Recently the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the (Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation) continued to allow another fund manager, Alan Brian Bond, to manage $50 million for eighteen months after the New York money manager had been indicted in a high-publicity kickback scheme. This prompted Democratic State Senator Marc Dann to craft a bill requiring BWC administrators to Google the investment managers once a month to make sure they haven’t been indicted.

If you thought Google Maps and the corresponding satellite images were cool then you’ll be hard-pressed to find a word to describe the experience of using Google Earth. Before you get too excited, do check to see if your computer meets the current requirements.

I don’t think you have to be a geography geek like me (I did take four years of high school geography after all) to appreciate this service. It’s amazing. You can zoom in more than on GMaps, you can tilt the image, you can get driving directions superimposed on the satellite images, you can get road names added, dining options included and much more.

In line with this article in today’s NYTimes, neither the directions nor some of the locations of things are always correct, but they’re close. Go play.

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“Alex Tabarrok”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/06/krugman_beneath.html denounces Paul Krugman as an “illiberal demagogue” who has forgotten his heritage as an economist. The reason: Krugman’s claim that China is a strategic rival, and his recommendation that the Chinese bid for Unocal be blocked. Now I’m far from being an expert on Asian politics, and so won’t pronounce on the substance of whether Krugman is right or wrong on this specific issue. But I do think it’s fair to say that there’s another term than “illiberal demagogue” for someone who believes that strategic concerns trump trade interests when push comes to shove. That term is “mainstream international relations specialist.” The kind of “doux commerce” liberalism that Alex seems to favour has been out of fashion in IR theory since Norman Angell’s (somewhat unfairly) ballyhooed _The Great Illusion_ .

If I understand Alex correctly, he’s telling us that economics, which likes to portray itself as a rationalistic and impartial approach to the understanding of human behaviour, is at its core a set of normative arguments for the increase of trade and commerce, and against the pursuit of a certain kind of ‘irrational’ self-interest. I think that Alex is largely right on this – though many economists wouldn’t admit it (and one is faced with the interesting question of whether scholars like, say, Dani Rodrik, are economists under Alex’s definition of the term). But it leads to the interesting question of when economists’ prescriptions for free trade over strategic manoeuvre are in fact the right prescriptions. On the one hand, posturing and mutual distrust can lead to a downward spiral and thus to war, in circumstances where peaceful commerce might otherwise have been possible. And it may well be, as Alex believes, that you can reconstruct people’s beliefs away from war, and towards peaceful exchange by substituting the voices of liberal economists for those of “mercantilists, imperialists and ‘national greatness’ warriors.”* On the other, if one state _does_ see politics as a zero-sum game and is unlikely to be persuaded otherwise, then it may be a big mistake to concede strategic resources to that state – it may use them against you later. This is of course the reason that international trade in, say, advanced weapons systems, does not resemble a free market (whether control over oil companies is a similarly sensitive strategic asset, I’ll leave to the discussion section). Which means that if Alex wants to make a convincing case that Krugman isn’t just making a claim that runs against the usual normative biases of economists, but is actually wrong on the merits here, he needs to provide more evidence than an argument-by-assertion that China is now “moving” from war to trade. As stated above, I’m not a China expert, but from what I do know, this is very much an open debate.

* interestingly, those in international relations theory who make this sort of claim are usually vehemently opposed to economic reasoning.

Dan Nexon’s “evisceration”:http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2005/06/dangers-of-talking-points-rnc-defense.html of the RNC memo defending Karl Rove.

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case in which journalists have appealed against a ruling that they should either reveal anonymous sources or go to jail. A noteworthy feature of the NY Times treatment of the story is the presentation of the issue in terms of whether journalists are entitled to special protection not available to bloggers. At the end of the story Rodney A. Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond School of Law is quoted as follows

The federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court down, has grown very skeptical of any claim that the institutional press is deserving of First Amendment protection over and above those of ordinary citizens … The rise of the Internet and blogger culture may have contributed to that. It makes it more difficult to draw lines between the traditional professional press and those who disseminate information from their home computers.

The failure of journalists to establish a special exemption raises the more general question of whether and when people should be compelled to reveal details of their private conversations. If constitutional limits are to be imposed on such questioning, it may be better to derive them from the right to privacy in general rather than the specific claims of the press. Alternatively, and perhaps preferably, it might be better for the legislature to provide a public interest exemption of some kind.

On the same topic, I was going to respond to this piece by Margaret Simons about bloggers and journalists but, as often happens, Tim Dunlop has written exactly what I would have said, only better.

* And nowadays everyone does

Something that I’ve been wondering about for a while. Google Ads don’t necessarily match their advertisements to websites in quite the manner that you’d expect, presumably because of the way that its underlying algorithm works. “Brad DeLong’s site”:http://delong.typepad.com/, for example, seems to have become the new in-spot for Republican and Conservative singles to hook up with each other, while “Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/log/ rather improbably provides a venue for union-busting specialists to connect with their core clientele in the business community. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if many of Nathan’s readers make a habit of clicking on the link to “Union-Free Labor Relations Training” on a regular basis. After all, each time that they do, a small sum of money presumably disappears from the advertising budget of a rather slimy organization, and reappears (after Google deducts its cut) in Nathan’s Paypal account. Now personally, I’ve no problems with that. But does this undermine the rationale behind using Google Ads for politically targetted advertising? Left-leaning blogs are likely to “sound” Republican to Google’s algorithm because of the frequency with which they mention Republican politicians (and Republican blogs will sound left-wing). Thus, they’re likely to attract a disproportionate number of ads which are aimed at exactly the wrong population. Many of the people who read these blogs are unlikely to want to click on the ads for any sincere motives. The same, of course, is true for right wing blogs harping on how horrible the Democrats are; again they’ll appear to be “good” bets to an automated algorithm for advertisements aimed at leftwingers, unless that algorithm is sophisticated indeed.

Unless Google changes its algorithm, I can’t imagine any easy technical way of distinguishing ‘fake’ clickthroughs from real ones, except in the most straightforward of cases (e.g. the same person at the same IP address repeatedly clicking on an ad again and again). Now this may in reality be a non-problem – I’ve seen no data on it- but in principle, Google Ads seems to me to be quite vulnerable to politically motivated attacks, which could prove quite expensive for the advertisers.

The other day I found myself in the curious position of having to prove that I had been on a flight in order to be allowed to return home. The only explanation I could come up with for the airline having no record of my presence on the flight there is that the gate agent had failed to scan in my boarding pass. As far as I can tell I had done everything “by the book”. In this day and age of being tracked in so many situations and so many ways, I found it an interesting twist that I could think of no way of proving (no way that the ticketing agent seemed to find satisfactory) that I had, indeed, been on the plane and should be allowed to return home on my originally scheduled flight. Details follow.

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“David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/opinion/26brooks.html?ex=1277438400&en=52bbe1eeacc48d40&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss on the merits of Bush’s Africa policy.

bq. The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching – from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek – to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning. … The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasize nonmaterial causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate the crooked timber of humanity – that human beings are not simply organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their own that usually defy planners. You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish.

The crucial – and rather disingenuous – qualifier is “at least when it comes to Africa policy.” Even Brooks doesn’t have the chutzpah to defend Bush’s overall foreign policy approach as an exemplar of Burkean prudence and appreciation for the complexity of other societies. On which, see further a rather interesting article by leftwing rabblerouser “John Hulsman”:http://www.heritage.org/About/Staff/JohnHulsman.cfm and Anatol Lieven “forthcoming”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/12/cons-vs-neo-cons/ in the Summer 2005 issue of _The National Interest_. But even on Brooks’ chosen turf – the Bush administration’s Africa policy and the Millenium Challenge Account initiative – there’s little positive to be said from a principled conservative stance. Burke, Oakeshott and other traditional conservatives are notoriously hostile to grand abstractions and keen on practical results. Over the last four years, the Millennium Challenge Account has yielded plenty of airy rhetoric, but no practical results worth talking about. This is for the simple reason that it still scarcely exists. The problems of implementation that Brooks, in fairness, acknowledges in passing, stem from the fact that the Bush administration has “obligated only 2%”:http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2005/05/compassionate_c.html of the Millennium Challenge funds. Nor has the administration requested the $5 billion that Bush promised in any of the four budgets submitted to Congress after the initiative was announced. As of April 29 not “one dollar”:http://www.democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-doc.cfm?doc_name=fs-109-1-24 of Millennium Challenge Account money had reached a developing nation. While an appreciation that complex societies can’t be “rescued from above by technocratic planning” is a fine and wonderful place to begin thinking about how to improve development aid, it can also be a highly convenient excuse for doing nothing. For all the bluster about Burke, Hayek and Oakeshott, the development-aid-as-vaporware approach seems at the moment to be well explained by a simpler theory of “conservatism as moral philosophy”:http://chatna.com/theme/conservatives.htm ; that its primary characteristic is “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

(hat tip – “p o’neill”:http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/ )

I found it curious that in March of this year The New York Times mentioned the Web site BugMeNot.com in an article on sidestepping life’s little annoyances. Curiously, a new NYTimes article (scroll down to the bottom of the page) published this weekend repeats this recommendation.

For those not in the know, BugMeNot helps you find a username and password for sites that require registration. This means that you can proceed to viewing articles on, say, sites like nytimes.com without having to create an account for yourself on such sites.

Firefox users may be interested in this helpful extension that allows one-click use of BugMeNot. When you are on a page with a form for entering your username and password, place the cursor in the username or password box, right click on the mouse (or do the corresponding equivalent on a Mac) and you get a BugMeNot option in the menu. Select it and the form will be filled in automatically with registration information.

“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/ links to a “terrific paper”:http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.html by E.M. Purcell called “Life at Low Reynolds Number.” The Reynolds Number is, roughly, the ratio of intertia to viscosity in fluids, and if you want to learn more about it I strongly urge you to read the rest of the talk for yourself. I learned about the Reynolds Number in graduate school. It’s not something they teach sociologists, as a rule, but I discovered during my first year that Princeton University Press often had sales at the University Store. Because I am in inveterate dilettante — er, I mean, polymath — I picked up a great book by “Steven Vogel”:http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/svogel called “Life’s Devices”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691024189/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.

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What with Tom Cruise and his Scientology-driven antipathy to psychiatric medicine “in the news”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8344309/ recently, it might be worth revisiting an old post about the claims that Scientology makes for its founder, the appalling L. Ron Hubbard.

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“Well it wasn’t just the selection was it?”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4618309.stm Those debates had mainly been around the backs, but since the Lions never got near the ball, Henson probably wouldn’t have made much difference. O’Driscoll knackered within 90 seconds was a blow, but the real difference was the ability of the All Blacks both to get the ball and to handle it even in the torrential rain. Will Woodward change the selection? Comments open.

I just finished reading Rick Perlstein’s “The Stock Ticker and the Super Jumbo”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0976147505-0 yesterday (an earlier version of the essay and the various responses is available “here”:http://bostonreview.net/BR29.3/contents.html, but buy the book if you can for extra post-election analysis goodness). It’s a great read, and a smart essay, but I think it buries its real argument.
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Roger Scruton has an “immensely enjoyable”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=6290&page=4 , sometimes insightful, occasionally brutally stupid, and often deleriously silly article on Jean-Paul Sartre in the latest Spectator (registration required). After reading it you could always revisit Paul Jennings’s splendid “Report on Resistentialism”:http://www31.brinkster.com/yewtree/resources/resistentialism.htm .