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PC gone wild

Published
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Anja
on November 18, 2007
in News
. 0 Comments

And by that I mean political correctness. Apparently, Sesame Street’s early episodes, now available on DVD, contain a not suitable for children warning, the NY Times reports.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.” Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said. Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

Please, give me a break!

What else Bayes’ Theorem is good for

Published
by
Anja
on November 12, 2007
in News
. 1 Comment

Apparently it can be used to detect stupidity. Well, sort of. StupidFilter is an open source project to identify “rampant stupidity in written English.” Eventually, the authors hope to create a Firefox and Wordpress plugin. I wonder if they can create one for email, considering some of the ones I get from my students.

Unfortunately, the StupidFilter will not be able to distinguish between ironic and genuine uses of stupidity:

The StupidFilter is blind to irony. Our intent is that one or two instances of “lol” or “ur dum” in several paragraphs of otherwise-cogent text won’t result in a false positive. However, we consider the StupidFilter’s irony-ignorance to be a feature, insofar as even if an allegedly-smart person makes a short, stupid comment, their smartness doesn’t make the comment any less stupid. If your mom had designed the StupidFilter, she might say “If you can’t say anything smart, don’t say anything at all.”

Furthermore, it may be easily defeated:

Won’t people just try to defeat the filter, the way spammers try to get around spam filtering?
We certainly hope they will — that implies they’re no longer generating text statistically likely to be stupid. It’s true that an obvious attack on the StupidFilter would be to salt a short, stupid comment with a long excerpt copy-pasted from, say, Project Gutenberg, but we think it’s reasonable to count on the laziness of the stupidest commenters not to do this.

Meanwhile, I thought of some other filters that could be created: Not-enough-nudity-filter, I-haven’t-studied-the-facts-but-I-like-to make/act in-a-movie-about-it-filter, Cheesy-filter, Bias filter (wait, that would eliminate my blog, too), filter-filter. Maybe you can come up with some more.

Does this remind you of something?

Published
by
Anja
on November 3, 2007
in News and Politics
. 2 Comments

Venezuela is slated to vote on profound constitutional reforms in December, among them abolition of presidential term limits.

In addition to abolishing presidential term limits, President Chavez is also proposing to bypass legal controls on the executive during a state of emergency, bring in a maximum six-hour working day, cut the voting age from 18 to 16, and increase presidential control over the central bank.

Could it be that the six-hour work day and lowering of voting age are incentives to get voters to approve the more egregious reforms that will increase presidential power? Of course, they only look good on the surface. Making it illegal for anyone to work more than six hours will surely have a negative effect on the economy. What if I am poor and I need to work more than six hours to make a living? What if I like my work and want to work longer than six hours? Passion is often what drives achievement, production and innovation. Government spending on welfare programs will have to be increased, which means higher taxes. Higher taxes means people have less money to spend and to invest into the economy.

With respect to the voting age, I am inclined to think that 16-year olds will be less able to make informed choices. This is not to imply that older people necessarily make better choices, but one could argue that the younger and more impressionable your voter pool is, the easier you it will be to sell them questionable measures. I suppose we will see whether Venezuelans realize the extent to which these constitutional reforms will move them toward a dictatorship when the outcome of the referendum vote is in. This should remind you of something. One need only look at history to see how many dictatorships arose from the democratic process.

Trade Expansion helps the American Worker

Published
by
Anja
on October 31, 2007
in News
. 0 Comments

Who knew? Well, most free market economists argue that. The Cato Institute’s Daniel Griswold has published a new study confirming this cherished belief:

Contrary to public perceptions:

* Trade has had no discernible, negative effect on the number of jobs in the U.S. economy. Our economy today is at full employment, with 16.5 million more people working than a decade ago.

* Trade accounts for only about 3 percent of dislocated workers.Technology and other domestic factors displace far more workers than does trade.

* Average real compensation per hour paid to American workers, which includes benefits as well as wages, has increased by 22 percent in the past decade.

* Median household income in the United States is 6 percent higher in real dollars than it was a decade ago at a comparable point in the previous business cycle. Middle-class households have been moving up the income ladder, not down.

* The net loss of 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade has been overwhelmed by a net gain of 11.6 million jobs in sectors where the average wage is higher than in manufacturing. Two-thirds of the net new jobs created since 1997 are in sectors where workers earn more than in manufacturing.

* The median net worth of U.S. households jumped by almost one-third between 1995 and 2004, from $70,800 to $93,100.

Checkmate, One Hopes.

Published
by
Anja
on October 29, 2007
in News
. 2 Comments

Ex World Champion Chess master Garry Kasparov has decided to run for President in Russia in March of 2008. He is heading a coalition called “The Other Russia”, which is pushing for more substantial democratic change to Russia. An editorial of Kasparov in the WSJ shows his judgment of Putin:

Mr. Putin’s government is unique in history. This Kremlin is part oligarchy, with a small, tightly connected gang of wealthy rulers. It is partly a feudal system, broken down into semi-autonomous fiefdoms in which payments are collected from the serfs, who have no rights. Over this there is a democratic coat of paint, just thick enough to gain entry into the G-8 and keep the oligarchy’s money safe in Western banks. But if you really wish to understand the Putin regime in depth, I can recommend some reading. No Karl Marx or Adam Smith. Nothing by Montesquieu or Machiavelli, although the author you are looking for is of Italian descent. But skip Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism,” for now, and the entire political science section. Instead, go directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo. If you are in a real hurry to become an expert on the Russian government, you may prefer the DVD section, where you can find Mr. Puzo’s works on film. “The Godfather” trilogy is a good place to start…

Also, a nice excerpt from an interview with Bill Maher is available over at Reason.TV.

Kasparov recently published a book called “How Life Imitates Chess”. In it he describes how chess can help in analyzing one’s decision-making processes. That reminds me of Ayn Rand’s letter to chess champion Boris Spassky, in which she wrote:

…Oh yes, Comrade, chess is an escape - an escape from reality. It is an “out,” a kind of “make-work” for a man of higher than average intelligence who was afraid to live, but could not leave his mind unemployed and devoted it to a placebo - thus surrendering to others the living world he had rejected as too hard to understand. …You, the chess professionals, are taken as exponents of the most precious of human skills: intellectual power - yet that power deserts you beyond the confines of the sixty-four squares of a chessboard, leaving you confused, anxious, and helplessly unfocused. Because, you see, the chessboard is not a training ground, but a substitute for reality. (Philosophy: Who needs it, pp. 54-57)

Ah, the irony! In that letter Rand proclaims her support for Spassky’s opponent Bobby Fischer, since the game between Spassky and Fischer was seen as an ideological match between Russia and America. And now, a Russian chess champion is working politically to achieve a free society in Russia.

AJAXed with AWP