Stan Taylor

The Null Device recently linked to a story about a professor who got a nonsensical, computer-generated article accepted for publication in a supposedly peer-reviewed, producer-pays-to-publish academic journal. It’s an interesting story, but what caught my eye was the professor’s carefully considered conclusions based on his experience:

From this one case, we cannot conclude that Bentham Science journals practice no peer review, only that it is inconsistently applied. . . While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making.

This type of thinking makes me miss the academic world; I think this is also a good example of the type of careful academic nuance that all too often gets lost when academic topics are presented to a wider audience.

In the last couple of days, I’ve heard several commercial television news reports about torture, but they’ve consistently referred to waterboarding as an ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’ Way to buy into the conservatives’ framing of the issue.

If you read my blog regularly, you probably already know that I’ve long been pretty pessimistic about the economy. My over-simplified layman’s take is: since so much of the economic growth of the last couple of decades was based on unsustainable and/or imaginary things (e.g., real estate values; crazy, unregulated investment vehicles,etc.), the new reality–after we stop the decline of the global economy–will be much different. For instance, see this post by Rafe Colburn and my comment about it.
Now, I’ve found an article in The Economist that backs up my pessimism. After going through details of the current and future economic situation, here’s the summary:

The worst is over only in the narrowest sense that the pace of global decline has peaked. Thanks to massive—and unsustainable—fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world’s economies will depend on their governments.
Consider what that means. Much of the rich world will see jobless rates that reach double-digits, and then stay there. Deflation—a devastating disease in debt-laden economies—could set in as record economic slack pushes down prices and wages, particularly since headline inflation has already plunged thanks to sinking fuel costs. Public debt will soar because of weak growth, prolonged stimulus spending and the growing costs of cleaning up the financial mess. The OECD’s member countries began the crisis with debt stocks, on average, at 75% of GDP; by 2010 they will reach 100%. One analysis suggests persistent weakness could push the biggest economies’ debt ratios to 140% by 2014. Continuing joblessness, years of weak investment and higher public-debt burdens, in turn, will dent economies’ underlying potential. Although there is no sign that the world economy will return to its trend rate of growth any time soon, it is already clear that this speed limit will be lower than before the crisis hit.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

The next time I encounter someone who thinks that science and religion are mutually exclusive, I will direct them to this sermon delivered at a synagogue by science journalist Robert Krulwich.
By the way, if you’ve never listened to RadioLab, you’re missing something great. You can subscribe to the Radiolab podcast via iTunes.

A few weeks ago, we bought a new Maytag washing machine from our local Home Depot. It was delivered and installed a few days later, on a Tuesday. We did a few loads of wash without incident. On Thursday evening, it stopped in the middle of a wash cycle and we smelled a burning rubber odor. It had died.
The next day, I stopped by the Home Depot and talked to the guys in the appliance department. They said that they had to talk to Maytag in order to see how to proceed. They called me back later in the afternoon to inform me that Maytag would send a repairman out the following Tuesday to assess the situation.
My wife and I found that really unacceptable for two reasons: 1.) we’d be without a working washing machine for at least a few more days, and 2.) Home Depot was passing the buck to Maytag for a product we bought from them.
I talked with the Home Depot guy again and he said that they would like to help us out by just swapping out our dead washer with another from their stock. The manager would could make this happen would be in on Saturday afternoon.
On Saturday afternoon, the manager called and made arrangements to do the swap. I was not home, but my wife said that the guys who brought over the new washer were clearly not trained appliance installers; they had multiple difficulties in getting the one washer out and the new one installed. In the process, they managed to put one large gouge and several cuts in the linoleum floor in the laundry room and to scratch our hardwood floors.
We were happy that Home Depot had tried to circumvent Maytag’s bureaucracy and to provide good customer service, but we were not too pleased with the floor damage.
The Home Depot store filed a claim with their insurance company for the damage. The adjustor came out a couple of days later, and we received a check a few days after that. The amount that they awarded us will pay for the damage and then some.

I’m sad to report that this morning, we had Tippiedog put to sleep. She was about 15 or 16 years old, and, as this photo shows, had been a member of our family since 1995 or 1996. We already miss her greatly.

The theme of this week’s This American Life radio program is ‘Scenes from a recession.” In the first act:

Ira goes to the Rogers Park area of Chicago to talk to some condo owners who are in a precarious situation—since the housing market crash, the developer who renovated and sold them their units has all but disappeared. He’s in foreclosure on half of their building’s units, and in the meantime, they have no one to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the building they all bought into.

It’s a nightmare situation for the owners. At the end, Ira talks with two of the owners about why they haven’t just defaulted on their mortgages in order to get out of this horrible situation. First, each owner concedes that the consequences of default would not be that onerous for them, but then each owner explains why she stays. The first owner says it’s a matter of honoring her word: she signed a contract, she has the ability to pay on it. The second owner says that she stays out of a sense of obligation to the community of unit owners. Her departure would just make the situation that much worse for the remaining owners.
I’m shocked at the stark contrast between the attitudes of these people and of the people and institutions who got them into this situation–not just the slimy developer who fled the country, but also the bank that is stalling on foreclosure as long as possible, when foreclosure is what the unit owners need to move forward.
I know that this story was produced so as to highlight this contrast, but I’d say it’s a pretty clear depiction of how we’ve gotten into our current economic mess.

Inventor Ted Ciamillo has created a ‘dolphin-inspired’ fin that allows humans to swim “up to 33 miles (53 kilometers) per hour and turn up to 80 percent of their energy into thrust.” How cool is that?
(Via Follow Me Here)

I heard this on the news this morning: SXSW iPhone users overwhelm AT&T’s 3G coverage

In response to my recent musings about making needlepoint hip, I received an email from Jenny Henry who has her own needlepoint design company: Jenny Henry Designs. She does some pretty cool stuff. The best place to see Jenny’s work is her Flickr gallery. My favorite of her designs is her true love coin purse.