Foreign Dispatches

Stupidity and Greed

If there's one industry whose executives can be trusted to consistently make the wrong choices, it's the entertainment industry. Many in the record business seem utterly incapable of learning from past mistakes.

Two and a half years after the music business lined up behind the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, and hailed him and his iTunes music service for breathing life into music sales, the industry's allegiance to Mr. Jobs has eroded sharply.

Mr. Jobs is now girding for a showdown with at least two of the four major record companies over the price of songs on the iTunes service.

If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted - 99 cents to download any song - could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.

Music executives who support Mr. Jobs say the higher prices could backfire, sending iTunes' customers in search of songs on free, unauthorized file-swapping networks.

Risk-Loving Primates

Via Mahalanobis comes the following report which goes against what we know about typical human behavior.

When given a choice between steady rewards and the chance for more, monkeys will gamble, a new study found.
And they'll keep taking risks as the stakes rise and dry spells get longer.

[...]

The male rhesus macaque monkeys were shown either of two lights on a screen. Looking at a "safe" light yielded the same fruit juice reward each time. Looking at the "risky" light meant a larger or smaller juice reward. In the first test, the average reward was the same over time regardless of which light they chose.

The monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to gamble, even when the game was changed so that gambling yielded less juice over time.

There's more to the story, but the long and short of it is that the tested rhesus macaques, unlike most* members of our species, show no evidence of appreciating the concept of "folding while you're ahead": humans are generally so risk-averse that we we're willing to do such seemingly irrational things as buying insurance, and the bigger the sums at stake get, the more averse to risk-taking we tend to be. I have a strong suspicion that this species difference in attitudes towards risk management has played more than a minor role in explaining where we are, and that the supposed "irrationality" of human risk-aversion was actually anything but irrational in the evolutionary context in which it evolved.

PS: Actually, a little searching turns up this report (copy here) which indicates that capuchin monkeys, unlike rhesus macaques, are like us in displaying an "irrational" aversion to risk**; one wonders why it is rhesus macaques should be different, and whether any of the other great apes share our disaste for risk or are gamblers by nature. I'm guessing the former will turn out to be the case.

*Pathological gamblers aside, of course.
**They also seem to be perfectly capable of mastering the workings of the price system, which ought to give some opponents of capitalism pause.

Terror Alert in Hamburg

I haven't seen any sign of this report in the English-speaking media yet, but it's definitely worth paying attention to.

1000 Polizisten suchen Terrorverdächtige

Es war nur ein Gesprächsfetzen, doch der Inhalt hat in Hamburg zu einer Großfahndung geführt. Ein Zeuge hörte an einer Bushaltestelle drei arabisch sprechende Männer über "Heldentum vor Allah" reden. Jetzt fahnden 1000 Polizisten nach den Terrorverdächtigen.

Hamburg - Der Zeuge sei glaubwürdig und spreche arabisch, teilte die Polizei mit. Er habe gehört, wie sich die drei Männer an einer Bushaltestelle unterhielten. Dabei sei der Satz gefallen: "Wir werden morgen als Held vor Allah stehen." Die Männer hatten einen Rucksack dabei, sagte Hamburgs Polizeivizepräsident Michael Daleki am Donnerstagabend.

English translation:

1000 Policemen in Search of Terror Suspects

It was only a scrap of conversation, but the content has led to a huge search in Hamburg. A witness heard three Arabic-speaking men at a bus stop talking about "heroism for Allah." Now 1000 Policemen are searching for the terror suspects.

The witness was trustworthy and spoke Arabic, shared the police. He had been listening to how the three men at a bus-stop had been talking amongst themselves. That is how he happened to hear the following quote: "We will stand before Allah as heroes in the morning." The men had a rucksack with them, said Hamburg's Police Vice-President Michael Daleki on Thursday.

As you can see from the article, the pictures of the wanted men are already being circulated. If this does turn out to be a genuine terror alert, CCTV cameras in public transport facilities will be looking less and less like the ineffectual security measure civil libertarians have long insisted they are.

PS: Reuters already has an English-language report up, but so far it seems to be the only English-speaking organization to have done so.

Saintly Qualities?

A certain David Hirst had some charitable things to say a while back about the life and works of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a certain deceased Palestinian of influence best known as the founder of Hamas:

In truth, neither Arafat nor Yassin had Mandela's special greatness. But of the two, it was Yassin, the founder-leader of the militant Islamist organisation Hamas, who came closer. The reason was not to be found in his beliefs - which, in their narrow, obscurantist, religious frame, were far removed from the South African's lofty humanism and compassion - but in the facts of his career, and the part that certain, very personal, qualities - of selflessness, simplicity, conviction and a true sense of service - played in bringing it to fruition.

If this is all it takes to approach "greatness", then I'm sure Mr. Hirst would approve of the nomination of a certain other historical figure for "greatness", a man of nearly unrivalled eloquence, a man of tremendous personal bravery, a man who commanded intense personal charisma and loyalty, even unto death, a man who worked tirelessly and in obscurity for years to attain the goal he'd always believed in even when others thought him a useless dreamer, a man who rose from the most modest circumstances to attain empyrean heights of power, a man of great simplicity of tastes and habits, who both ate and dressed sparingly and without fuss, and who in his final years not only worked himself to the brink of exhaustion and over, battling personal illness to personally oversee his people's struggle, but even ceased to indulge the few previous pleasures he had previously enjoyed, like listening to the music of his favorite composer, as a gesture of solidarity with the suffering of his people. The name of this nominee for Mandela-approaching greatness?

On Gay "Recruitment"

Randy McDonald links to a post by Eugene Volokh in which the latter raises a touchy question, and tries to answer it with the help of some survey evidence: is it really a myth that gays and lesbians try to "recruit" heterosexuals into experimenting with homosexuality?

I'll be perfectly frank and say that I don't see the need for all the buildup on his part to address the question, other than as political cover, as the answer is quite clearly yes, at least for gay men, and as a long-time dweller in two megacities which are gay meccas, I know this from first-hand experience. If you are young, male, in decent physical shape, not outright ugly and enjoy going out, it's pretty much impossible for you to avoid being hit on occasionally by gay men on the make, many of whom don't easily take "no" for an answer, and for whom the disclosure of your exclusive heterosexuality actually seems to act as an aphrodisiac of sorts, the ultimate challenge to their skills as seducers. I say all this not to defame gay men, but the fact is that in these respects they're no better or worse than their equally pushy straight counterparts for whom the "conquest" of a lesbian serves as a powerful assertion of their manhood.

Gay men aren't devilish conspirators with a secret political "agenda" to lure all straight men away from the path of matrimonial bliss, but they are given to the same mix of wishful thinking and aggressiveness which plagues men who are convinced that every beauty they see is secretly in love with them (or at least would be if only they had a chance to talk to her), and the fantasy of being that guy who's so good-looking that the hetero stud crosses to play for the other team is common enough that it supports a vigorous market in pornography and fiction which plays to that theme.

In summary, yes, just like their straight counterparts, gay men do "recruit", or at least try to - not all of them, not even most of them, but enough that I've personally been either the target of such advances or a first-hand witness on literally more than a score of occasions. There is one way in which the gay and straight "recruitment" scenarios differ, however, and it's not to the benefit of straight men: at least with gay "recruitment" the target of unwanted attention is often physically well equipped to defend himself from a creep who doesn't understand the word "no."

Explaining vs. Justifying

There's an interesting exchange up on Brad DeLong's journal between himself and his former professor Jeff Weintraub, centred around a question many left-wingers respond to with vitriol whenever they see posed.

My wise ex-teacher Jeff Weintraub asks whether I really wish to endorse ... the

specific formulation you quoted approvingly from... Lindsay Beyerstein... that there are "very, very few" westerners "who make excuses for brutal theocratic thuggery." [That] doesn't hold up under serious examination. Instead, it's the kind of polemical overstatement that slides into its own form of absurdity and outright... and, I suspect, it amounts to a distortion and trivialization of what you yourself actually believe. OK, perhaps she really meant to say something else, and just didn't get around to refining this formulation.... But if we take this claim seriously as stated, then I would have to say to anyone who found it plausible--I know people who do, and I read others--that they are describing a different planet from the one I'm living on.

A Nation of Math Haters

I can't say I'm the slightest bit surprised to read that mathematics is far and away the least popular subject amongst American adults looking back on their school days, but what I find amusing is a telling anecdote which I'm convinced gets to the heart of the distaste so many people have for math.

In an AP-AOL News poll as students head back to school, almost four in 10 adults surveyed said they hated math in school, a widespread disdain that complicates efforts today to catch up with Asian and European students. Twice as many people said they hated math as said that about any other subject.

Some people like Stewart Fletcher, a homemaker from Suwannee, Georgia, are fairly good at math but never learned to like it.

"It was cold and calculating," she said. "There was no gray, it was black and white." (emphasis added)

In more straightforward language, there's less room in mathematics for the verbal bullshitting which allows so many people to get away with all sorts of illogical nonsense: you're either right or you're wrong, and when you're wrong there's no way for you to spin your way free of embarrassment. Herein also lies the great allure of topics like theology or politics (especially that of the Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh variety) in which every fallacy known to man is easily and often deployed to great effect - one can be as vehement and irrational as one pleases with little fear of ever being found an intellectual lightweight, at least amongst the fellow members of one's ideological tribe ...

[Via MathForge.]

Japan is Dying

We all knew that it was a matter of time before Japan began to go into demographic decline, given the extremely low birthrate in that country, but it still comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that the process has already begun.

Japanese fertility rates have long been on the slide, but newly released figures from the Ministry of Health and Welfare confirmed that during the first six months of this year, deaths outstripped births and the overall population of Japan fell by 31,034.

If the same pattern continues for the remaining months of 2005, a demographic turning point — where the population is contracting on an annual basis — will have been reached two years ahead of official Government forecasts.

[...]

No Pleasing Some People

It's more than clear that for large portions of the Arab world, anything that portrays Israelis as in any way human is simply unacceptable.

DUBAI (AFP) - Arab satellite news channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have been forced to fend off accusations they served up Israeli propaganda with their coverage of the historic evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements.

Big Brother Will be Watching You Drive

Wherever and whenever you're going, if you're British, and if things go smoothly, in America soon thereafter.

The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.

Officials in the United States say they'll be closely watching the British trial as they contemplate initiating their own tests of the plates, which incorporate radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags to make vehicles electronically trackable.

[...]