Is there a calculator in the house?

The NYT ran an article on how nice young men are bilking retirees out of their money by selling them insurance products that they don’t need. Since there isn’t much in the way of hard numbers, it’s hard to know how many people have really been affected (Massachusetts is considering action against some of the insurers, though.) However, I’m amazed at the way some things are phrased:

Regulators say annuities that begin paying immediately are often sound investments for retirees. A 73-year-old customer of one popular annuity, for instance, is guaranteed to begin immediately receiving $252 a month for life, in exchange for a $30,000 payment. If the buyer lives more than 10 years, that income is greater than the original amount paid.

That’s actually wrong. Sure, 10 times 12 times $252 is $30240, which is greater than the initial $30,000 outlay, but if you factor in the discount rate (how much you could have made if you parked your money elsewhere), you’re deeply in the hole after ten years compared to just sticking the money in a high-intrest bank account. (See net present value )

Right now, you can open a risk-free FDIC-insured account that pays 5% annually. (HSBC, for instance, has such an account.) Maybe you think that the feds will rejigger the risk-free interest rate (currently a shade under 5%), so let’s be conservative and say that you expect a 3% absolutely risk-free rate of return (compounded yearly). If the best you could expect is 3%, that $252 monthly outflow is only worth about $26,600 discounted at a 3% annual rate. You’d have to live about 12 years for your $30,000 to be worth $30,000 in today’s dollars. If the interest rate were higher (say, today’s 5%), it would take you just under 14 years to reach that point.

The advantage of the annuity is that it provides insurance in case you run out of savings before you die. Suppose that you put your $30,000 in such an account and made $252 withdrawls every month. At 3% interest (compounded monthly), it would take a shade under 12 years to deplete your savings – during which time you still had the option of moving your money elsewhere (say, if you wanted to help your grandkids make a down payment on a house). Of course, if you lived much longer than those 12 years (5% interest buys you an extra year and a half or so), you’d be in trouble, which I suppose is the point of an annuity. If you had an investment that paid 11.25% or so, you could live without touching the principal – but it’s unlikely that you’ll get that risk-free.)

The whole business seems a bit macabre, but insurance companies can cover the costs of unusually long-lived holders by setting payouts properly. (That’s assuming that they can’t earn at least 11.25% on their invested income, which would mean they wouldn’t need to worry how long the annuity-holders lived.) One shouldn’t, however, pay an annuity to just one person unless you’ve set it up to profit no matter how long they live. Or you might end up like François Raffray:

Jeanne Louise Calment (February 21, 1875 August 4, 1997) reached the longest confirmed lifespan in history at 122 years and 164 days. Her lifespan has been thoroughly documented by scientific study; more records have been produced to verify her age than for any other case.
In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a “reverse mortgage”. At the time of the deal the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Unfortunately for Raffray, not only did Calment survive more than thirty years, but Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments.

18:08 EST | permalink | /issues/scams

Household pests

A while back, the apartment had a mouse problem. A., since he was often up most of the night, saw a mouse scurrying around. I think E. mentioned that he’d seen it, too. Then I found a mysterious hole in a sealed bag of food I’d left in my room. Then I began to see the mouse itself: it showed up outside the common room, but escaped before I could catch it. Then, one day, I was tapping out an email and heard a rustling — it was rummaging through the stuff on top of my dresser (heaven knows how it managed to climb up there), with me ten feet away and the lights blazing!

Needless to say, when I crept over to catch it, it bolted. I discovered that it had chewed its way into a ziploc of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and had eaten the chocolate off of every last one of them. Coffee beans and chocolate dust were all over the dresser. (Picky little snot, wasn’t it.)

I decided that this was a good impetus to clean the room. I vacuumed up all of the beans, removed the radiator covers and looked for bolt-holes, stopped storing my luggage (could be nesting material!) under the bed, and plugged every hole I could find, which turned out to be just one very small gap in the baseboard in the corner. I couldn’t imagine even a mouse fitting through it, but I haven’t seen it since.

I even set a trap: a deep pickle-jar with some sunflower-seed butter and granola and a wooden ramp leading to the mouth. It was never disturbed. Maybe the hole was its point of entry.

Then, I was browsing the Intarweb today, and discovered that you can’t feed chocolate to your pet mice. It’s toxic to them.

Ha. Pwned.

18:26 EST | permalink | /issues/pest-control

How to waste an evening

One of a series on my continuing adventures in computer drama.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to upload this video of the Harvard Law School building-moving project to YouTube. As usual, the project stretched into three or four hours, complete with the usual triumvirate of poorly-documented software, inexplicable error messages, and mysterious crashes.

First, the fun part:

There are also photos.

Now, the geeky part. If you’re not a computer nerd, the rest of this post may bore you.

I wanted to concatenate a bunch of videos I took with my camera, rotate the ones that I took at a 90 degree angle, strip out a few seconds of chaff, and append a title card to each end. And I wanted to speed them up. It’s impressive to see a house creep down a street at all, but on the Internet, no-one wants to spend more than a minute on it.

I settled for concatenating the videos. (And speeding them up.) Here’s what actually worked, after several zillion different things that didn’t:

• Use transcode on Linux to concatenate the AVI files together. (Concatenating them with cat and running them through mencoder is a bad idea (despite what some may suggest ) – it produced a file that crashed most of other programs I tried to run on it. Concatenation is easy: avimerge -o out.avi -i in1.avi in2.avi in3.avi …

• Use VirtualDub” to speed up the video. Go to Video->Frame Rate. Click “Change to ___ frames per second” and set that to some multiple of the original frame rate (I used 10, so 15 fps became 150 fps). To ensure that the file is not insanely large, you also have to decimate the video. Click “Decimate by ___” and fill in the multiple of the frame rate you used (10, in this case.) N.B.: transcode is a Linux program and VirtualDub is a windows program, so I needed two boxen just to upload a video to YouTube! Of course, I’m hardly the first to rant about this stuff.

• Compress the video (Video->Compression), because YouTube only handles videos up to 100MB. I just picked the first codec that worked “Indeo^® video 5.10”). (I also dropped the audio (Audio->no output, for a small savings.)

• Upload it. This was the easy part.

Now, for the stuff that didn’t work:

• VirtualDub has a wonderful interface for a piece of free video software. It may be the only piece of free video software with a wonderful interface. The problem with VirtualDub is that it’s fantastically finicky about the video it will take. This became an issue when I tried to paste my title cards (15 fps) onto my video (15.00015 fps). Yes, of course, it refused.

• Avidemux, despite being possessed of a…utilitatian (but very functional) GTK2 interface, didn’t refuse to concatenate video because of a tiny difference in the frame rate. The problem was that it would randomly stop opening the videos it produced for reasons I never understood. I’d use it to append a bunch of mpegs together. (These were either straight from the camera or from the camera via VirtualDub, where I’d rotated and cropped them.) It would happily save the concatenated video to a file…then refuse to open it. I’d open one of those files, and the application would instantly quit without so much as an error message.

• So I switched back to Linux. I took the clips that I’d rotated and cropped and tried assembling them using the catandmencoder method. Flop: I couldn’t slice out the extra frames using the VirtualDub decimator. VirtualDub would abort 1/3 of the way in and complain that the file was corrupt. Same deal if I used the avimerge technique.

• So I switched to Linux again. My guess as to how to drop the unnecessary frames didn’t work: I tried the –frame_interval option to transcode…but transcode promptly crashed. Like this:

jdb@bigbox:/mnt/max/park$ transcode -i merge.avi --frame_interval 120 -o fast.avi
transcode v1.0.3 (C) 2001-2003 Thomas Oestreich, 2003-2004 T. Bitterberg
(dvd_reader.c) no support for DVD reading configured - exit.
[transcode] (probe) suggested AV correction -D 0 (0 ms) | AV 0 ms | 0 ms
[transcode] auto-probing source merge.avi (ok)
[transcode] V: import format    | MJPG RIFF data, AVI (V=ffmpeg|A=avi)
[transcode] V: import frame     | 320x240  1.33:1
[transcode] V: bits/pixel       | 1.562
[transcode] V: decoding fps,frc | 15.000,0
[transcode] V: Y'CbCr           | YV12/I420
[transcode] A: import format    | 0x1     PCM          [11024, 8,1]  176 kbps
[transcode] A: export           | disabled
[transcode] V: encoding fps,frc | 15.000,13
[transcode] A: bytes per frame  | 733 (734.933333)
[transcode] A: adjustment       | 1936@1000
[transcode] V: IA32/AMD64 accel | sse (sse 3dnowext 3dnow mmxext mmx asm C)
tc_memcpy: using sse for memcpy
[transcode] warning : no option -y found, option -o ignored, writing to "/dev/null"
[transcode] V: video buffer     | 10 @ 320x240
[import_avi.so] v0.4.2 (2002-05-24) (video) * | (audio) *
[import_ffmpeg.so] v0.1.12 (2004-05-07) (video) ffmpeg: MS MPEG4v1-3/MPEG4/MJPEG
[export_null.so] v0.1.2 (2001-08-17) (video) null | (audio) null
[import_avi.so] format=0x1, rate=11024 Hz, bits=8, channels=1, bitrate=176
[transcode] input is mjpeg, reducing range from YUVJ420P to YUV420P
[filter.c] Filter "levels=output=16-240:pre=1" with args (levels=output=16-240:pre=1)
[filter.c] Filter "levels=output=16-240:pre=1" not loaded. Loading ...
[filter.c] Loading (levels=output=16-240:pre=1) ..
[filter_levels.so]: v1.0.0 (2004-06-09) Luminosity level scaler #0
[filter_levels.so]: scaling 0-255 gamma 1.000000 to 16-240
[filter_levels.so]: pre-processing filter
[mjpeg @ 0xb6953c68]invalid id 23618.38 fps, EMT: 0:05:53, ( 0| 0| 0)
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

(Sharp-eyed readers will note that that command wouldn’t have done anything anyway, because the computer complained that I didn’t pass a -y argument, so it wrote its output to /dev/null. I didn’t notice this until just now. I tested it with an actual -y argument: -y mjpeg,null (because the input was mjpeg). That also bombed:

jdb@bigbox:/mnt/max/park$ transcode -i merge.avi --frame_interval 120 -o fast.avi -y mjpeg,null
transcode v1.0.3 (C) 2001-2003 Thomas Oestreich, 2003-2004 T. Bitterberg
(dvd_reader.c) no support for DVD reading configured - exit.
[transcode] (probe) suggested AV correction -D 0 (0 ms) | AV 0 ms | 0 ms
[transcode] auto-probing source merge.avi (ok)
[transcode] V: import format    | MJPG RIFF data, AVI (V=ffmpeg|A=avi)
[transcode] V: import frame     | 320x240  1.33:1
[transcode] V: bits/pixel       | 1.562
[transcode] V: decoding fps,frc | 15.000,0
[transcode] V: Y'CbCr           | YV12/I420
[transcode] A: import format    | 0x1     PCM          [11024, 8,1]  176 kbps
[transcode] A: export           | disabled
[transcode] V: encoding fps,frc | 15.000,13
[transcode] A: bytes per frame  | 733 (734.933333)
[transcode] A: adjustment       | 1936@1000
[transcode] V: IA32/AMD64 accel | sse (sse 3dnowext 3dnow mmxext mmx asm C)
tc_memcpy: using sse for memcpy
[transcode] V: video buffer     | 10 @ 320x240
[import_avi.so] v0.4.2 (2002-05-24) (video) * | (audio) *
[import_ffmpeg.so] v0.1.12 (2004-05-07) (video) ffmpeg: MS MPEG4v1-3/MPEG4/MJPEG
[export_null.so] v0.1.2 (2001-08-17) (video) null | (audio) null
[export_mjpeg.so] v0.0.5 (2003-07-24) (video) Motion JPEG | (audio) MPEG/AC3/PCM
[import_avi.so] format=0x1, rate=11024 Hz, bits=8, channels=1, bitrate=176
[transcode] input is mjpeg, reducing range from YUVJ420P to YUV420P
[filter.c] Filter "levels=output=16-240:pre=1" with args (levels=output=16-240:pre=1)
[filter.c] Filter "levels=output=16-240:pre=1" not loaded. Loading ...
[filter.c] Loading (levels=output=16-240:pre=1) ..
[filter_levels.so]: v1.0.0 (2004-06-09) Luminosity level scaler #0
[filter_levels.so]: scaling 0-255 gamma 1.000000 to 16-240
[filter_levels.so]: pre-processing filter
*** glibc detected *** transcode: malloc(): memory corruption: 0x080f97a8 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/libc.so.6[0xb7e8682d]
/lib/libc.so.6[0xb7e8726c]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_memalign+0xab)[0xb7e8812b]
/usr/lib/libavutil.so.1d(av_malloc+0x2d)[0xb7fc155d]
======= Memory map: ========
<snip>
Aborted (core dumped)

• I couldn’t find an equivalent option in mencoder, so I decided that the rotate-and-crop videos must have been corrupted. I ditched them and went back to the the raw ones from the camera. After some fiddling, these actually worked.

• In retrospect, I probably could have tried using VirtualDub to assemble the cropped-and-rotated videos (I didn’t before, because I was trying to add my title cards, which it wouldn’t do – at least, I couldn’t produce title cards that it would take.) Ah, well. Next time.

22:12 EST | permalink | /computers

Sheer genius

http://www.xkcd.com/c149.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c163.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c138.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c125.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c218.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c114.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c230.html (Crop to just panels 1-3; it’s funnier that way.)

http://www.xkcd.com/c215.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c214.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c213.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c205.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c189.html (I think this explains the popularity of martial arts at MIT.)

http://www.xkcd.com/c182.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c178.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c217.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c78.html

http://www.xkcd.com/c91.html

21:02 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

When it rains, it pours

Here’s more from the “unsolicited parenting advice” department:

This is what 3 a.m. looks like at the Costello house, a diminutive red brick three-story in the West Village: On the second floor, Harrison, age 5, is splayed, sideways and snoring, across his parents. king-size, Anglo-Indian four-poster, having muscled his mother out completely and pushed his father, Paul, a 35-year-old photographer, to the extreme edge of the bed.

[…]

“I used to get hysterical and wonder, what is this new life of stumbling around in the middle of the night?” Ms. Costello said. “Now it’s just so oddly part of the routine. Paul and I wonder, will we ever sleep together again?”

W. T. F.

Allow me to rip off an Internet celebrity: if your kids aren’t capable of handling the “stay the hell out of the bedroom” rule, then you have failed as a parent.

It’s parenting like that that creates kids like this.

00:44 EST | permalink | /issues/parenting

Uh-oh

I entered the date for my qualifying exam on my cell phone’s calendar.

I typed in “qual” (7825) using the T9Word (“guess what I’m typing”) option.

Its first guess was “suck”.

I hope that’s not a bad omen.

18:26 EST | permalink | /academics

Unsolicited parenting advice

The New York Times, today:

IT’S difficult when you have a kid,” the photographer Justine Kurland said. “If they’re in a good mood, you can get work done. But if they’re in a bad mood, you’re at their mercy.”

Ms. Kurland is known for photographing people in American wilderness landscapes, but the scene this day was the rent-stabilized apartment she shares with Casper, her 2-year-old son, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Casper, named for the 19th-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, had just given a textbook example of one of his trickier moods. His father, the sculptor and multimedia artist Corey McCorkle, who lives 10 blocks away, arrived to take him out for breakfast, but he refused to budge. Instead he sat sobbing, rooted to the kitchen floor, a stunt Ms. Kurland said he increasingly liked to pull when she was scouting locations on the extended road trips she takes for her projects. [continued…]

AAAAAAGH! I can’t even COUNT how many times my parents pulled that stunt on me as a kid. I wanted to stay home; instead, I got a tour of the most boring parts of Massachusetts from the backseat of the car. Every. Single. Weekend. I’m surprised that I didn’t start huffing paint thinner.

For heaven’s sake, lady: Leave. The. Kid. At. Home. It’s not as though she’s living in North Dakota – this is NYC. She can find a nanny. And it’s not as though she has to pay through the nose to avoid the nanny problem — she’s an artist, not a politician. Hire an illegal; no-one’s going to check.

My parents wouldn’t have even needed a nanny — just park me in front of the Nintendo, thank you very much. It would have been good practice for the interminable hours of being parked in front of a computer in college.

13:54 EST | permalink | /arts/photography

Coincidence?

• September 2000: Enter Princeton University.
• September 2001: Shirley Tilghman is installed as the first female president of Princeton University.
• September 2004: Enter Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• December 2004: Susan Hockfield is installed as the first female president of MIT.
• February 2007: Drew Faust is selected as the first female president of Harvard University.

I sense a trend.

15:11 EST | permalink | /academics

Mario Meets Yahoo

TechCrunch has a gushing post about Yahoo! Pipes, which is some sort of graphical RSS-feed-editing service. You can drag little boxes around to combine news feeds, deleting posts that match certain criteria, keeping others, and publishing the result as a new RSS feed.

I can think of some uses for this, but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Michael Arrington.It’s very slick, but I’m not sure who the intended audience is.

To Yahoo’s credit, the UI is so intuitive that in a few minutes, I’d whipped up a new feed for Guy Kawasaki’s blog that strips out his oh-so-cute minced oaths “bull-shitake” and “full of sushi.” Here’s what it looks like:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to replace the phrases—I could only delete the offending posts in their entirety. Call it collateral damage in the war on preciousness.

20:52 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

Three cheers for John McCain

For making it really, really easy for me to not vote for him:

A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.

The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or “cartoon” minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

[…]

It also covers obscene images of minors including ones in a “drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.” (The language warns that it is not necessary “that the minor depicted actually exist.”)

I suppose that means this image of a naked bearded man fondling a naked boy would be illegal. (Note, of course, that it’s a tondo painted 470 BC that today resides in the Ashmolean Museum.)

The real problems in the U.S. are obvious: social security is doomed. Congress can’t control its spending and doesn’t want to try. Iraq appears to be entering a civil war. Ten million illegal immigrants are living in the U.S.; a non-trivial minority of whom are involved in organized crime. Public education is a trainwreck in progress.

But no presidential candidate has the spine to tackle these problems. Instead, we get feel-good legicrap like the baseball steroid hearings, the Terry Schiavo travesty, the everyone-knew-it-was-doomed Federal Marriage Amendment, and this.

Are child molesters escaping justice because we lack a law that forces ISPs to face fines of $300,000 for failing to report ancient Greek paintings? I have my doubts.

But there’s a silver lining. I might have actually struggled over the campaign-finance issue, because I thought McCain’s views were, besides that, decent. But now that he’s cast his lot with the panderers, “pay no attention to the abortion that is the federal budget—Here! Over here! We’re saving your kids from perverts!” crowd, it will be very, very easy to vote for someone else.

That he managed to take a giant dump on the Internet industry in the process (since they’ll have to police their customers or face enormous fines) is icing on the cake. I have an idea: every time the Feds want to delegate the functions of government to private industry, they should be required to estimate how much it will cost American business. Ditto federal agency rulemaking. If corporations have to file environmental impact statements, I daresay that the government should be expected to file business impact statements. (We already have the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, so this isn’t entirely implausible.)

That’s the sort of pandering I could get behind.

21:00 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

More meat for the meme morgue

From the “The 100% of the Usage Panel recommends that this phrase be taken out and shot” department:

“mommy wars”

When Drudge picks up an AP story about the thirty-something full-time mother of four who lobs a fragmentation grenade from the cockpit of her kid-filled Lincoln Navigator through the open top of her high-powered-childfree-consultant (and Yale classmate)’s BMW M3 while they sit stranded in traffic on I-80, then, and only then, will I feel comfortable with the phrase.

See also

15:32 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Kafka on the Charles, Chinese child theft, and the usual sex scandals

Two stories hit the wires recently: a tiff between Princeton University and the townies (dog bites man; sky blue) and a child custody dispute in Tennessee. Both emerge from a little-discussed and highly sordid corner of college life: University justice.

First, from the Princetonian, there’s a fight between Princeton University and the local prosecutor over a case of assault involving some undergraduates. What appears to be at issue is the University’s judicial process, which the locals think is interfering with their investigation.

For reasons that also remain unclear, Mercer County assistant prosecutor William Burns threatened the University with legal action when it began its internal disciplinary hearing. “If you continue to demand [that the victim] supply documents pertaining to any criminal charges, you may be charged with … Obstructing the Administration of Law [and] Hindering Prosecution,” Burns was quoted as writing to the University on Jan. 8, according to a reply letter by University General Counsel Peter McDonough.

Given that the University judicial process (oops, two judicial processes — the Honor Committee, which handles in-class cheating, and the Committee on Discipline, which handles everything else) has never been a shining example of transparency, I tend to side with its critics, whatever their reasons. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t tell us prosecutor’s beef is.

The alleged assault victim’s lawyer has a more pointed critique:

The recent conflicts between the University and law enforcement authorities show that current practice of dual, independent frameworks is unacceptable, Murphy said. Calling the University disciplinary process an attempt to “resemble a fully-functional mini-criminal trial,” Murphy said that the University’s efforts usurped the power of local authorities.

My feelings exactly — you’ll see why in a moment.

A bigger-deal case just made the national headlines: a Chinese couple won custody of their daughter after the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision of a Memphis judge who had awarded custody to a foster family.

According to the article, the parents, Shaoqiang He, and his wife, Qin Luo He, fell upon hard times and sent their month-old daughter to live with another family [editor’s note: WTF?!] temporarily. When they wanted her back, the other family refused to give her up.

The case spurred the usual complaints about anti-Chinese prejudice in the judicial system; how it was stacked against foreigners with poor English; the usual. (Interestingly, half of the Google hits during my searches on the subject were from English-language versions of Chinese newspapers.) But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is how the He family’s financial difficulties came about. According to the AP story:

Anna Mae was born in 1999 shortly after her father, a student at the University of Memphis, was accused of a sexual assault. He was ultimately acquitted, but the charge cost him a scholarship and the student stipend that was his family’s primary source of income.

A 24 January 2002 article from Life magazine provides a bit more detail.

Anna Mae was born on Jan. 28, 1999, into poverty and turmoil. Her father, “Jack” Shaoqiang He, 37 – known around this friendly Southern town as “Mister He” – was a visiting college professor from China who came to the USA on a student visa and was pursuing a doctorate in economics at the University of Memphis.

Here he married “Casey” Qin Luo, 34, a Chinese woman he met through a friend back home. She spoke no English, but she shared his strong faith and love for America, Mister He says. They planned to build a good life together.

But in 1998, when Casey was pregnant with Anna Mae, her husband was charged with assaulting a fellow student. He and the student, a Chinese woman named Xiaojun Qi (pronounced Key), went to a computer lab alone; a week later Qi went to school officials, displayed bruises and said Mister He caused them during a sexual assault.

Mister He vehemently denies the allegation. He says he left the lab feeling uncomfortable after the woman asked him for a $500 loan. But the university dismissed him, his income from the university vanished and his student visa hung on his collegiate appeal.

On Thanksgiving in 1998, the Hes left their one-bedroom apartment and went to the grocery store. They were attacked by several men, and Casey was knocked down. That night she began suffering vaginal bleeding. Her condition worsened until doctors finally, in January, delivered Anna Mae by C-section, one month premature.

With a $12,000 hospital bill, a criminal assault charge and a continuing legal fight to try to get reinstated at the university, the Hes sought help in caring for their baby. Friends at their church suggested a local adoption agency.

Mid-South Christian Services agreed to place the baby in a foster home for three months. They placed her with Jerry and Louise Baker.

One minor point: according to Factiva, the marriage between Shaoqiang He, 37 and Qin Luo, 33, is listed in the marriages section of the January 9, 2002 Memphis Commercial Appeal – meaning that the parents would not have been married at the time of the birth of the child in four years before, in 1998. Either the Appeal article is mis-dated (it wouldn’t be the first time), or the Life author has his timeline wrong (“husband” should have been “future husband.”)

Soon after the Baker family foster placement, the legal wrangling over the child began. But the interesting part is how they got there: the University judicial process that prompted the He family to place their kid in foster care in the first place. It reminded me of a case on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s website:

A Harvard graduate student has been barred from continuing his studies because a fellow student accused him of sexual assault in January of 2002. The student was acquitted on all six counts of rape and assault by Middlesex Superior Court last August and his accuser was shown to be fabricating parts of her story at the trial. Despite this, Harvard has not readmitted him and has not dropped its own charges against him.

(FIRE, it should be noted, is a pressure group — if you hadn’t guessed when you saw that they refer to Harvard as “Kafka on the Charles.” Not that I disagree with much of what that they do.)

The Boston Globe and the Harvard Crimson also covered the case. As a biographical tidbit, the non-assault didn’t happen in Child Hall, which is right near where I used to live. It’s the Gropius-designed wall on the left side of this photo. Apologies on the lack of a better picture.

I don’t know what has happened to the student in question, Georgi Zedginidze. The latest word that I saw was a Crimson columnist blasting the University’s policy of wrist-slapping convicted rapists while simultaneously jack-booting the acquitted. The author laments the “Coalition against Sexual Violence’s” successful demands to eliminate the right of confrontation from the University judicial process.

Erin O’Connor, who writes about academic excess, had similar complaints about the He case back in 2004:

Had officials at the University of Memphis accorded Shaoqiang He due process, had they held firmly to the tenet that in this country a person is always innocent until proven guilty, he would not have been expelled on the basis of an accusation. He would not have been deprived of his education, he would not have had his career prospects ruined, and he would not have lost his daughter.

[…]

The Hes plan to return to China after the dispute about their daughter is settled.

If they do plan to return, now that they have four children, I wonder how they’ll skirt the one-child policy? I understand that a lot of Chinese who intended to go back elect to stay in the U.S. when they realize that their kids will get the worst of it when they return.

On that note, despite O’Connor’s closing line, Larry Parrish, the lawyer for the foster family, accused the Hes of engineering the dispute as a means of staying in America. An article in the University of Memphis’s student newspaper quotes Parrish:

“Jack He is extremely intelligent and very fluent and is a con-artist. He is the best I’ve ever seen,” Parrish said. “He plays on the sympathies of other people. He creates situations that are not real.”

Parrish contended the Hes were using the situation as a way to stay in America. If not for the custody battle the Hes would have been deported, Parrish said.

Parrish also said, “he is the most dishonest witness I have ever seen. That’s why the courts have found him completely without credibility.”

I assume this is the usual character assassination one would expect from an thorough attorney. Does it lend any credence to the original charges against He? It’s doubtful: He was cleared by a court of law.

And that’s where the stories converge: in each of these cases, a University judicial system ignored the verdict of a court of law and soldiered on, either finding the student guilty or thrusting him into academic limbo. In the Harvard case, Zedginidze had taken a leave during the trial, and was all but told not to petition for re-admission, as Harvard might (if he reapplied) actually find him guilty of rape and expel him.

According to the Globe, if Zedginidze managed to persuade the university to schedule a hearing, he’d have no right to confront his accuser, no right of cross-examination, and no right to an attorney – in other words, standard practice for the Star Chamber a University tribunal. The Honor Committee at Princeton has much the same rules. I’m not sure about the Committee on Discipline, but I’d be shocked if it were much better.

As for the He case, the articles that I’ve read do not give the specifics of the University’s sanctions. Was He actually expelled? Was he “persuaded” to take a leave of absence, as was Zedginidze? Or did the U. of Memphis just cancel his fellowship? As doctoral students are generally paid by the University to go to school, the latter would be a crippling loss. In most fields, if you are paying for a doctorate, you’re probably being ripped off. There is a quid pro quo, of course: the students provide fairly cheap labor, which is why schools (particularly schools of the humanities) admit so many of them. But I digress – you can read more about that here.

In any event, one can only be happy that the He family has been reunited. One wonders how we ended up with a system were unaccountable-bureaucrat courts can ruin students’ careers (and, indirectly, break up families) on the basis of allegations that real courts have found to be baseless.

On the other hand, would Shaoqiang He have fared better, had he not been in tried by the University of Memphis’s tribunal, but in his native China?

The awful part is that I’m not sure.

20:52 EST | permalink | /academics/kangaroo-courts

Seen and not heard

ORLANDO, Fla. - AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff.

[…]

“The flight was already delayed 15 minutes and in fairness to the other 112 passengers on the plane, the crew made an operational decision to remove the family,” AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.

[…]

The Orlando-based carrier reimbursed the family $595.80, the cost of the three tickets, and the Kuleszas flew home the next day.

They also were offered three roundtrip tickets anywhere the airline flies, Graham-Weaver said.

The father said his family would never fly AirTran again.

I, on the other hand, plan to fly with them whenever possible. This is a victory for air travelers everywhere.

I’m all in favor of children, certainly—America has anough child-free nitwits, although certainly not as many as Europe.* And children can certainly be loud—that’s why I wear earplugs. But if your kid is going to waste a collective 28 man-hours* of innocent bystanders’ time, then slip her a damn mickey before the flight. Or drive.

[*] On that note, don’t miss this Mark Steyn column.

[**] (In fairness, the article doesn’t say if the 15-minute delay was the kid’s fault or if the plane was already late before they boarded.)

AirTran, incidentally, is the successor to ValuJet, which suffered the infamous ValuJet Flight 592 crash in the Florida Everglades. I’m not complaining: they fly the BOS-CAK route, cheap.

15:29 EST | permalink | /issues/children

Dead horses that should be retired. With prejudice.

“Battle of the sexes”

(This one’s so bad that it pains me to write it.)

(see also)

23:35 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Bleg! Bleg! Bleg!

My brother Davide’s soap opera “The Gates” made the semifinal round of the SoapU contest. If you can spare a second, I’d love it if you could help him out by voting for his episode. (Voting takes about three seconds – you don’t actually have to watch the episode if you’re in a hurry.)

To vote, just go to SoapU.com and click the preview pic next to “The Gates; Columbia University; Davide Barillari”. The show should start playing. You can click one of the rating buttons below the video to vote for the episode. (I recommend a “10”, but of course, I’m biased.)

I had some trouble with Firefox, but your mileage may vary – I have some exotic extensions installed. Internet Explorer worked perfectly, though.

If you had a chance to vote, thanks!

14:24 EST | permalink | /academics/columbia

That’s not something you see every day

BE Professor Threatens Hunger Strike to Protest Tenure Denial

By Joyce Kwan STAFF REPORTER

An African-American associate professor has threatened to go on hunger strike unless the provost resigns and his tenure is granted, protesting what he claims were racist motives behind the denial of his tenure. The Department of Biological Engineering decided not to advance BE Associate Professor James L. Sherley.s case for tenure on Dec. 13, 2004. Since then, Sherley has asked senior administrators to overturn his department’s decision.

[…]

In a December letter sent out to MIT faculty calling for support, Sherley said, “I will either see the Provost resign and my hard-earned tenure granted at MIT, or I will die defiantly right outside his office. This is the strength of my conviction that racism in American [sic] must end. What better place to kill a small part of it than at a great institution like MIT.”

There’s no doubt that the tenure process needs reform. That the current system makes it very difficult to have women to have both children and a high-powered academic career is beyond dispute. The left decries the lack of minority professors at top schools and cries racism. The right regularly blasts “tenured radicals” and demands limited-term contracts for faculty. (A small number of (usually obscure) schools have even tried this.) I have my doubts that Prof. Sherley’s tactic will work, but I’m also surprised that more of the media haven’t picked up on this.

Incidentally, if you read magazines like First Things or The Weekly Standard and see references to an MIT professor who bashes embryonic-stem cell research and flogs adult stem cells, it’s often Prof. Sherley. See, for instance, this and this, both by my former college classmate Ryan Anderson.

21:40 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

Adventures in multiculturalism

[The scene: 5 Bryant Street, home of the Chinese department office. Three other students and I are reviewing a skit with one of the teachers. I’ve corrected some of my grammatical errors for clarity.]

Me: “Nín xǐ huān tāng ma?” (您喜歡湯嗎?) [Do you like soup?]

Teacher: It should be “Nín xǐ huān hé tāng ma?” (您喜歡喝湯嗎?) [Do you like to drink soup?]

(later)

Me: “Nín xǐ huān ròu ma?” (您喜歡肉嗎?) [Do you like meat?]

Teacher: It should be “Nín xǐ huān chī ròu ma?” (您喜歡吃肉嗎?) [Do you like to eat meat?]

(later)

Me: “Nín xǐ huān dòufu ma?” (您喜豆腐嗎?) [Do you like tofu?] Wait, no…[I’m sensing a pattern here] it’s “Nín xǐ huān chī dòufu ma?” (您喜吃豆腐嗎?) [Do you like to eat tofu?]

Teacher: Er, it’s just “xǐ huān dòufu.” “chī dòufu” means…something else.

Me: Is it bad?

Teacher: Yes.

I didn’t press it. Native speakers: can you cast any illumination on this one? I’d love to know.

Update: From my collaborator on a comp. sci. project:

i saw your post because your site was on digg.
"eat someone's tofu" means to touch someone in private parts.
i had a taiwanese girlfriend.

Rock on, Intarweb! That was quick.

That said, what on earth am I doing in digg? As of right now (12:36 am on the 5th), the Dan Peng article is in the third slot. I wrote it in April of 2003; it showed up on Slashdot a bit later. Dan settled with the RIAA in May 2003.

I’m surprised that there’s still life in that page. I guess this is why Jakob Nielsen marked undated content as #3 on the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. (There are dates in the article – but they’re at the very bottom.)

22:29 EST | permalink | /world/china

Our Culture of Pandering

While raiding the KSG library for a copy of Christopher Lasch’s* The Revolt of the Elites that wasn’t falling apart (as was Lamont’s), a slim volume with “pandering” on the spine caught my eye. Since the propensity of politicians to pander is one of my (and Carlos’s) favorite laments, I pulled it.

It was Sen. Paul Simon’s Our Culture of Pandering, in which he bashes the American media, political, educational, and religious establishment. The book throws out a number of obvious and quite fair attacks: the increasingly centralized and profit-obsessed American media delivers salaciousness rather than substance, American public schools are the laughingstock of the developed world, American churches pay a lot of lip service to charity but few are willing to ask their congregations to sacrifice for it, and American politicians are decidedly unwilling to show real leadership. Regarding the last, Simon related a conversation with Rep. Richard Kelly (R-FL; later imprisoned for his role in the Abscam scandal). Kelley agreed that increasing foreign-aid spending was in the national interest, but said his constituents wouldn’t stand for it.

Simon asked how many letters Kelly received against foreign aid in the month prior.

“Probably half a dozen,” he replied.

Interestingly, the xenophobia (xeno-indifference might be a better term) theme ran through all four chapters. American colleges don’t send enough students to study abroad (Simon wonders if we would have had a war in Vietnam had LBJ spent a semester in Asia). American churches are far more willing to raise money for new buildings than for foreign or disaster aid abroad. American newspapers spend more time covering celebrity scandals than international developments (to say nothing of TV news). And American politicians (as above), even if they believe that more foreign aid spending would benefit America (to say nothing of the world), are generally unwilling to show much backbone on the issue. (After reading Easterly’s book, I’m more than a little skeptical of using raw spending as a measure of our commitment to helping the destitute abroad, but the point is well taken.)

00:46 EST | permalink | /issues/culturewar

Outage ended

If you sent mail to any @barillari.org address between early September and late December, it most likely did not get through. The mail server for barillari.org stopped working in early September. Because the vast majority of the mail sent to @barillari.org addresses is bulk mail, I didn’t make fixing it a high priority. My apologies if you sent anything to a @barillari.org email address during that period — it should be working now.

00:06 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/outages

Born too late

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption at a fifteen-year-old death bed?

There was very little that adult gangsters practiced or enjoyed that child gangsters did not contrive to reproduce on their own scale. There were boys’ saloons, with three-cent whiskies and little girls in the back rooms, and there were children’s gambling houses, in which tots could bilk other tots at the usual menu of faro, policy, and dice games. […]
If it seems that these children must have very early used up the entire stock of adult pleasures—sex, drink, gambling, extortion, racketeering, fraud, intimidation, unfair competition, price-fixing, terrorism—it should be remembered that the life expectancy for kids growing up under these conditions could not have been very high.The whole adult order of high and low sensations had to be experienced in fifteen or twenty years at best before they succumbed to disease, malnutrition, exposure, stab wounds, or gunfire.

04:17 EST | permalink | /issues/life-extension

The Anti-Sachs

Just finished Will Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.

I read Lamont Library’s copy, so I had the benefit of someone’s crabbed marginalia. Among the more illuminating pencilings: “the worst neo-lib crap available on the free market” (on the title page), “so McDonald would be the big push? what a crap theory!” (below a section contrasting aid-planners’ inflexibility to Ray Kroc’s leap from selling mixers to running restaurants). This petered out after the first chapter — I suppose he or she dumped the book in disgust.

The central argument is that developing-country problems can be better solved with tweezers than with sledgehammers. In other words, aid-givers with narrow, well-defined goals and clear measures of success are more likely to do good than those with open-ended goals and hundreds of objectives, even if they have (as they often do) colossal budgets. Easterly calls the former “searchers” and the latter “planners” or “big push” projects, but he might as well call them “Smile Train” (insert any narrowly-targeted charity here) and “Jeffrey Sachs”. Unfortunately for the world’s poor, students of the Sachs school include Western governments, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, big-name philanthropists, and Bono.

I’m occasionally a bystander to international-development chatter, so Easterly’s nonstop tweaks at ID bureaucratese were a nice touch. He devotes the middle of one chapter to such succinctly-titled entities as “The Open-Ended Ad-Hoc Working Group on Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Outcomes of the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields”. Near the end, he finds a report by the “Joint Venture on Managing for Development Results for the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness and Donor Practices” called “Managing for Development Results, Principles in Action: Sourcebook on Emerging Good Practice.” One Scalian section lists reports produced by aid agencies:

“…besides the UN’s 3,751-page Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, we have the British government’s 453 page Our Common Future: Report of the Commission for Africa, plus the latest update of the IMF and the World Bank’s 1,246 page PSRP Sourcebook…”

For this world in which Bangladeshi children die of diarrhea while Big Aid keeps International Paper in business, Easterly blames misaligned incentives. Western aid agencies are not actually rewarded for achieving their goals, only for setting them. Mere expenditures are often used as a measure of success. Easterly’s reductio ad absurdam: would those who paid $10 to see the 2005 flop Catwoman be mollified in knowing that the producers dumped $100 million into the film? (The Catwoman analogy appeared in his 2005 Foreign Policy article – I guess it was too good not to reprint.) Today, the ONE Campaign advocates pushing 1% of the U.S. federal budget into foreign aid – on top of the $2,300,000,000,000 that the West spent on foreign aid over the last 50 years.

Perhaps to avoid the “neocon toady” slur, the second part of the book heaps scorn on the American nation-builders in Iraq in 2003 (and Afghanistan in 2001 and El Salvador in the 1980s and Vietnam in 1961 and Guatemala in 1954 and so on). As an economist, he proclaims himself unqualified to judge the national security benefits of each of these interventions, but finds that they did little economic good (besides spurring an “explosion of Vietnamese restaurants” and Guatemalan handicraft shops in the U.S.). He’s a fan of markets, but not of recent efforts to create them. On post-communist Eastern Europe, he explains that the “chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms,” to whom fell the task of writing new laws.

AIDS activists also get their sacred cow gored: Easterly asserts that campaigns to bring (expensive) AIDS drugs to the poorest parts of the world are wasting money better spent on (cheap) prevention. One of his more macabre observations: spending money on AIDS treatment rather than prevention actually makes the AIDS crisis worse, because treated people live longer and can spread the disease further. Easterly blames anti-condom conservatives in the U.S. and AIDS activists who found an easy target in Big Pharma.

His success stories are narrowly targeted and often home-grown — private colleges launched by Indians and Ghanaians, a Unilever-sponsored handwashing campaign to fight diarrhea in India, entrepreneurs selling anti-malarial bed nets in Malawi (free nets tended to end up as fishing equipment). His parting shot calls for more of those narrowly-focused campaigns, a willingness of aid donors to forget about self-sufficiency (in other words, abandon the tired story about teaching men to fish and just feed the starving kids), and more independent evaluation of the outcomes of aid projects. He calls this, in not so many words, a scientific approach to aid. You’d think that this would be obvious, but then again, I was floored a few years ago when I started hanging out at Harvard Med and found out that something called “evidence-based medicine” was the the next big thing. (What on earth were doctors practicing before?)

The book is a few dozen pages too long, most of which are taken up by tedious and unnecessary examples of capitalism at work, many of which somehow manage to involve his children. The central dichotomy between “searchers” and “planners” makes the latter out to be so outrageously wrong that one might accuse Easterly of setting up a strawman. Since he takes on the entire 20th century’s worth of Western foreign aid and humanitarian military intervention, he could easily be accused of cherry-picking the worst examples of big-push aid to bulk up the scarecrow. But neither of these detract much from the book. Highly recommended, particularly if you can get a copy after a starry-eyed development groupie had a go at it.

P.S. Someone deserves an award for Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature. Have you ever wasted ten minutes looking for a passage that you know was there somewhere, should have bookmarked, but didn’t? I rarely have to do that anymore.

01:15 EST | permalink | /issues/poverty

More words that should not be used together. Ever.

“scary smart”

(See also: 1 2 3 4 )

21:39 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Overheard in the Lamont Cafe

“Oh my God, do you think Goldman Sachs would have me take the Chinatown bus?”

21:48 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Ha!

I bet the pro-Sandinista-but-pro-choice types in Cambridge, MA, Berkeley, CA, and so forth didn’t see this one coming:

Nicaragua brings in abortion ban

Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos has signed into law a ban on all abortions, even in cases when a woman’s life is judged to be at risk.

Previous legislation from a century ago allowed an abortion if three doctors certified that the woman was in danger.

Abortion was a central issue for November’s presidential election in mainly Roman Catholic Nicaragua.

President-elect Daniel Ortega once favoured abortion rights but changed stance after re-embracing Catholicism.

Something tells me, though, that there won’t be any protests in front of the Nicaraguan Embassy in Washington over this one…

16:56 EST | permalink | /world/nicaragua

Couldn’t resist. My apologies.

President George W. Bush queues up with other world leaders for his complimentary haircut at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Hanoi on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006. (AP Photo/Hoang Dinh Nam, Pool; via Yahoo! News)

11:06 EST | permalink | /world/vietnam

Sacha Baron Cohen: Civil Rights Avenger?

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat is awash in praise these days, but I’ve seen surprisingly little attention paid to an interesting tidbit from the title character’s past. From Wikipedia:

“[Cohen] … attended Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge where he read history and wrote his dissertation on Jewish involvement in the American Civil Rights movement, focusing especially on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the Southerners who get the worst of it in his film. Borat hitchhikes with a trio of drunken South Carolina college students who lament the end of slavery. He incites a rodeo audience into cheering (supposedly faked via careful editing) his wish that “George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq.” He prank-falls in a Confederate memorabilia shop, destroying hundreds of dollars of merchandise. And, in the film’s most infamous scene, (at a dinner party on Secession Drive, no less) he hands a bag of his own excrement to his hostess.

Borat also delivers a bizarre on-air interview with WAPT, a Mississippi-based TV station. Again, according to Wikipedia, WAPT had a “long history of discrimination against African-Americans in news coverage and advocacy against Civil Rights” – a fact unlikely to have escaped Cohen. (A WAPT producer later claimed to have lost her job after Cohen’s production company duped her into booking the interview.)

The only Americans to get a real pass are a group of black teenagers he meets outside a school (they lower his pants and teach him their dialect), a middle-aged black prostitute (one of the few professional actors in the film) who Borat marries and brings back to Kazakhstan, a Jewish couple who run a bed and breakfast, and the participants in a Washington, D.C. gay pride parade. All of these are archetypal good guys in contemporary American cinema – but in fairness to Cohen, no-one could accuse his employment of them as being anything but original.

17:44 EST | permalink | /world/usa

It’s Cultural Insensitivity Week at barillari.org

I don’t know what this is:

The placard is in English, but the camera’s resolution was too low to pick it up. That said, it reminds me of something else.

16:15 EST | permalink | /world/china

Strategic linguistics

Nearly everything at the military museum in Beijing is placarded in both English and Chinese. Except (not by chance, I’d imagine) the gallery on the Korean War. Or, as the signpost diplomatically calls it, “Hall of Resisting US Aggression and Aiding Korea.”

00:40 EST | permalink | /world/china

Toys ‘R Hamas

Don’t miss this (click image for more):

22:01 EST | permalink | /world/middle-east

Truth pwns political satire, part 97

Exhibit A: today’s WSJ OpinionJournal:

The Fertility Gap
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.

[…]

But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Exhibit B: a long-forgotten whitehouse.org poster:

Caption: “America can defeat terrorism in the bedroom!”

18:53 EST | permalink | /issues/partisanship

A web service everyone can get behind

The Web 2.0 Logo Generator:

14:12 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

In your face, foreigners!

This is what I’ll point to next time someone suggests that the U.S. ought to have compulsory voting like Australia or Brazil or what-have-you:

Three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices, according to a poll on pop culture released on Monday.
[…]
Respondents were far more familiar with the Three Stooges – Larry, Curly and Moe – than the three branches of the U.S. government – judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four percent identified the former, 42 percent the latter.

23:45 EST | permalink | /issues/elections

ObPhDComicsRef

This strip is absolutely perfect. In a few panels, it conveys the disorientation and, er…wait, what was I talking about?

20:12 EST | permalink | /academics

You know the market is saturated when…

I was reading a blog post when a button bar at the bottom caught my eye:

It’s a bunch of links to different social bookmarking systems. I counted 42 distinct sites.

Who knew that so many even existed?

On that note, don’t miss Targeting an audience of 53,651. Excerpt:

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

15:51 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

davfs2 shenanigans

[Hardcore nerd post. Non-geeks, please ignore.]

WebDAV is a nice, lightweight, widely implemented network filesystem protocol. davfs2 is the client implementation for Linux, which lets you mount a remote WebDAV server.

Heaven forbid that you should confuse it, though. If you confuse davfs2 (as I did, by trying to unmount the same share twice), you might get this delightfully cryptic and mildly ungrammatical error message:

/sbin/mount.davfs: Process 5852 already uses device cfs0.
  Maybe it's only a stale pid-file left from unclean shutdown.
  Please clean up manually.

Notice the lack of any hint as to where that pidfile is. The phrase “Maybe it’s only a stale pid-file left from unclean shutdown.” doesn’t appear in a Google or a Yahoo search; I hope putting it here will fix that.

I thought I’d be smart about this. “I know!,” I said, “I’ll use strace!” (strace prints out all of the system calls that a program makes, so you can get an idea of what its inputs and outputs are.)

strace -o foo mount /path/to/mountpoint

Of course, strace revealed not a word about pidfiles, device cfs0, or the long-dead process 5824. Neither did ltrace.

Eventually I realized/remembered that mount was (fork/exec)ing mount.davfs, so strace wasn’t picking up anything that happened after the fork—which is when all of the interesting stuff happened.

Thankfully, strace has a switch that makes it hang on to all child processes: -f. So,

strace -f -o foo mount /path/to/mountpoint

…revealed the last few things that mount.davfs was doing:

6475  write(2, "\n", 1)                 = 1
6475  setresuid32(-1, 0, -1)            = 0
6475  access("/dev/cfs0", F_OK)         = 0
6475  open("/dev/cfs0", O_RDWR)         = 5
6475  chown32("/dev/cfs0", 0, 100)      = 0
6475  chmod("/dev/cfs0", 0660)          = 0
6475  getuid32()                        = 0
6475  setresuid32(-1, 0, -1)            = 0
6475  ioctl(5, CIOC_KERNEL_VERSION, 0xbffffc54) = 0
6475  open("/var/run/mount.davfs/cfs0.pid", O_RDONLY) = 6         <------ AHA!
6475  fstat64(6, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=5, ...}) = 0
6475  mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7fe8000
6475  read(6, "5852\n", 4096)           = 5
6475  write(2, "/sbin/mount.davfs: ", 19) = 19
6475  write(2, "Process 5852 already uses device"..., 129) = 129
6475  write(2, "\n", 1)                 = 1
6475  exit_group(1)                     = ?
6474  <... wait4 resumed> [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 1}], 0, NULL) = 6475
6474  --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
6474  exit_group(1)                     = ?

Note the “AHA!” above. The pidfile was in /var/run.

I have no idea how /var/ is supposed to be arranged. Some things make sense – logfiles are in /var/log, mail boxes live in /var/spool/mail (depending on your setup). But some things make no sense: mysql databases live in /var/<b>lib</b>/mysql, as if that makes any sense. (They aren’t code libraries!) I suppose that /var/run makes sense for pidfiles but why couldn’t it be something obvious like /var/pids?

(I know. I know. That would be too easy.)

Update: The source of the problem that prompted me to mount and unmount davfs2 until it died and left behind a stray pidfile was also in /var/ – the /var/cache/davfs2 directory. As it turns out, if you remove files behind davfs2’s back, it can get confused, spewing errors like this:

/sbin/mount.davfs: Connection failed, mounting anyway.  File system will only be usable when connection comes up.

When I looked at the network dumps (using tethereal "tcp port $PORT" -i lo -d tcp.port==$PORT,http -x -w path-to-output, which I highly recommend), it turned out that davfs was requesting files that I’d long since nuked. Blowing away the contents of the /var/cache/davfs2 fixed the problem. (Why the heck do these hang around between mounts, anyway?)

01:55 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web

This is what I do now that I no longer have CS problem sets

Snopes.com broke with the usual repertoire of urban legends and posted the following:

The English language has at least one nine-letter word that remains a valid word as each of its letters is successively removed.

Their solution was “startling,” with the parting note that “there may be other equally valid solutions.”

As a computer nerd, I couldn’t resist. With a quick hack, I found 13 words of length >= 9 that can be cut down to one letter, leaving a valid English word each time. (To be fair, I found 12, since “splitting” is a derivative of “splittings.”)

cleansers
discusses
drownings
scrapping
splatters
splitting
splittings
startling
starvings
strapping
stringier
trappings
wrappings

Here’s how they break down: winnowed_words.txt.

Note that “splittings” is a whopping ten letters long.

splittings
 splitting
  slitting
   sitting
    siting
     sting
      ting
       tin
        in
         i

I’m using the /usr/share/dict/american-english-large dictionary from Debian, ignoring all case and throwing out all words with apostrophes. (N.B.: american-english-large includes some unusual plural constructs like “shes” and “hes”.) I’m only counting “a” and “i” as valid one-letter words. Counting all single-letter words as valid under the self-reference rule bumps up the total by two, adding “carousels” and “flashiest,” but adding no words of length > 9.

15:00 EST | permalink | /computers/linguistics

Rick Santorum would be relieved

In cases of polygamy, only the first spouse may qualify as a spouse for immigration.

Source: U.S. Department of State

07:23 EST | permalink | /issues/immigration

The shark jumps me

I used to pride myself on coming up with awful ideas before they appeared on the Internet.

So, when I said to myself “hey, why hasn’t someone taken this mashup silliness to its logical conclusion and made a National Sex Offender Registry/Google Maps hybrid?”, I was disappointed to discover that someone had already done that.

I’m still waiting for the crimelibrary.com/Google Maps “Jeffrey Dahmer Walking Tour” mashup, though…

16:36 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web/weirdness

ph33r my 1337n355

“So…,” I said to Dan around 3:30 p.m. yesterday, “I’m sorry—I’ve got to run. I want to put this computer together so I can show the product to people by the close of business today.”




Ha.

Thirteen hours later, I now think that I might – might! – have the computer working.

This is why I didn’t go into hardware.

Some tips, so you don’t repeat my mistakes:

• Bring the laptop. Always bring the laptop. When I took the new computer from Boston to Cambridge (where it resides for now), the voice of reason won out: “Joe, it’ll only slow you down. It’s really heavy. Besides, you have another computer there. Why would you need the laptop?” Needless to say, I answered this one around 2 a.m., when I spent an hour or so trying to sort out a DHCP failure at two in the morning with two potentially-broken computers.

• Don’t move a CD-ROM drive while it’s spinning. I trashed a Knoppix CD this way. I might have even trashed the drive, because it didn’t seem to work properly after that (but it might not have been working to begin with).

• The Gigabyte GA-8I945GMF motherboard isn’t just bleeding edge, it’s freakin’ hemorrhaging wound. Linux 2.6.15 isn’t 31337 enough for it, apparently – to get the on-board Ethernet to work, I needed 2.6.16. (Note that I said “work”. 2.6.15 recognized that there was an Ethernet card, but pointedly discarded any data I tried to send through it. An ancient 3COM boomerang card (which I fortunately had snagged from MIT reuse some months back) did work, though.

• On that same note, if you’re trying to use the motherboard with both PATA (IDE) and SATA devices, make sure you switch the “On-Chop SATA Mode” to “Enhanced”. Otherwise, you’ll get delightful errors: after I booted the Debian installer from CD, it would complain that it couldn’t find a CD-ROM drive. No, I’m not making this up.

• After I managed to get the OS installed and booted, the kernel started spewing KERN_EMERG errors (“CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode” “CPU0: Temperature above threshold”) to the console. Googling confirmed that these are generated by the processor when it thinks it’s overheating. A gob of thermal paste didn’t help matters, but reseating the heatsink did. It’s not as though you have to push the heatsink anchors down hard. You have to push them down really really really damned hard. I could have sworn I was going to ruin the motherboard — which would have been one of the least fun, but not the least fun, experience I’ve had for $90. (According to Intel, you’re supposed to mount the heatsink after installing the motherboard in the chassis – so it’s anchored a half-inch above the case by a bunch of screws, and has a lot more room to bend than if it were on the floor.) After I managed to get the confirmatory click from all of the anchors, I haven’t seen the CPU core temperature rise above 52 degrees. (Yet. I’m sure it will spike as soon as I publish this, just to spite me.)

• I actually had a related problem with an AMD processor last year (which is why I had the thermal paste.) I should have learned my lesson: buy nothing bigger than a Pentium II. Any speed gains from the speedier processor are more than consumed by the trouble of getting the faster one not to burn up.

• I have a newfound respect for the guys who immersed their entire computer in cooking oil as a new form of liquid cooling. I’d link to them, except that I don’t have a web browser. (I’m typing this at the console. Did you think I was enough of a masochist to try to get X11 working on this thing?)

• I now have the urge to rig up the computer to send me an SMS message if the CPU core temperature gets too high. I’m not sure what’s worse: that I know how to do this, or that I am tempted to do so.

All in all, I’m amazed that there are so many Internet sites that publish twenty-page articles comparing heat sinks or motherboards or processors – or anything else that requires you to take apart and reassemble the heatsink-mobo-processor combo more often than absolutely necessary. (I mean, as far as unpleasant hobbies go, at least being a fire-eater or a shock rocker gets you the chicks, right? I am unaware of anyone, anywhere, of any gender, ever having been seduced by a tricked-out PC.)

05:13 EST | permalink | /computers/hardware

Here’s one for the search engines

As googling for the neologism “Tilghwoman” will confirm, Google appears to have dropped the online archive of Tiger PDFs from my junior year at Princeton. Perhaps the link above will fix that.

(Interestingly, as of this writing, Yahoo!’s search engine still returns a hit for “Tilghwoman”. Score one for Yahoo.)

03:44 EST | permalink | /academics/princeton