10 March 2008
Waste
IRS Spends Millions to Tell You the Check is Almost in the Mail
"'The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.
"'The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost of $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.
"'That works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. ...'"
"Why spend this money? The story quoted Keith Hennessey, director of the president's National Economic Council:
"'"Any time you do something as a government tens of millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And so if you're going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few people as possible confused about what's happening, they understand what's coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS and Treasury have to figure out how to deal with it," said Hennessey.'"
If we take the NEC president's explanation at face value (some don't), the rationale seems vague and flawed to me. I'd like to know how many people don't already know they're going to get a "stimulus plan" check, how many people would be confused if they got a check from the IRS that, say, included a slip of paper in that envelope explaining it, and how many people who don't know and who would be confused to receive the check will actually open, read and understand the pre-explanation of the check. (To answer the first unknown, there's probably a Pew or Gallup poll out there that's already got the numbers. An ABC poll conducted a month ago asked whether people think the stimulus plan rebate is a good idea or not.)
Would it cost more or less than $42 million for the IRS and/or Treasury to add a brief explanation of the stimulus plan check mailing to its automated phone line, for those who are confused and who want answers before they deposit their checks? What about if the IRS phone number and a link to this IRS website page -- which explains why we're getting the checks -- were included on the checks or on a slip in the envelope with the check?
I guess it's really too much to expect that the refunds could be processed along with the tax returns.
$42 million ?!
(Of course, there are worse uses of money. ... But at least some folks truly believed the war would cost less, be beneficial to suffering people, and rid the world of terrorists.)
10:10 Posted in finance and business , math and numbers , politics, government and law | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 January 2008
Mathematical Beauty and Trying to Make Meaning
At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky offers a sequence of numbers (1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...) and considers the order inherent in it. He considers that one might try to impose order on the sequence, insisting on "neatness and elegance when there isn't any there."
He goes on, speaking of the elegant, inherent order of math, in words that seem to me to apply to many aspects of life (or am I forcing the analogy?):
"Someone who grasped too quickly at order, who demanded closure right now, who forced the pattern, might never find the stable level. If you tweak the table of first differences to make them "more even", fit your own conception of aesthetics before you found the math's own rhythm, then the second differences and third differences will come out wrong. Maybe you won't even bother to take the second differences and third differences. Since, once you've forced the first differences to conform to your own sense of aesthetics, you'll be happy -- or you'll insist in a loud voice that you're happy.
"None of this says a word against - gasp! - reductionism. The order is there, it's just better-hidden. [T]he moral is to reduce at the right time, to wait for an opening before you slice, to not prematurely terminate the search for beauty. So long as you can refuse to see beauty that isn't there, you have already taken the needful precaution if it all turns out ugly."
I know I have experience forcing the pattern, not waiting for the opening but ripping my own with the jagged tools of my preconceptions, assumptions, expectations, blurry vision, distracted listening. I have not listened to the inherent rhythm, I have missed finding the stable place. I've done it when frustratedly working math tests (SATs, GREs, etc.) and I've done it in lots of other non-math ways -- the details are missing from my consciousness but the memory of the feeling of the forced false pattern, and the knowledge of the instability underlying it, lingers ...
07:20 Posted in math and numbers , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 October 2007
So Many Dead and Dying
On Thursday, to my knowledge, a bird and a woman died. The bird, a pet parakeet belonging to a friend, died at 11:03 a.m., after a long life; the woman, a friend of a friend, and an acquaintance of mine, died at 8:04 p.m., after a relatively short life (48 years), one that seems cut terribly short. Both deaths were witnessed by people who love the dying creatures, who were sad they were leaving, who found it hard to watch them die, who cried, who mourn and grieve, who will remember. In the case of the woman's death, other lives will also change, and perhaps major decisions will be made because she is gone, because she was here.
On Thursday, if it was an 'average' day, about 155,000 people died around the world (and about 363,000 people are born). It's hard to comprehend that one or two people die every second. Since I started typing this 10 minutes ago, if this day is average, about 1,000 people who were alive when I started are now dead. Their lives and deaths change other lives.
I can't find any statistics online about global animals deaths per day, but it must be in the billions, counting insects and microbes. Even considering only mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and birds -- pets, animals in the wild, farm animals, circus and zoo animals, animals killed by hunting and human transportation and slaughterhouses -- millions must die every split second.
I'm not railing against death. True, it seems an odd system, but then so is birth. As long as we have birth and a finite planet, death makes some 'sense', I guess, or we'd run out of room even faster than we are.
What I'm thinking about here is just how incessant, constant, and ordinary death is, and how the death of someone we love feels so surprising and extraordinary to us.
16:37 Posted in animals , community , death , math and numbers | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
30 September 2007
Recent Reading
Recent online reading of interest: of Girard, desire, imitation and fashion; musing on death and life; findings of sloppy science; essays on climate change and human responsibility; the anniversary of Sputnik; and how hypocrisy traps make some of us squirm.
>> Death and the garden, Shelley, not looking out the window, obituary motifs, and thoughts on decay in The glad reaper: Our obituaries editor finds solace in a garden, a correspondent's diary (by Ann Wroe) in The Economist:
"More than I used to, I note the premature browning of leaves and grass, the erosion of statues and stones, the rotting of things. The odd pangs and pains in my own body I now surmise to be Death knocking, or leaving a calling card, with a promise to come back later.
"Is this morbid? Some friends and colleagues think so, joking nervously about 'the Grim Reaper' and 'Grave-Watch', muttering of coffin counts. But to me it is simply part of a continuum: death in life, life in death. Everything in nature springs up, flourishes, dies, springs up again: we do the same. Bodies form and decay all the time. What the spirit does, being outside nature, has the potential to be much more interesting. But since we have forgotten that life, if we ever knew it, we are left with physical dissolution, and we don't like it much."
>> Girard and the world of fashion: The Forces of Beauty and Desire in Fashion Imitation:
"It would hardly be controversial to mention beauty and desire in the same sentence. We desire to be beautiful, to own beautiful objects, to be with beautiful people. ... Our daily experiences assure us that desiring something is a conscious, spontaneous act. The things we desire are the things we have chosen. But what if this is not the case? What would this mean for a theory of beauty?
"Rene Girard ... views desire as something that is formed in the relationships people have with each other rather than as something found within individuals themselves. Perhaps more importantly, he stresses that imitation underlies the relationships in which desire is created. ... As an example, my best friend who is more beautiful than me wants to buy a dress. The theory of mimetic desire says that I also want the dress, not because I believe it to be a beautiful dress but rather because it is a dress that is desired by my beautiful friend.
"Two important points emerge from this scenario. The first is that my desire to have the dress is a direct response to the way in which I compare myself unfavourably with my friend. Moreover, by owning the dress she likes, I hope to take on the qualities I admire in her but perceive to be lacking in myself. In essence, I am trying to become my friend when I copy her desires. As Girard states, 'aware of a lack within ourselves, we look to others to teach us what to value and who to be.' Desire is therefore about self-identity. Advertising can be seen to exploit this insight."
>> I didn't read this but heard it yesterday on NPR's Weekend Edition: Khrushchev, Schorr Look Back on Sputnik. On the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, Sergei Khrushchev, the son of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Dan Schorr, who was then Moscow Bureau chief for CBS News, talk with Scott Simon about its significance. I don't know why, but my attention was riveted as I listened to the interview.
>> Also worth listening to, Scott Simon's reflections on the Larry Craig case: What makes Scott squirm:
"It's the exultation among so many that another hypocritical politician has been exposed. ... There are those who believe Mr. Craig deserves his humiliation because he's a hypocrite ... I guess by now I have seen enough of life that I prefer to see someone as a real, complicated human being ... Human life, including sex, abounds with hypocrisy, faithlessness, carelessness, and people who say 'I love you' when they only mean, 'I want you.' People who say 'My spouse doesn't understand me,' when they really mean, 'My spouse knows me too well.' Most adults can supply their own examples. ... I wonder if people who applaud Larry Craig's arrest ... really want to arm the police with a moral license to set traps that catch people in hypocrisy. That's the kind of trap that most of us would step into someday."
>> Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), writes about the morality of environmental and political choices in his op-ed piece, Our Moral Footprint, in the NYT.
Havel's essay seems a response to current Czech Republic president (since 2003) Vaclav Klaus's op-ed of June 2007, What is at risk is not the climate but freedom, in the Financial Times, in which Klaus says that "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now ... [is] ambitious environmentalism. ... This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."
Havel eventually asserts, as does Klaus, that the climate and the Earth are not at risk, but Havel's take on it is markedly different from Klaus's:
"The end of the world has been anticipated many times and has never come, of course. And it won’t come this time either. We need not fear for our planet. It was here before us and most likely will be here after us. But that doesn’t mean that the human race is not at serious risk. As a result of our endeavors and our irresponsibility our climate might leave no place for us."
Before he gets there, he more pointedly contends:
"It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don't know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision, aren't we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays? ... We can't endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution. ...
"I’m skeptical that a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science. Technological measures and regulations are important, but equally important is support for education, ecological training and ethics -- a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility."
>> Sloppy Science Studies: Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis in the WSJ. I'm almost to the point of not believing any scientific study, even replicated ones, certainly not based on summaries reported in the mainstream media, and I probably don't know enough science or remember enough statistics to trust my own judgment reading the original studies. (Of course, why should I believe this guy's findings, either?):
"Dr. [John] Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. ...
"These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. 'There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,' Dr. Ioannidis said. 'A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.' The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined."
Update, 4 Oct 2007: Related to this: "The facts never speak for themselves, which is why scientists need to 'frame' their messages to the public," an article by Matthew C. Nisbet and Dietram A. Scheufele, in The Scientist.com:
"The dominant assumption is that ignorance is at the root of conflict over science. According to this traditional 'popular science' model, the media should be used to educate the public about the technical details of the issue in dispute. Once citizens are brought up to speed on the science, they will be more likely to judge scientific issues as scientists do and controversy will go away. The facts are assumed to speak for themselves and to be interpreted by all citizens in similar ways. ...
"... Arguments in favor of the popular science model are not very scientific. In fact, they cut against more than 60 years of research in the social sciences, a body of work that suggests citizens prefer to rely on their social values to pick and choose information sources that confirm what they already believe, often making up their minds about a topic in the absence of knowledge. A second challenge to the popular science model is that in today's media world, by way of cable TV and the Internet, the public has greater access to quality information about science than at any time in history, yet public knowledge of science remains low. The reason is that a small audience remains attentive to science coverage, but the broader public literally tunes out, preferring other media content."
14:25 Posted in books and reading , death , earthcare and environment , education , finance and business , girardian anthropology , math and numbers , politics, government and law , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
18 May 2007
Risk Assessment, Scapegoating, Escaping Death
Dave Pollard writes about a study that researches "the risks of various 'voluntary' activities: non-critical medical therapies, job and transportation choices, and hobbies" and figures the comparative risk of fatality for people engaging in these activities for a year.
His analysis is that the report is an "illustration of the degree to which we mentally miscalculate the risks we face in our everyday lives, seeing some things as much safer than they really are (e.g. firefighting) and other things as much more dangerous than they really are (e.g. drowsy driving)." He also cites the example of SUVs being slightly less safe to drive than convertibles.
What interests most is this comment:
"This delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone -- British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein -- must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only bottled water, to wear masks, to introduce five levels of increasingly hysterical 'threat' to everyone's safety."
Here's the usual human way of controlling anxiety about chaos, scariness, death -- blame and sacrifice someone who (or something that) is seen as the cause of the anxiety. Drunk drivers, speeders, bad parenting, tyrants in other countries, sick cows, Chinese manufacturers, terrorists, toy makers, fat people, medical practitioners, gun makers, lax drug agencies, add your own favourites ... In general, we can feel justified blaming anyone who acts mean, lazy, irresponsible, greedy, impatient, selfish, sick, with expediency, etc.
Don't misunderstand. People are culpable for actions that hurt others, especially with intent to do so. And -- removing all the people who hurt other people (and animals, and the Earth itself) from the Earth would leave it an empty planet. 'Bringing to account' everyone who deserves it may rectify some situations, bring with it a sense of justice or fairness, and restore 'wrongdoers' to the community; but it will never prevent human death. We can't escape physical death no matter what we do. Fitness, good diet, relief from environmental toxins, scrupulousness to avoid accidents and injurious situations and people -- all the health and safety precautions in the world -- will not result in physical immortality. It's funny how we seem to think it just might.
12:35 Posted in death , health and medicine , lists , math and numbers , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 April 2007
Fairness, Procreation and a Hummer
What's Fair?
We often think we know, but maybe we simplify the context to such a great extent that we're usually wrong.
Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) asks whether, because he hasn't procreated and is therefore saving a huge amount of energy in that realm, and because he routinely walks to work and therefore saves energy every day, it's fair for him to have a Hummer. Is it?
19:55 Posted in consumption , earthcare and environment , math and numbers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
22 March 2007
Manure
"Please remember that my web page is like a two-year-old manure pile in back of your barn: It is continually growing and the best stuff is often buried on the bottom." -- The Humble Farmer
J'agree, not just for myself but for lots of weblogs. Newest ≠ best.
12:33 Posted in blog business , math and numbers , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
14 March 2007
How To Celebrate Pi Day
Celebrate Pi Day (3/14, specifically at 1:59) -- There's not a lot of time left! You could try the frozen hot dog throw. Or honour pi by memorising it. More ideas here.
19:20 Posted in holidays and seasons , math and numbers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this