Factoid: The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners

The New York Times story Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ is a staggering litany of American exceptionalism. A few excerpts:

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. . .

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation . . . China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison [excluding those in administrative detention]. . .

The United States comes in first [in] incarceration rates, [with] 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. [Next]is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. . . . England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The story cites a variety of causes, including higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net, and elected judges.

Factoid: The prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1% at 65 years of age, and doubles every five years after that

Source: Guy Brown, "Death special: The bitter end" New Scientist 13 October 2007

It's not a pretty picture. The Big Hope used to be that we'd live longer, but that disease and disability would be compressed into short period at the end of life. Well-being would be a step function that dropped off quickly just before we dropped dead. Unfortunately, increasing lifespan is combining with an increase in degenerative disease to create "expanded morbidity," a long and painful decline towards our demise.

The factoid in context:

The prevalence of most degenerative diseases, such as cancer, and vascular and neurodegenerative disease, increases roughly exponentially with age. For example, the prevalence of Alzheimer's is about 1 per cent at 65 years of age and approximately doubles every five years after that, to around 25 per cent for 85-year-olds. In the US, 46 per cent of people over 85 years of age are thought to have Alzheimer's. There are an estimated 5 million people with Alzheimer's in the US today, and as people live longer this number is projected to rise to 12.5 million by 2050 (Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol 36, p 281).

. . .

Of Americans older than 80 years, 74 per cent have a disability. They are also more likely to be forgetful, confused or depressed. Almost a quarter of non-institutionalised Americans over 85 are thought to be severely depressed.

A friend who teaches geriatric nursing tells me that the Boomer Generation is particularly unprepared for this fate: they have always rejected the prospect of growing old.

Guy Brown argues that we need to put "death, dying and dementia" on the political agenda. He advances the need for more research and hospice funding - and for a new attitude to death.

The hard part is teaching our hearts what our heads (in their more sober moments) already know: death is a part of life. It's hard enough accepting the small inconveniences of life; learning to accept death seems almost impossible. At least longer life spans means we have a little more time to practice than our forebears.

Tools make the solution

In an example of how tools shape thinking, New Scientist reports on a study where using Mathematica led students to focus on the computational aspects of a problem, rather than trying to understand the underlying physics. (Mark Buchanan, "Physics tool makes students miss the point" 8 January 2008; source paper by Bing & Redish)

Mathematica frees scientists from the drudgery of solving equations by hand - but first you have to devise a solution strategy. Apparently this is a broader problem: automated thinking tools prevent people from thinking about the broader context of the problem they face.

I have to wonder whether the quants on Wall Street (and their bosses) were so wrapped up in their computer models that they didn't think about the underlying risks of sub-prime derivatives, or the moral hazard of decoupling the mortgage reseller from the consequences of a loan going bad.

In a version of "you get what you measure", here "the solution is determined by the tool."

Factoid: A quarter of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so

Jakob Nielsen says that in their current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful - and these were "above-average" users. Instead, Nielsen reports, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.

That's a good reality check for the digerati...

Another step in reducing world-wide poverty

Senators staying up all night to vote on budget resolutions doesn’t make the pulse race, unless you’re a C-SPAN junkie or a devoted listener to NPR News. But late last Thursday night both Washington State's senators cast important votes that will reduce poverty, and bring hope to millions of hungry people around the world.

The planet becomes daily more interconnected. America needs wise and active partners in every country to build a safe and prosperous world. Healthy and flourishing people in Africa will not only use our software, ride in our planes, and buy wheat from the Palouse; they will also help us write software, produce goods we need, and enrich our intertwined cultures. Alleviating hunger and poverty in the developing world is part of building a better America.

Malnutrition during the first two years of life affects a child's development by reducing IQ, slowing motor skills, and increasing learning disabilities. Chronic hunger increases people's susceptibility to disease. It leaves children listless and unable to concentrate in school, and adults lacking the energy to think and work productively. Approximately 800 million people in the developing world are chronically undernourished. Hungry people cannot be our partners in building a safe and prosperous future.

Ending hunger and poverty is also a moral issue. All religions and ethical traditions teach that the path to salvation leads through compassion. Each of us becomes a better person when we relieve the suffering of others. We can do this individually and collectively: through direct, personal action, and through discharging our obligation as the world’s wealthiest nation to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

No one disagrees that ending huger and poverty is a worthy goal, but it might seem utopian. In the face of so much suffering, entrenched for so long, can anyone really make a difference? The governments of the United States and 188 other nations believe so: in September 2000, they pledged to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty by 2015, less than a decade from now. The financial cost of ending hunger is relatively slight. The United Nations estimates that the basic health and nutrition needs of the world's poorest people could be met for an additional $13 billion a year. Animal lovers in the United States and Europe spend more than that on pet food each year.

The President and Congress doubled poverty-focused overseas assistance between 2001 and 2008. This has helped poor people in many ways, for example by providing wells near homes and fields. The resulting easier irrigation means more food, and more time for children to do their homework rather than spending hours every day carrying water from a far-away river.

But the work has just started; doubling poverty assistance is easy if one starts from a small base. Currently, less than one-half of 1 percent of the Federal budget goes to programs that help lift people out of hunger and poverty. A stronger International Affairs budget is essential to create partners for America in building a better world.

The Senate had actually been on track to cut this budget well below the President’s request. Fortunately, both Senators Murray and Cantwell understand the vital importance of building a hunger-free world, and they supported the passage of the Biden-Lugar Amendment on Thursday night. This brought the International Affairs budget back to the level of the President’s request. Both senators are also co-sponsors of the Global Poverty Act, which would make cutting hunger and extreme poverty in half by 2015 an official goal of U.S. policy.

To learn more about poverty-focused development assistance, see the Bread for the World web site

Free Software = Greed?

One expects purveyors of proprietary software to be avaricious; that’s what being in business is all about. But Richard Stallman & Co?

Proprietary software companies want to give you their product – in exchange for money, to be sure. But Free Software advocates don’t want to let go.* They cling to their intellectual offspring, always retaining visitation rights, never letting it grow up and live its own life. Free software licenses want to ensure that the writer of the code can always see it in future, that it remains available to them forever. (IANAL: take this definition with a bag of salt. See wikipedia and its references for the true scoop.) They resist alienation, in the legal sense of the transfer or conveyance of property or some other right to another (from the Latin alienatus, from alius, “other”).

Now, wasn’t there this angry 19th century guy with a bushy beard who got worked up about all the ways in which workers lost control of their lives through being alienated from the products of their labor...? And wasn’t there this geeky 20th century American guy with glasses who riled people up by associating open source with communism? Ah, it all makes sense now.

* Actually, companies don’t want to give away their software, either – you get a license to use the software, not title to it. But heck, they’re greedy capitalists, so that shouldn’t be a surprise.

De-situating Spectrum: Non-spatial metaphors for wireless communication

Today’s spectrum policy debate is conducted in terms of a pervasive metaphor: that spectrum is spatial, signals are phenomena in space, and radios are agents (see my DYSPAN 2007 paper “Imagining Radio: Mental Models of Wireless Communication”, PDF).

Metaphors are not right or wrong, but a dominant metaphor can forestall new insights. Any metaphor highlights some aspects of the situation it is explaining, and suppresses others. We are so used to thinking about spectrum in spatial terms that the metaphor’s disadvantages have become invisible, and alternatives to it are barely thinkable. Spectrum allocation is imagined in terms of property rights in real estate, and cognitive radios are conceived of as smart agents acting within delimited, space-like frequency domains. Alternative metaphors can stimulate new approaches for policy making and research by de-familiarizing wireless communications.

It is useful for a new metaphor to have some overlaps with existing ways of thinking. An entirely different conceptual structure that shares no referents or mappings with the dominant view – like the “wireless communications are like the Internet” metaphor proposed by Open Spectrum advocates – will be so alien that it has trouble getting traction. This paper therefore explores conceptual models for wireless communication that have similar concept-to-concept mappings as the spectrum-as-space analogy, but that do not rely on a spatial metaphor.

One possible alternative metaphor is to imagine spectrum to be like all the crafts practiced in a medieval city. A spectrum license is like the letters patent that give a particular guild a monopoly in their respective crafts. The spectrum licensee is the guild. License-exempt spectrum is that set of trade activities that do not require letters patent. A spectrum part corresponds to a specific craft. Signals are like the practice of the craft. Radios are like craftspeople and their customers. The regulator corresponds to the King or city burgesses who issue charters.

One can model different types of allocation as different terms on the business practice monopoly that is issued to a craft guild. Command-and-control spectrum allocation would be analogous to the state not only issuing a charter to (say) the weavers’ guild to make textiles, but also specifying the kinds of fabric they may make, and the prices they can charge. They need the Crown’s permission to change any of the parameters, and weavers have to stay weavers. The analogy of transferable, flexible-use allocation would be that weavers still need letters patent to practice their craft, but can make any kind of fabric they like, charge any price, and can sell on their practice to anyone they wish.

In short, this is a “spectrum-as-business-practices” model. Other non-spatial metaphors include spectrum-as-intellectual-property-rights, and spectrum-as-markets (as distinct from markets in spectrum).

A new metaphor highlights hidden assumptions in the dominant conceptual model by emphasizing and downplaying issues differently. For example, the spectrum-as-business-practices analogy blurs the distinction between the craft of a weaver and the act of making and selling textiles; that is, the distinction between spectrum and signal is played down. By comparison, the dominant spectrum-as-space metaphor emphasizes that spectrum exists independently from signals, which are “added” to the space. It implies that one can clearly separate the underlying asset (spectrum) from what you do with it (the signals), just as land is distinct from the buildings on it. The business practices metaphor therefore calls into question the meaning of the term “spectrum resource”, and the entire project of maximizing the utility of a nation’s spectrum resources, since spectrum is not an asset independent of use.

The spectrum-as-business-practices metaphor also stresses that the primary regulatory consideration is permission to perform a set of behaviors within certain constraints; the use of a resource, which is primary in the spectrum-as-land conception, is downplayed. A business license is a set of rules of permitted behavior, rather than use-neutral title to an asset conceived as a space-like frequency interval. It therefore invites a formulation of wireless communication policy purely in terms of signals and radios, with no privileging of frequency above other operational parameters.

Through these and other comparisons, non-spatial metaphors for wireless communications mark out an alternative conceptual model for spectrum policy and cognitive radio research that can lead to new solutions.

Indoctrinated against the Market – really?

Stefan Theil claims that French and German students are being taught that capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral. This is a crucial observation; such a pity, then, that the proof he presents in his Foreign Policy article Europe’s Philosophy of Failure is little more than a litany of inflammatory citations.

One can buttress almost any argument by selective quotation from a large enough corpus, and Theil does a good job. (Another good job is this video clip making the case that Top Gun is a gay love story.) However, a claim as sweeping as this requires at the very least a quantification of the frequency of critiques of the free market relative to neutral and positive statements. Even better would be opinion surveys of students that establish which biases they’ve absorbed; and best would be to show a correlation between specific texts/curricula and such opinions. He does quote polls, but they’re just ones of entire national populations.

I would not expect such rigor in Newsweek, where Theil is European economics editor. The readership of Foreign Policy, however, is well able to absorb a more academic approach – and deserves one.

It’s even more important to provide solid evidence when an assertion squares with most Atlantic intellectuals’ existing biases. (It definitely does with mine.) If he’s right, the divergence between the US and the EU will only increase over time, to both sides’ detriment. The implications for diplomacy and business strategy are profound. Even a greater loss, then, that he doesn’t give us better evidence to go on.

Gardening the Web (2)

I’ve been working away at a new way to think about internet/web policy – one of the reasons why this blog has been so quiet for the last few months. I hinted at this work back in November in the post Gardening the Web.

I’ve now written up a draft; I’d appreciate any feedback. If you’re eager, try the 60-page paper (DOC, PDF); there’s also a 12-page precis (DOC, PDF). For everybody else, here’s the abstract:

Technology and business shifts constantly change the context in which regulators have to make policy for the internet/web. There are also abiding policy imperatives that always need to be met: revenue, economic vitality, public safety, consumer protection, and culture and values.

Policy makers use mental models to frame policy questions and actions. However, technical change calls into question the approaches used successfully to date. This paper outlines a schema for communications regulation that reflects the nature of the internet/web. The framework is inspired by the metaphor of the garden, and is grounded in an understanding of complex adaptive social systems, of which gardens are one example.

A consideration of systems theory yield tactics (tools) and strategies (principles) that guide policy making in meeting the over-arching regulatory goals of stability and productivity. The three guiding principles are fostering experimentation, designing flexible policies, and building in resilience. These principles are implemented through tools such as encouraging diversity, keeping an open mind, delegating, setting clear boundaries, taking a holistic approach, transparency, and modeling policy choices.

The application of the framework is illustrated in a discussion of three current policy questions: video regulation, rules for internet voice services, and licensed vs. unlicensed spectrum allocation.

Hostage to Fortune (2)

Since Rudy's departure has blown away my first prediction for the presidential race (Clinton v. Giuliani; Giuliani wins), it's time for another one.

The first guess was made between Iowa and New Hampshire. This one comes after Florida and before Super-etc. Tuesday. Hillary still seems to have the better odds on the Left, but McCain has been winning media mind-share, so:

Clinton v. McCain; McCain wins.

It's a toss-up among the Democrats. There is another strong possibility:

Obama v. McCain. Obama wins, but is assassinated within two years.

Of course, the Dems may self-destruct at the convention with an Obama/Clinton tie, leading to a brokered nomination:

Gore v. Any Republican; Any Republican wins.

The futility of technology forecasting

I have at last come across the source of a key insight about the futility of technological prediction, e.g. as practiced by Ofcom (and economists passim) when trying to establish the net present value of a long future stream of innovation. Simply put: if you could predict the future well enough for a technology prediction to be meaningful, you would know enough to already have the technology in hand, thus vitiating the prediction.

I’ve come across this trope in various places; I now believe the idea originated with Karl Popper. Charles Pigden, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Otago referred to it in a Philosopher’s Zone podcast about conspiracy theories. (It’s a great podcast, by the way.)

Popper outlines the argument in the preface to The Poverty of Historicism (available on Google Book Search) as part of a refutation of historicism. Popper contends that he had shown in a 1950 paper, “Indeterminism in Classical Physics and in Quantum Physics,” subsequently updated in a chapter on indeterminism which is part of the "Postscript: After Twenty Years" to his Logic of Scientific Discovery, that, for strictly logical reasons, it is impossible for us to predict the future course of history. He sums up the argument in five statements:

1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge.
2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge.
3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.
4. This means that we must reject the possibility of a theoretic history; that is to say, of a historical science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.
5. The fundamental aim of historicism methods is therefore misconceived; and historicism collapses.

The key step is (2). Popper contends that it is self-evident that if there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, then we cannot anticipate today what we shall know only tomorrow. He provides a logical proof in the papers mentioned above; in short, it amounts to showing that no scientific predictor (human or machine) can possibly predict, by scientific methods, its own future results. Since this logical argument applies to a predictor of any complexity, including societi4s of predictors, it means that no society can scientifically predict its own future states of knowledge.

Factoid: Half of all Americans fall into poverty for a year at some point in their lives

This is a striking reminder of the fragility of daily life, and a selfish reason for everybody to care for the poor.

Source: Mark R. Rank & Thomas A. Hirschl, 2001. "Rags or Riches? Estimating the Probabilities of Poverty and Affluence across the Adult American Life Span," Social Science Quarterly, The Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 82(4), pages 651-669.

From the abstract:

Between the ages of 25 and 75, 51.1 percent of Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line, 51.0 percent will encounter a year of affluence, while only 21.0 percent of Americans will avoid either of these economic extremes.

The research is based on an analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Poverty is defined using the US Census Bureau criteria. Affluence is defined as ten times the poverty levels. For more on income volatility, see here.

Pandering to the Man

Essay contests played a central role in the intellectual life of the 18th century, as Robert Darnton relates in George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003). Taste was arbitrated by centralized authority – how different from the blog rolls and technorati ratings that are needed to vault a blogger onto the A-list today.

Jacques-Pierre Brissot, who gained momentary fame – cut short by the guillotine – as leader of the Girondists during the French Revolution, was a pathetically persistent self-promoter. He was an obscure hack, a lousy writer, and too outspoken to be published in France. He scorned academies in his memoirs, yet groveled to be represented as “member of diverse academies, known ... by a memoir ... crowned last year at the Académie de Châlons.” Darnton describes a cache of Brissot’s letters which show him “seeking introductions, cultivating endorsements, trying to get his name in journals, soliciting favorable reviews, demanding special treatment in essay contests, and maneuvering to get elected to academies.” [Chapter 8, The skeletons in the closet: How historians play God.]

The academy also figures in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epiphany during a tramp from Paris to Vincennes, which in his own telling triggered the breakthrough of Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: he was transfixed by a question posed by the Academy of Dijon for an essay contest. [Chapter 5, The Great Divide: Rousseau on the route to Vincennes]

The competition for visibility is fiercer today than ever, but writers are now at the mercy of the mob, rather than the mandarins. Page views make or break a blog, though referrals from the superstars can help. The elites still have their perks, but have to share power with the plebs.

Writing contests are still around, feeble scions of a once-proud house. Book prizes can still make the front page in Europe, but in the US they’re relegated to the book jacket blurbs. The London chatterati probably know who won last year’s Man Booker Prize; care to name this year’s fiction Pulitzer?

Seriously weird numbers

In his article about transcendental numbers for New Scientist, mathematician Richard Elwes suggests that Cantor’s work on the topic had profound consequences: “It means that the range of numbers that human brains and computers are equipped to handle - essentially those easily derived from the integers - are actually just an infinitesimal sliver of the numerical universe. Swarming around the integers and fractions is an infinitely larger collection of transcendental numbers. They are the "dark matter" of mathematics: they constitute the overwhelming majority of numbers, yet known examples are rare.” (e: the mystery number, New Scientist, 21 Jul 2007, p. 38)

Transcendentals are numbers that cannot be related to the integers by any sequence of ordinary arithmetical operations like addition, multiplication, or raising to powers. The square root of two can’t be written as a fraction, and the Pythagoreans found that outrageous enough; but it just multiplying it by itself gets you back to 2, an integer. The number e was proved to be transcendental in 1873, pi less than a decade later. However, finding more examples has proved remarkably difficult.

The article implies that being able to call on a geometric intuition – that is, one that can be referred back to the concrete world – is important even to mathematicians. It mentions that work by Alain Connes that offers deep insights but “defies all usual geometric intuition and is disconcertingly difficult to get to grips with”; however, some more recent work promises to “demystify Connes's extreme levels of abstraction” and provide “a raft of techniques for understanding Connes's abstract geometry in a more intuitive way.” It’s reassuring that not only cognitive scientists like Lakoff and Nunez feel that the practice of even mathematics has to be grounded in the physical.

Eight business technology trends to watch

Three McKinsey consultants have compiled currently fashionable business ideas into a list (registration required); gee, it must be New Year or something.

Nothing very surprising here, but the article does function as a decent annotated bibliography of trendy business books, listed in the "Further Reading" sections.

The list:

Managing relationships

1. Distributing co-creation (Benkler, Chesbrough, Surowiecki, Von Hippel)

2. Using consumers as innovators (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, Tapscott & Williams)

3. Tapping into a world of talent (Florida, Pink)

4. Extracting more value from interactions (Johnson et al., Beardsley et al., Malone)

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation (Hagel, Heinrich, Ross et al.)

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management (Davenport & Harris, Riedl & Konstan, Thomke, Weinberger)

8. Making businesses from information (Varian and Shapiro)