It sounds intruiging, but is it true?

Americans and Chinese Differ in Their World View--Literally

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that whereas North Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal object, East Asians are generally more holistic, giving more consideration to the context. Researchers have not known, however, whether these differences originate during the encoding, retrieval, or mental comparison stages of perceptual-cognitive processing, or whether they might even be the result of reporting bias....

Nisbett and his collaborators posit that these differences in attention to object and context arise through socialization practices. "East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning," the scientists observe. "In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context."

Glad to Hear It

Even in China, Feng Shui Disharmony: A university's plans for a training program in the ancient practice raise scorn for 'a fake science.' By Don Lee

The pathways of centuries-old tombs follow the pattern of the Big Dipper's seven stars. Countless homes and modern buildings sport mirrors to deflect bad energy and outdoor fountains to guide riches inside.

So when a university here joined this month with a government agency to offer training in the 3,000-year-old practice of harmonizing buildings with nature, it seemed as natural as, well, feng and shui, or wind and water.

Instead, it has triggered a backlash.

"This is really ridiculous," scoffed Chen Zhihua, an architect and professor at prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing. "It's a fake science…. It only makes money for some swindlers."

Ge Jianxiong, an eminent geography professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, likened feng shui to dregs that have floated up to the surface.

"This shouldn't be happening," he said.

He's right. It's sheer superstition.

Love It or Leave It?

In America Still Beckons, Joel Kotkin writes,

Europe may be a great place to visit, but U.S. emigration to the continent is paltry—while the reverse flow from Europe to the United States remains at consistently high levels even with the somewhat bothersome screenings imposed after 9/11. While Europeans are no longer the primary immigrants to the U.S. (that role having been taken over by Latin Americans and Asians), they remain an important factor in the continuing re-invention of America.

I wonder what the stats are.

Update. This is all I could find. Like a lot of topics, the more one looks, the more complicated things get.

Correlation is not causation II

Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? (Not So Fast) By GINA KOLATA

The diet messages are everywhere: the National Cancer Institute has an "Eat 5 to 9 a Day for Better Health" program, the numbers referring to servings of fruits and vegetables, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation has a detailed anticancer diet.

Yet despite the often adamant advice, scientists say they really do not know whether dietary changes will make a difference. And there lies a quandary for today's medicine. It is turning out to be much more difficult than anyone expected to discover if diet affects cancer risk. Hypotheses abound, but convincing evidence remains elusive.

Most of the proposed dietary changes are unlikely to be harmful - less meat, more fish, more fruits and vegetables and less fat. And these changes in diet may help protect against heart disease, even if they have no effect on cancer.

...

Most people want some sort of control, a way to prevent the disease from ever striking them or, if it does strike, to keep it from recurring.

Correlation is not causation I

Tim Cavanaugh writes,

...a new study indicating that higher rates of religious belief translate into higher rates of homicide, STD transmission, non-lethal violent crime, and assorted other signs of dysfunction...Like religion itself, this study fulfills a spiritual need (the need to diagnose Americans as bible-pounding dummies), but delivers a lot less than it promises.

"A spiritual need." That's great. So many people need something to hate.

Typical Crap

A Trend So New It's Old By Jack Shafer debunks the LOUISE STORY story:

Story says she conducted the survey from November 2004 to January 2005 while at Columbia. Earlier this week, the editors of Gelf Magazine posted a list of questions from the survey, and remarked how some of them were "loaded," that is, likely to produce a biased result. For instance, the first question—"When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?"—assumes that the respondents intend to have children.

Story says she revised the survey after its weaknesses were pointed out to her. But in her final tabulation, she retained the responses from about 30 women who answered the first survey because, she said, the responses didn't vary significantly from those given to the revised version. She concedes the survey wasn't conducted with social-science rigor but calls it "a very good journalistic questionnaire."

The problem with Story's e-mail survey is not that she asked a lot of students questions. Reporters are supposed to ask lots of people questions. But if a journalist wants readers to be impressed by numbers like "roughly 60 percent," they must 1) say who collected the numbers and 2) explain how the numbers were collected. The Times and Story failed the reader by not stating that these findings were about as anecdotal and impressionistic as, say, the findings of a columnist like David S. Broder based on 100 interviews he conducted in Iowa to take the state's political temperature. Broder would never write, "roughly 60 percent of 100 Iowans interviewed believe the president is doing a bad job," because a hard number indicates that such numerical findings have real significance (especially when their source is not divulged). Instead, Broder would typically place the results in their proper anecdotal context, by using a phrase like "most of the Iowans I met with. ..." That would dispel the misapprehension that he thought his interviews had the same footing as as a Gallup poll. Story, on the other hand, presented her results to sound like good sociology.

Story has strong and adamant defenders. Master's adviser Sylvia Nasar, a former Times reporter, accuses me of "shooting first and asking questions later"....

Story wrote for the Times business section over the summer. Her Times colleague, the much decorated David Cay Johnston, is a major fan of her work. "Among the young journalists I have mentored over the past three decades, Louise Story is in a league by herself," he writes in an e-mail. She quickly grasps "subtle issues at the level of theory and principle whose significance and context she writes about in plain English."

Read on for further debunking. The Times calls this journalism? (And I fell for it! Typical me!)

About 2 Minutes

Over-Ruled: When There's No One to Ask, Just Do It By David Brown

It's difficult to say what specific actions might have made what degree of difference. But it seems that there was a dearth of big, risky and unambiguous decisions by mid-level responders -- managers or intermediate officials with some resources potentially under their control, who had the greatest opportunity to do the right thing at the right time. Instead, there was an excess of waiting for leadership and coordination.

You say letting people throw the switches whenever they think the time is right is a recipe for anarchy? Certainly it can be under normal circumstances. But a hurricane's aftermath creates abnormal circumstances. Anarchy is what happens when people are left without the essentials for life -- and are terrified to boot. They find their own stocks of water and food (and guns and drugs and liquor, too).

The unfortunate truth is, when a 100-year hurricane hits a city that is poor and violent under the best of circumstances, if the people in charge don't break the rules, the people who aren't in charge will. It seems at least possible that there would have been less disorder after the storm if more people had put their hunches and reputations on the line before and during it.

Of course there were examples of constructive rule-breaking in the Katrina disaster zone. One of the more memorable involved the mayor of Gulfport, Miss., who, as reported in this newspaper,ordered his police chief to hot-wire a privately owned fuel truck and move it onto city property. One of the more incredible was the report in the New York Times about two Navy helicopter pilots who, after delivering food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast, heard a radio transmission saying helicopters were needed to rescue people in New Orleans. Out of radio range of their commanders and unable to get permission, they nevertheless went to the rescue of about 100 people. When they got back they were reprimanded, according to the article. One pilot was grounded and put in charge of overseeing a kennel holding the pets of evacuated service members.

There were others. Some search-and-rescue teams agreed to carry out pets -- against the rules -- because they knew it was the only way the animals' owners would leave.

But why weren't there more examples of ingenuity and initiative? Aren't Americans historically a people who don't bow to authority, who do things their own way? Isn't that part of the mythology of American restlessness, inventiveness and westward migration?

From what I've seen -- in daily life, as well as in my reporting -- two things have poisoned American decisiveness, at least in the public sector.

One is the consciousness of legal liability that has permeated our culture in the most astonishing way...

Another reason many Americans in authority hesitate to make risky decisions is the fear of criticism and even public humiliation -- at the hands of the news media, late-night comedians and, now, the nonstop cacophony of the blogosphere....

Five days after the hurricane, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official ordered Mark N. Perlmutter, a 50-year-old orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania, to stop treating patients on the tarmac of the New Orleans airport because he had not filled out the proper paperwork. He protested, explaining that the woman he had just diagnosed with diabetic ketoacidosis might die without immediate intravenous fluids and insulin. But he was led away. The official said to him, "We cannot guarantee tort liability protection," Perlmutter told me yesterday.

After learning that on-site certification wasn't yet possible, the doctor was allowed to return to the tarmac and get his medical instruments. The woman, who was semi-conscious when he'd first seen her, was dead, Perlmutter said. He then flew to Baton Rouge in a helicopter and got certified, a process he said "took about two minutes."

In Case I Need to Buy a Car

Car Buying Mistakes cites 10 common car-buying mistakes from Consumer Reports. He also suggests CarFax.

There's also Buying a New Car which advocates

soliciting bids from all dealerships within about two hours of here. What follows is an example of the sort of message that I send. You should either direct it to the sales manager, or send it via e-mail to their internet sales person.

Somewhere along the line I was directed to the scams discussed at CarBuyingTips.com and Fighting Chance.

My current favorites are the Pontiac Vibe, the Volkswagen Jetta wagon, and the Subaru Impreza Wagon, but it looks as if they've stopped making the Jetta as a wagon. I used Intellichoice & Edmunds.com to come up with this list.

The "problem" of "price gouging"

Price Gouging Saves Lives by David M. Brown

After Charley cut his swath through central Florida, hundreds of thousands of central Florida residents were unexpectedly deprived of electrical power and therefore of refrigeration. Hence the huge increase in demand for ice.

Let us postulate that a small Orlando drug store has ten bags of ice in stock that, prior to the storm, it had been selling for $4.39 a bag. Of this stock it could normally expect to sell one or two bags a day. In the wake of Hurricane Charley, however, ten local residents show up at the store over the course of a day to buy ice. Most want to buy more than one bag.

So what happens? If the price is kept at $4.39 a bag because the drugstore owner fears the wrath of State Attorney General Charlie Crist and the finger wagging of local news anchors, the first five people who want to buy ice might obtain the entire stock. The first person buys one bag, the second person buys four bags, the third buys two bags, the fourth buys two bags, and the fifth buys one bag. The last five people get no ice. Yet one or more of the last five applicants may need the ice more desperately than any of the first five.

But suppose the store owner is operating in an unhampered market. Realizing that many more people than usual will now demand ice, and also realizing that with supply lines temporarily severed it will be difficult or impossible to bring in new supplies of ice for at least several days, he resorts to the expedient of raising the price to, say, $15.39 a bag.

Now customers will act more economically with respect to the available supply. Now, the person who has $60 in his wallet, and who had been willing to pay $17 to buy four bags of ice, may be willing to pay for only one or two bags of ice (because he needs the balance of his ready cash for other immediate needs). Some of the persons seeking ice may decide that they have a large enough reserve of canned food in their homes that they don't need to worry about preserving the one pound of ground beef in their freezer. They may forgo the purchase of ice altogether, even if they can "afford" it in the sense that they have twenty-dollar bills in their wallets. Meanwhile, the stragglers who in the first scenario lacked any opportunity to purchase ice will now be able to.

Note that even if the drug store owner guesses wrong about what the price of his ice should be, under this scenario vendors throughout central Florida would all be competing to find the right price to meet demand and maximize their profits. Thus, if the tenth person who shows up at the drugstore desperately needs ice and barely misses his chance to buy ice at the drugstore in our example, he still has a much better chance to obtain ice down the street at some other place that has a small reserve of ice.

Indeed, under this second scenario—the market scenario—vendors are scrambling to make ice available and to advertise that availability by whatever means available to them given the lack of power. Vendors who would have stayed home until power were generally restored might now go to heroic lengths to keep their stores open and make their surviving stocks available to consumers.

The "problem" of "price gouging" will not be cured by imposing rationing along with price controls, either. Rationing of price-controlled ice would still maintain an artificially low price for ice, so the day after the storm hits there would still be no economic incentive for ice vendors to scramble to keep ice available given limited supplies that cannot be immediately replenished. And while it is true that rationing might prevent the person casually purchasing four bags of ice from obtaining all four of those bags (at least from one store with a particularly diligent clerk), the rationing would also prevent the person who desperately needs four bags of ice from getting it.

Combined total: One

How many people were murdered in the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center? One.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords

A snowclone.

One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Written by David Mirkin

李敖

Friendship visit by ally of China turns into blistering lecture By Joseph Kahn

China's leaders may have felt they had no better friend in Taiwan than Li Ao, a defiant and outspoken politician and author who says that Taiwan should unify with Communist China. But when the Chinese government invited Li to tour the mainland this past week, the Communist Party got a taste of its rival's pungent democracy.

During an address at Beijing University on Wednesday, broadcast live on a cable television network, Li chided China's leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration's fear of academic debate and advised students on how to fight for freedom against official repression.

...

The Chinese government invited Li as part of its attempt to court Taiwan notables who are opposed to attempts by President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan to move the island toward formal independence. The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, rolled out the red carpet for three Taiwanese opposition party leaders this spring, an overture that helped soften support for Chen's agenda.

He had challenged the Nationalists, or Kuomintang, when they governed Taiwan as a one-party state, and served time in prison in the 1970s. When Taiwan became a democracy, he attacked those who supported separatism.

But when he arrived in mainland China, he surprised his hosts with caustic comments aimed not at Taiwanese separatism, but at mainland authoritarianism. Though Li did not criticize Hu directly, he made pointed references to the lack of freedoms in mainland China and suggested that "poker-faced" Communist Party bureaucrats do not have enough faith in their legitimacy to allow normal intellectual discussion.

With several top university officials sitting by his side, he called the administrators "cowardly" for ferreting out professors at the school who are suspected of opposing communism.

Though his arrival in mainland China was covered prominently by the state-run media and his speech was viewed on television by millions around China, the authorities imposed a blackout on reporting about his visit after the speech.

An overly literal translation here.

Better than Most People Think

In Knowledge Deficit, Russell Roberts writes:

What proportion of the American labor force earns the minimum wage or less and what is the standard of living of the average American today relative to 100 years ago?

Even among highly-educated groups such as journalists or congressional staffers, the median answer is depressingly similar -- they think 20% of the American work force earns the minimum wage or less. In fact, the actual number is something less than 3%. Usually a non-trivial portion of each group thinks that our material well-being is lower today than 100 years ago. Their median answer is that we are 50% better off than we were 100 years ago. In fact, the average American is at least five and maybe 30 times better off than we were in the good old days.

Here are a couple of Economic Literacy Tests:

• 1
• 2

Dirty White Slut

Offensive map removed

A publisher has withdrawn tourist maps from CKS International Airport showing a pop singer with a profanity on her T-shirt, the company said yesterday. The free map of Taipei shows singer Vivian Hsu (徐若瑄) wearing a pink sleeveless T-shirt with the words "dirty white slut" printed on it in gothic letters, a pink cap and hot pants. The words seemed to refer to promiscuity. The map's publisher, the Vision Group, said there had been no complaints about the slogan, but it had still decided to remove the maps from the airport. "The person responsible for issuing the map didn't understand English, but when we saw the picture, we thought it better to withdraw it from circulation," a company spokeswoman said. The map is still available at some hotels in Taipei, though. "We have no right to interfere with the hotels, they make their own decision about the map," she said.

I don't consider "slut" a profanity; this is typical Taiwanese over-reaction. At the same time, I can't see why so many are all agog over this ordinary-looking girl.

Pork

A report on Marketplace talks about "Operation Offset" and mentions Porkbusters. There was a segment on the news about cutting spending that didn't mention either of these, but a reporter called various congressmen who mostly refused to cut anything. But I can't find the report.

A greater role for government?

'Animal spirits' with Chinese characteristics By Mark A DeWeaver

In one of the twentieth century's most influential books, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that investor decision-making is often influenced more by "the mass psychology of the market" and "animal spirits" than by rationally formed expectations of future returns. This led him to conclude that "the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands." Instead, he called for a greater role for government policy in guiding capital allocation decisions on the grounds that this would greatly reduce investment volatility and thus help to eliminate boom-bust economic cycles.

...

China's economic reforms since 1978 have done away with many of the features of the old centrally planned economy, but investment continues to be highly volatile. While the introduction of asset markets has created new speculative distortions, the old policy cycle continues to operate as well. When policy is loose, overinvestment is encouraged by local officials, whose decisions are influenced by opportunities for promotion, competition for tax revenue, or even bribery. At the same time, the ability of managers to siphon off profits while leaving the state to bear losses encourages excessive risk-taking. Later, when policy is tightened, local government activities and enterprise-financing come under increased scrutiny by the central government and boom turns to bust.

DeWeaver presents these possible causes:

• desire for promotion plays a big part: cadres tend to be rewarded for economic growth in their areas
• competition for tax revenues
• bribes from contractors
• kickbacks from suppliers
• corruption in financing overinvestment: managers are frequently in a position to use bank funds for private businesses
• situations in which "the manager is responsible for profits, while the state is responsible for losses"

DeWeaver concludes:

Contrary to what Keynes believed, in China state control of investment has not only failed to tame the "animal spirits" of the free market but is actually a source of additional instability. During the command economy period, leaving the "duty of ordering the current volume of investment" in the hands of the central government produced some of the worst economic disasters on record. Subsequently, it has also become clear that this duty cannot safely be left in the hands of local government officials given the perverse nature of their incentive structures. And while speculative investment using one's own money must at some point be limited by fear of loss, for someone in a position to misappropriate state funds with impunity, the optimal "volume of investment" is practically infinite.

Whose Fault?

Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding By Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser

...scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans.

That sounds like the Army Corps of Engineers to me. But

John M. Barry -- who criticized the Corps in "Rising Tide," a history of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 -- said that if Katrina did not exceed the design capacity of the New Orleans levees, the federal government may bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.

And he's the last source quoted in the article.

What if you can't get them to work?

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood By LOUISE STORY

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

And yet people complain that women are outnumbered by men in many professions. But if many of them don't see the need to work, there will be less of them working, right?

Who could have done better?

Let Wal-Mart take over emergency management By John Tierney

If you mention the Red Cross or FEMA to people in Slidell [La.], you hear rants about help that didn't arrive and phone lines that are always busy. If you mention state or national politicians, you hear obscenities.

But if you visit the Wal-Mart and the Sam's Club stores here, you hear shoppers who have been without power for weeks marveling that there are still generators in stock (and priced at $304.04). You hear about the trucks that rolled in right after the hurricane and the stuff the stores gave away: chain saws and boots for rescue workers, sheets and clothes for shelters, water and ice for the public.

"This was the only place we could find water those first days," said Rashan Smith, who was shopping with her three children at Wal-Mart on Saturday. "I still haven't managed to get through to FEMA. It's hard to say, but you get more justice at Wal-Mart."

...

[Bill] Clinton looks back on the 1990s as FEMA's Age of Pericles. "I think we did a good job of disaster management," he said on ABC's "This Week." While criticizing the Bush administration for leaving poor people stranded in New Orleans, he said that he and his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, had been especially sensitive to the needs of poor people because of their own backgrounds.

But if they cared so much, why didn't New Orleans ever work out a feasible way to evacuate poor people? FEMA had a golden opportunity to plan it during the 1990s. The threat of nuclear war had receded and terrorism wasn't yet a priority, so the agency's biggest concerns should have been an earthquake in California and a flood in New Orleans.

But it was too busy dealing with the record number of other "disasters" that Clinton declared - an average of one a week, which meant FEMA was mailing out checks for every flash flood within range of a major media market. Upstate New Yorkers suddenly became incapable of coping with the cost of snow removal.

In 1997, Congress gave FEMA $500,000 and ordered it to develop a comprehensive plan to evacuate New Orleans. The agency passed on the money to Louisiana, which used it instead to study building a new bridge. As Rita Beamish of The Associated Press reported on Sunday, FEMA didn't bother making sure a plan was drawn up - an aide to Witt said its job had just been to pass on the money.

How often do you suppose someone at Wal-Mart headquarters dispenses $500,000 and doesn't bother keeping track of it? It's legendary for tracking every transaction and pinching every penny.

For those who don't know what the Age of Pericles is.

Rita Beamish's Congressional order to map plan to evacuate New Orleans ignored

In Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, attention has focused on the inability of local and federal officials to evacuate or prepare for the large number of poor people, many of them minorities, who had no access to transportation and remained behind.

That possibility was one of the concerns that led Congress in 1997 to set aside $500,000 for FEMA to create "a comprehensive analysis and plan of all evacuation alternatives for the New Orleans metropolitan area."

Frustrated two years later that nothing materialized, Congress strengthened its directive. This time it ordered "an evacuation plan for a Category 3 or greater storm, a levee break, flood or other natural disaster for the New Orleans area."

The $500,000 that Congress appropriated for the evacuation plan went to a commission that studied future options for the 24-mile bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said. The hefty report produced by the Greater New Orleans Expressway Commission "primarily was not about evacuation," said Robert Lambert, the general manager for the bridge expressway. "In general it was an overview of all the things we need to do" for the causeway through 2016...

Asked why the congressional mandate was never fulfilled, Barry Scanlon, senior vice president in the consulting firm of former FEMA Director James Lee Witt, said he believes the agency did what it needed when it gave the money to the state.

"FEMA received an earmark which it processed through to the state as instructed by Congress," Scanlon said. Witt is now a private consultant to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco on the Katrina aftermath.

Partly True

Grade inflation - a mark of human kindness is actually about executive pay. Let's see if what the author says is actually true of academic grades.

Grade inflation, - as well as executive remuneration and audits, are the inevitable product of benign human nature, of pleasant social interactions and of self interested commercial ones. But some institutional structures invite grade inflation and others resist it.

Why has the grade point average of American college students, like English A-level scores, been rising? Why has executive remuneration outstripped the earnings of other employees? Why have audit standards been falling? The answer to all these questions is the same. Grade inflation occurs whenever one group of human beings is asked to comment on the performance of another.

• The "Lake Wobegon effect" (named after the fatuous Garrison Keillor’s mythical prairie town where all the children are above average). "Dedicated instructors sympathise with their students, effective boards support their chief executives, good accountants not only count the profits but make an effort to understand the business....But no complex maths is required to see that if people are picking numbers that are, on average, above the average of everyone’s pick, that average will steadily increase."
• The second component of grade inflation is Goodhart’s Law (when an aggregate becomes a target its significance immediately changes). "Students will focus on the particular skills on which they are measured. [And that's a bad thing?--pkd]...People learn to do the things that are required of them, and so it is with examination performance. The only antidote to Goodhart’s Law is the balanced scorecard – use different indicators and change them frequently. [But if we want to teach certain skills, we test them on those!?--pkd]"
• Grade inflation is also the product of competition. Competition improves performance and mostly this is good: it leads to lower prices and shorter queues at the checkout. But the process has perverse results when the product is performance measurement, and the buyer is the person whose performance is being measured. If Professor Nice gives all his students As, and Professor Nasty gives all her students Cs, then students will prefer to enrol with Professor Nice. Not only does this increase the average grade, but it puts pressure on Professor Nasty to conform. [Too true.--pkd]