to realtime evaluation as users are able to evaluate which signals are valuable and which are not. Imagine the potential for coordinating and managing large emergency situations particularly.

Now to address objections. Generally speaking, objections to these proposals are all parametric questions that we can easily engineer around. Questions of security: how can we preserve a ballot’s integrity or prevent people from misusing realtime emergency navigation data can generally be addressed with the right set of protocols (you have a 3rd party control the voting platform or time-delay realtime emergency tweets in appropriate situations). Questions of workability: can we depend on telephone communications and satellites? What if Twitter goes down? These problems are generally managed by ensuring redundancy in the system. Questions of access: not everyone has a  cellphone (fortunately almost everyone does and they are really cheap).

Thoughts?

A Story of Revolution in Venezuela

Before Chavez there was Bolivar, before Bolivar there was Miranda, who is now known as El Precursor. Interestingly, the link is to the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, not Wikipedia (it is both jarringly strange and wonderful to me that Wikipedia has made the Encyclopedia Britannica irrelevant to me). This selection is from the excellent A Way In The World, a selection of autobiographical personal narrative by the Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul:

…Venezuela is a colony in the New World, with slave plantations, and it has all the divisions of that kind of place: Spaniards from Spain, who are the officials; a creole Spanish aristocracy; creole Spaniards who are not aristocracy; mulattos; the Negros of the plantations; the aboriginal Indians. This kind of place is held together only by a strong external authority. When that external authority goes, people can begin to feel they are sinking. Freedom for one group can mean slavery or oppression for another group.

So the Venezuelan revolution, as it progresses, deepens every racial and caste division in the country, encourages every kind of fear and jealousy; and the revolution begins to fail. The ordinary people of the country begin to go over to the other side, the side of old authority, and the reverences and law and religion they know.

Miranda appeals to the slaves to join him. They don’t listen; in fact, the slaves of Barlovento rebel, and there is a moment when it seems they might capture the capital, Caracas. And now, to buy peace, or at any rate to buy time, some of the very men who had called Miranda out from London, to lead their revolution, decide to hand him to the Spaniards. They wake him up one night and march him to the dungeon of a coastal fort.

There is some very interesting material here and many things to note. One is the sheer impact of Spanish colonialism, which as part of its economic and territorial imperialism has reshaped the human map of Venezuela in very vicious ways. I am curious about the evolutionary path of these kinds of coalitions and the strategic games they play and why particularly these coalitions aren’t able to mutually coordinate a revolution or (later stable non-authoritarian government).

The line of thought also plays out some interesting questions. It seems to me that bad governance is path-dependent and part of the story is that turmoil itself retards the formation and optimal evolution of institutions that make civil governance possible. If you have any thoughts of readings to point me further along this path please post them in the comments.

Assorted Links

What I’m reading lately:

1. In Brazil, government regulations make it difficult to tap the medicinal potential of the rainforest.

2. The Italians want to drill into a volcano larger than Vesuvius.

3. A question of property rights, antiquities, and bargaining.

4. There is a great line in this story about frequent flyer miles where a consumer discussess his intertemporal discount rate.

 

 

 

More Problems With The GOP Socialist Narrative

It seems to me that if conservatives really cared or really understood what they were standing against when they drag out Soviet imagery at teabag parties, they would also care very much about placing checks on the government’s power over life and death by promoting the use of an independent judiciary for criminal trials. Specifically they should advocate using jury trials in federal court to try alleged terrorists or grant them access to the rights stipulated by things like the Geneva Convention.

You don’t have to reach my conclusion (that military tribunals for alleged criminals are wrong) to realize that this is a major gap in the conservative narrative, which now has become “We don’t trust government to do anything because that leads to gulags”.

Cigarettes Contain Infectious Bacterial Pathogens Line of the Day

“The commercially-available cigarettes that we tested were chock full of bacteria, as we had hypothesized, but we didn’t think we’d find so many that are infectious in humans, explains Sapkota, who holds a joint appointment with the University’s Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“If these organisms can survive the smoking process—and we believe they can—then they could possibly go on to contribute to both infectious and chronic illnesses in both smokers and individuals who are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke,” Sapkota adds. “So it’s critical that we learn more about the bacterial content of cigarettes, which are used by more than a billion people worldwide.”

Link here. Researchers from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon were also involved.