Articles!

A quick article dump to start the day’s blogging activities.

”Sarah Palin's $159,050 Conflict of Interest” - Todd Palin is currently racing a “snow machine” 1,971 miles across Alaska, during which his “Arctic Cat's powerful two-stroke engine will emit the same amount of hydrocarbons as an automobile driving from Chicago to San Francisco and back 150 times.” Fantastic. And it only gets trashier and more polluting. First, the pollution: “[During the race] Todd Palin will release as many cancer-causing and smog-forming pollutants as a Chevy Malibu driven around the Earth at its equator 28 times.” Now, the conflict of interest: the race is sponsored by “[…] the petroleum giants Tesoro and Conoco-Phillips; State Farm, Wells Fargo, Frontier Airlines, Alaska Airlines and the Alaska First National Bank.” You may be saying, “But you are not being fair. Maybe the Palins do not get a shady benefit from this.” Well, Todd is an annual competitor (seemingly surprising for a race with a field of 40 people willing to do this kind of evil to the environment) who has only one four times. “Once after Sarah was elected to the Wasilla City Council, once after she was elected mayor, the year she was appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, and the year she was elected governor.” Okay, okay, maybe I jumped the gun. Sorry for trying to shame such an upstanding family.

“Video Games Are Good For Children – EU Report” - Nothing too surprising here, but it is nice to have confirmation of something I believe: An EU panel determined that "’video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society.’" Yay! An excuse to play more video games!

Unemployment as stimulus -
“A Novel Approach: Using Unemployment Benefits as a Means for Stimulus” – An interesting plan to maximize the benefits created by unemployment payments: instead of paying out cash to an unemployed person for a set amount of time provide that person with a voucher that subsidizes them as an employee. For example, assume Mr. Doe is unemployed and receives $200 each week in unemployment payments ant that were anyone to hire Mr. Doe it would cost that firm $500 each week, a (made-up) prohibitive amount. The likely outcome here is that he remains unemployed. But if Mr. Doe can suddenly walk into an interview and say, “Instead of costing you $500 each week I will only cost you $300 each week and the money that would have been my unemployment check is now paying the other $200 of the salary.” Obviously this has limitations (e.g. what happens when Mr. Doe’s salary is no longer subsidized?), but in the short term this plan creates a greater overall income, implying a greater overall level of consumption, for the same government investment. At the same time it increases the overall production level of the economy.

“Big Satellites Collide 500 Miles Over Siberia” – This story seems pretty ridiculous at first, though it does highlight the very real concern of the volume of junk orbiting Earth. Apparently a non-functional Russian satellite launched in 1993 and described as “[…] out of control” crashed into a commercial satellite launched in 1997, creating thousands of particles that will now orbit Earth waiting to smash into other man-made satellites. I can’t help but think of this as a case of modern space zombies in which each zombie (read: smashed satellite) spends the rest of its time trying to create more zombies (read: smash other satellites). For perspective on the dangers we are facing from orbiting junk only fifty-two years into man’s era of sending crap into space: “[…] orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of liftoff and return to Earth.” I will now officially swear off space flight until we have orbiting Roombas keeping me safe.

“Letting Scientists Off the Leash” - This is an interesting article written by a researcher at Stanford University who discusses the flaws in the way money for research is distributed. His main point is that the typically conservative review boards that approve funding for grant proposals do not fund very imaginative or risky research. This leads to a situation where most of the ideas we are pursuing are those that we are already sure we can turn into a profit, not those that could have a substantially larger impact but at the same time carry larger risks (in that they are more likely than the boring projects to have an outcome different from that discussed when the grant was proposed). I don’t know too much about this, but I do support the idea of devising a more efficient means of identifying and funding riskier and more creative research.