What William Reads

I want to write a quick post showing some arguments about inevitability of large scale geoengineering which I find extremely convincing. I'm sure I won't convince that many people, most have made up their minds already.

First, look at list of countries by CO2 emissions. In 2006 global emissions were 28.43 billion tons per 6.55 billion people, or 4.34 ton/person. World population is still growing and is estimated to stabilize at levels around 9.5 billion for 2050-2100, which is the time in question.

Now let's see what would happen if everyone got to current European standards of living, and European CO2 emissions, which are 7.84 tons/person. This would result in CO2 emissions of 74.5 billion tons, or 2.6x times current levels. This number is already quite optimistic - it makes a huge assumption that all countries with higher CO2 emissions like US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Russia etc. scale them down quite considerably.

Now a brief discussion is in order on why numbers like that are relevant. First, I assume that there won't be a massive genocide, or nuclear warfare, or pandemic, or anything else that could drastically reduce population levels. The last time there was a significant reduction in population levels was 1340s. None of the world wars, or any other events even stopped population growth - in fact people tend to reproduce a lot more during times of crisis, than during times of peace and prosperity, so it would need to be the biggest war, pandemic, or other kind of failure in history to significantly reduce population levels. This assumption is probably the safest.

The second assumption is that the rest of the world will grow quite quickly. World GDP/capita is currently $9,774 PPP. EU GDP per capita is $30,513 PPP. If world economy grows at per capita rate of 2.8%, then by 2050 world average GDP will reach current EU levels. This coincidentally is almost exactly annual per capita growth rate of the world economy of the last 30 years. Unlike with population, where predictions are quite solid, here there are more reasons why growth could be significantly slower, or significantly faster than predicted. We just had a completely unexpected global recession for a fairly obvious example. And not so long ago we had massive completely unexpected boom in China and then India, so it can go both unexpectedly badly and unexpectedly well. Still, 2.8% is a pretty decent first estimate.

I want to write a bit more on the subject of economy. Many people are sceptical about the idea that the "poor" countries will ever attain levels of economic development seen in rich countries. But the rich-poor divide is illusory. As you can see yourself with Gapminder, the divide is long gone and most countries are in the middle. World average life expectancy today is higher than in most richest countries in 1950s years ago. World average life expectancy in all but one countries is higher than world average 100 years ago - all that in spite of wars, malnutrition, malaria, HIV, and lack of clean water in many of them! Life in countries considered by many to be "permanently poor" is vastly better than it was in Europe of your grandfathers, and rapidly improving. To think it will somehow suddenly stop is to ignore history.

Development can happen extremely rapidly - world's largest CO2 emitter has been China for a few years now, per capita emissions of which increased by factor of x2.2 between 1990-2006. Likewise for India, growth was x1.6 during that time. Even for big countries not typically associated with rapid growth you have high growth - x4 for Vietnam, x2.4 for Thailand, x2.3 for Malaysia, x1.9 for Indonesia, x1.5 for Pakistan, x1.4 for Brazil and Nigeria and so on (and these are all per capita rates, their total emissions increased far more). Developing countries are catching up fast.

Let's look at past performance of world CO2 emissions. Between 1992-2007, world's emissions increased by 38% - mostly driven by rapidly developing countries like China and India. Even developed countries weren't terribly successful - US and Japan had significant increases in emissions, and EU's stayed pretty much even, and nominally decreased mostly due to early-90s' collapse of heavy industry in former communist member countries. Even if developed countries got their act together and implemented reductions that were agreed on in Kyoto Protocol, they would still be swamped by just Chinese increases, resulting in net emission increases.

And the outlook for the next couple of decades doesn't look terribly promising. Intrade markets, thin as they are (and forgive me lack of links, but their website is virtually unlinkable), think it's extremely unlikely that China and India will agree to any CO2 limits anytime soon, and have pretty low opinion on what reductions developed countries will agree to - chance of agreeing to 10% reduction by 2025 seems to be about even, and there's quite a big difference between agreement and implementation (especially due to possibility of accounting shenanigans of land use changes and such), and such reductions would be swamped by developing countries increase. And in any case the 74.5 billion tons number already assumes that developed countries average will get reduced to current EU levels.

If you hope on peak oil to make 74.5 billion tons/year kind of number impossible, not only peak oil doesn't seem to be happening, coal production grows insanely fast, and estimates of "peak coal" talk about mid 22nd century.

Alternatives to 74.5 billion tons a year

So with business-as-usual, we'll be emitting enough CO2 to get the entire planet stir-fried. What would be alternatives?

First, either outright genocide or indirect genocide by limiting economic growth of developing nations - remember that poverty kills hundreds of millions of innocent people and causes vast suffering. Not only is it unlikely to happen, it would be probably the worst scenario of all.

Second, learn to live in a warmer world. This isn't necessarily going to be as bad. It's hard to imagine anyone who would like to have their children die of malaria and diarrhea just to satisfy some rich smug liberals. People who measure costs of limiting CO2 emissions usually focus on limits in States, or EU - but this is nonsense! Big increases don't come from SUVs, but from bringing poor people to more civilized standards of living, and limiting that would be disastrous. Costs of just taking global warming would be much less than the genocide that would ensue to keep poor people in their place. I think this scenario isn't entirely implausible - there were quite a few cases in history where international cooperation completely collapsed, and in externalities cases like CO2 emissions, this is a possible result.

The third solution, and we're getting somewhere now, would be to sever the link between GDP and CO2 emissions. This is surprisingly hard. Yes, it's trivial to move from Hummer to Prius, but the problem is people who cannot afford either yet, but will want some means of transportation eventually. And they will want electricity - coming from coal most likely. The alternatives look pretty bleak - nuclear power, and large-scale hydroelectricity, both provide only 3% of total primary energy use now (or about 15% of electricity each). All fancy types of renewable energy together don't even add up to 1%. A surprisingly large amount of energy is "traditional biomass", or wood and agricultural waste used for heating and cooking (but then, estimates of it seem to vary wildly). Other than that, right now we're entirely dependent on fossil fuels.

A popular idea of high standards of living without corresponding increase in energy use seems pretty unlikely to me. Yes, we might be able to break the correspondence at some point, but energy use per capita in poor countries is so low, it's simply bound to drastically increase.

Much more promising path is energy generation without fossil fuels. Our best chance so far was with nuclear power. Unfortunately we suddenly stopped what looked like extremely rapid exponential growth in late 1980s after Chernobyl disaster - estimated 4000 people will die due to increased radiation exposure (much higher estimates based on linear no-threshold model can be safely ignored, as LNT model is known to be empirically completely wrong).
By ridiculously naive estimations, if this growth continued exponentially as it seemed to have up to Chernobyl, nuclear energy would provide around 20% of total energy production today, or half of all oil could be eliminated. Now this kind of extrapolation is ridiculously naive, but you should give it some thought.

So could we switch to nuclear at ridiculously rapid pace? We would need over 50 times as much nuclear capacity to generate enough energy to cover increased energy use by 2050, what seems ridiculously optimistic by any standards, not to mention nuclear proliferation issues. It looks somewhat less ridiculous when expressed as 10% a year growth (or doubling every 7 years like pre-Chernobyl), but it's just not going to happen.
There aren't that many renewable options. Current global energy consumption is 15 TW, and it will be about 39TW by 2050 by extrapolation. The only large scale renewable energy source we use, hydroelectricity, is nowhere close to our needs, and neither is geothermal really, if we look at what small fraction of it we can practically extract thanks to high local concentrations. We're left with just two then - wind, and solar. We would need to use 5% of all wind energy of Earth to fill the energy gap.

In 2008 wind power had 121GW of installed peak "capacity", and produced 260 TWh of energy (what corresponds to 30GW of actual production). It would require order of 1000x increase in wind power, or 19% a year growth, to make it fill the energy gap. And the actual growth is actually fast enough at 29% in 2008. But there are clear diminishing returns here - best locations will be taken, and massive subsidies cannot really scale to TW levels.

The other alternative is solar power. Just Earth-based solar is so plentiful that using even 0.02% of solar power now, or 0.045% of it in 2050, we can replace all of world's energy use. And it doesn't stop there, with space-based solar we can get numbers many many orders of magnitude larger. It would sort of need a space elevator, but we might get there by 2200.

Anyway, while solar is undoubtedly our long term future, it doesn't look that bright in the short term. There's only 15GW of solar thermal installed, and mere 0.6GW of solar thermal. And these are capacity numbers. We're talking x10,000 increase to cover the energy gap, or 25% a year increase, or x200,000, 35% per year for solar thermal. Now these numbers are actually what we see now, but as I said for wind, these are all based on massive subsidies, and there's no evidence that they're scalable to TW range at all.

By the way all this is based on assumptions that all energy is basically equal, and all greenhouse gas emissions is energy production. Neither of these are true - electricity is relatively easy to replace with renewables, at least if we ignore their intermittent character, but transportation much less so. And even with 100% solar electricity-based economy, there would still be some significant sources of greenhouse gases like methane from agriculture - so whatever we estimate here is bound to be overly optimistic.

With all this said, thanks to better energy efficiency, and widespread use of renewables, it's quite likely that humanity energy use by 2050 will be much lower than baseline number of 74.5 billion tons a year. On the other hand expecting it to be vastly lower than current emissions is just extremely unlikely.

And here comes the final solution - without genocides, without unexpected revolution in either nuclear power or renewables, we will have much more CO2 in atmosphere in 2050 than now. And due to massive lag it has, it will keep warming Earth for a very long time after we finally get our emissions to decrease. So if we cannot agree to live in warmer world, we have to geo-engineer to survive the next century without massive and irreversible environmental change.

Nature did some real life large scale geoengineering testing for us, and it works without major side effects (you probably haven't even noticed the experiment in 1991). Economic estimations put it in ridiculously cheap range - some schemes are estimated to cost just 375 million dollar a year, or just 17,000 Toyota Priuses (seems like a highly relevant unit of measurement) - for comparison replacing every American car with a Prius would cost 5 trillion USD, and it would still do very little towards limiting global CO2 emissions. And stratospheric sulphur isn't the only solution, just the one we have best data on (by the way it's not about polluting more, only about moving less than 1% of existing pollution to higher layers of atmosphere).

So the alternatives are:

• Outright genocide
• Indirect genocide by forced poverty
  
• Accepting the warming
• Increase in nuclear or renewable energy far beyond anything that can be realistically expected in this timeframe
  
• Geoengineering

Guess which one is the least bad?

Now I just need to blog on abortion, and I win blogging controversy bingo.

I’ve been strongly hinting in recent blog entries that I planned to do something concrete about the data-jail problems of present open-source hosting sites. Because I believe in underpromising and overperforming, I decided at the outset not to announce a project until I could not only show working code, but code with wide enough coverage to make it crystal-clear that the project goals are achievable with a relatively modest amount of effort.

That time has arrived. I am very pleased to announce ForgePlucker, a project aimed at developing project-state extractor software for backup, offline analysis, and (eventually) re-importation. The proof-of-concept code can extract complete issue-tracker state from Berlios, Gna!, or Savane — and issue trackers are probably the hardest part of the job. I expect extraction of repository histories and developer permissions tables to be easier. Extraction of mailing-list state is probably a bit trickier than either of those, but doable.

The code as it exists now is just 1100-odd lines of pure Python; it can dump tracker state in either JSON or an XML format. Notice that this is already a production-ready tool for, among other things, examining bug lists offline. One of the goals in the project plan is: useful tools at every step of the way. This is not going to be a project where the developers toil in obscurity for years until releasing Epic Code That Changes Everything; the project plan lays out smaller deliverables that can be used to build cooperation with forge-system designers and other people interested in some of the data-transport problems associated with forges.

Accordingly, I’ve actually put as much effort into documentation than I have into code – there’s a project plan, a HOWTO on writing forge handler classes, and even a draft ontology of forge state we can use to translate among the data models of different forges.

Yes, I’m looking for co-developers. What the project especially needs is people interested in taking responsibility for developing and maintaining the handler classes associated with different forge types. Presently, I own the Savane and Berlios handlers; I’d like to give those away so I can concentrate on the framework code, and I hope to recruit owners for SourceForge, GForge/FusionForge, Launchpad, and Trac.

There’s lots of interesting work to be done here. Much of it will be code, some of it will be standards and documentation. Relevant skills and technologies include Python, JSON, RDF, HTTP forms, web-scraping, test-driven development. As always, being highly motivated to address the problem is more important than knowing any specific toolset at the outset. I expect this project to be genuine fun; it breaks naturally into small substeps on which you get rapid feedback at each stage, and testing for correctness will be relatively easy.

Once we field a forgeplucker that can pull complete project state off a suitably wide variety of forges, it will be time to think about tackling the re-import problem. We may solve that by bolting importers onto existing forge systems one by one, or by launching a forge-development project that builds on our extractor tools. Another direction we might go in is supporting scripted interaction with these systems. At every stage, useful tools!

To participate, get an account on Gna! and apply to join ForgePlucker. You can also examine the source-code repository and llist of open tasks. You will probably want to join the mailing list. I’m planning to set up an IRC channel as well.

(Yes, I’d rather have used a distributed VCS; I did my proof-of concept in Mercurial. But Subversion is the best we can do on Gna!, where I have the advantage of being a site administrator.)

Wayland resident Charles Irving is stepping down as the main point person on the proposed 372,500-square-foot Town Center project slated for the former Raytheon site across from Russell’s Garden Center.

"After five years, it is time for me to focus on new opportunities," said Irving in an interview on Wednesday. "The project remains in great hands and I remain a strong supporter."

According to Irving, project manager Frank Dougherty will continue to be the primary contact for developer KGI Properties, "therefore the community will see no change," and Anthony DeLuca of KGI, who has been involved with the project since its inception, will now take over Irving’s leadership role.

As a Wayland resident, Irving said, "I will be voting for the High School and the Town Center amendment at our (special Town Meeting). Both are important issues for this community."

At special Town Meeting starting Nov. 18, residents will vote on whether to approve Article 3, which would reduce the affordable housing component of the Town Center project from 25 percent to 12 percent, but contribute up to $1.122 million to a Wayland Municipal Affordable Housing Trust based upon the sale of all housing units.

In addition, the financial gifts promised to the town in the Development Agreement will be deferred and tied to development milestones or the sale of residences.

"We’re setting the ground rules for what gets built and how it gets built, no matter who the developer is," said Joe Nolan, chairman of the Board of Selectmen. "Our main goal is to maintain the vision for the property which residents voted for."

While Nolan understands Charles Irving "will now have a diminished role," he believes the project is "still in good hands" with KGI Properties.

Since 2001, KGI has successfully completed the development of approximately 2.2 million square feet of property at an aggregate cost in excess of $200 million, including retail centers in Haverhill, Taunton, Stoughton and Woburn, Mass., Hooksett, N.H., and Scarborough and Sanford, Maine.

KGI has offices in Boston, Wayland, Woburn, Providence, R.I., and Lebanon, N.H.
Earlier this year, KGI Properties bought out the interest of The Congress Group and Dean Stratouly in the Town Center project.

In addition to Irving and DeLuca, Stratouly had been involved with the project since its inception.

Tycho: I un... truncated it(?).  In the future, I will assess all posts for truncability. (CW)TB

Many local residents will be appearing in the Weston Friendly Society’s production of "Anne of Green Gables: The Musical."

This classic story recounts the poignant and funny story of Anne Shirley, the spunky, red-headed orphan who comes to Prince Edward Island hoping to find a happy home. The production is sure to be a hit with the entire family!

Performances will be Nov. 28 and 29 and Dec. 5 and 6 at Weston Town Hall. Orchestra tickets are $22 for adults and $19 for seniors and children 12 and under, and balcony seats are $19 for adults and $16 for seniors and children.

Tickets may be obtained at "www.westonfriendly.org" or by calling 781-893-9883.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about "No SQL" databases. This blog post considers the performance argument about No SQL databases; a subsequent posting will address the flexibility argument.

Traditions of Wayland resident Martha Beck will celebrate her 100th birthday with friends, family and staff on Saturday, Nov. 7 at 2:30 p.m.

Born in Germany, Beck came to the U.S. in 1925. She moved to New York City to live with her aunts, assisting them in cooking for a wealthy family on Fifth Avenue and waitressing at the Ritz-Carlton before getting married.

She is the mother of one son and the proud grandmother of four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

According to her daughter-in-law, Beck was very dedicated to her family. She also did a lot of charity work for the Freemasons and the Deborah Hospital Foundation in New Jersey, even after she moved to Florida with her husband.

On top of family and charity work, Beck’s third passion has always been cooking and baking.

She passed hundreds of recipes on to her daughter-in-law and always baked boxes and boxes of cookies for Christmas. After introducing the German fruitcake Stollen to the family, it remains a family staple and tradition to this day.

When asked about her secret to longevity, Beck replied, "One day at a time is a good idea."
Janelle Holt of Traditions of Wayland couldn’t be happier about Beck’s milestone birthday.

"Martha is one of the sweetest ladies in the world, and I am thrilled that I get to help her celebrate this special day," said Holt. "It is our goal to honor each of our unique residents whenever we can."

Martha’s family will be in attendance for the big day. The party will take place at Traditions of Wayland, 10 Green Way, Wayland. Call Janelle Holt at 508-358-0700 for more information.

The fall musical has come around yet again, ladies and gentlemen. This season’s show is "Flight of the Lawnchair Man," the story of one man’s journey into the skies.

That man is Jerry Gorman, played by Wayland High School senior Lowell Glovsky. Jerry works as a lowly employee at Wal-Mart and is desperate to escape the confines of his life. He seeks to do this by flying away on nothing more than a lawn chair strapped to a giant mass of balloons.

Before take-off, though, Jerry must deal with other obstacles besides how to get the lawn chair off the ground. His mother, his boss and longtime idol all stand in the way.

Robyn Levy plays mother Gorman, Ben Wohlfarth plays Mr. Frankel (his boss), and Sylvia Lorenzini plays his girlfriend Gracie.

Jerry’s longtime friend and idol Big Jack Preston is played by Seth Lifland and his girlfriend/stewardess is played by Cato Crumbley. The rest of the cast play various townspeople and supporting ensemble parts.

The cast started work on the piece on the first day of school, Sept. 8, and has been working every week since, including weekends. This show marks a departure from the last piece done by the Wayland High School drama program "Ballad of a High School." That piece was original in which students wrote about and created their own fictional characters. Like any traditional musical, this piece adheres to a script but allows for the actors and director, Richard Weingartner, to craft new staging and set ideas.

The show runs Thursday to Saturday, Nov. 12 to 14 at 7:30 p.m. (with a matinee on Nov. 14 at 2 p.m.). Tickets are $5 for students and $10 for adults.

Check out a gallery of photos taken at high school sporting events from the week of 10/26/09 - including photos not found in the print version of The MetroWest Daily News and The Milford Daily News. Click on any photo to open the gallery. If you really like a picture, you can buy it! Just click on the "Purchase this Photo" button. Look forward to these galleries once a week.

A recent paper from SIGIR, "The Wisdom of the Few: A Collaborative Filtering Approach Based on Expert Opinions from the Web" (PDF), has a very useful exploration into the effectiveness of recommendations using only a small pool of trusted experts.

The results suggest that using a small pool of a couple hundred experts, possibly your own experts or experts selected and mined from the web, has quite a bit of value, especially in cases where big data from a large community is unavailable.

A brief excerpt from the paper:

Recommending items to users based on expert opinions .... addresses some of the shortcomings of traditional CF: data sparsity, scalability, noise in user feedback, privacy, and the cold-start problem .... [Our] method's performance is comparable to traditional CF algorithms, even when using an extremely small expert set .... [of] 169 experts.

Our approach requires obtaining a set of ... experts ... [We] crawled the Rotten Tomatoes web site –- which aggregates the opinions of movie critics from various media sources -- to obtain expert ratings of the movies in the Netflix data set.

The authors certainly do not claim that using a small pool of experts is better than traditional collaborative filtering.

What they do say is that using a very small pool of experts works surprisingly well. In particular, I think it suggests a good alternative to content-based methods for bootstrapping a recommender system. If you can create a high quality pool of experts, even a fairly small one, you may have good results starting with that while you work to gather ratings from the broader community.

I have previously expressed skepticism about the projected Medicare savings assumed in the health reform bill making its way through Congress. If these savings don't materialize as Congress now posits, the bill will not turn out to be deficit neutral but, instead, will add to the large fiscal gap we are bequeathing to future generations. In a recent letter, CBO gives some numbers about the projected Medicare cuts in the House bill that show how wildly unrealistic they are:

The bill would put into effect (or leave in effect) a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time. It would leave in place the 21 percent reduction in the payment rates for physicians currently scheduled for 2010. At the same time, the bill includes a number of provisions that would constrain payment rates for other providers of Medicare services. In particular, increases in payment rates for many providers would be held below the rate of inflation (in expectation of ongoing productivity improvements in the delivery of health care). Based on the extrapolation described above, CBO expects that Medicare spending under the bill would increase at an average annual rate of roughly 6 percent during the next two decades—well below the roughly 8 percent annual growth rate of the past two decades, despite a growing number of Medicare beneficiaries as the baby-boom generation retires.

Thanks to the blog reader who drew this passage to my attention.

How to create or save 9 jobs for $889,

An amusing story about how government statistics are not always completely reliable.

Tycho: Runic Games is doing the Lord's work, in an robust and unambiguous fashion. Torchlight has the bracing qualities we associate with pure mountain streams. Let's run with that, actually; elemental is the keyword here, and not just because many weapons bear enchantments which confer elemental effects. I'd have said that an action RPG without multiplayer in the year two-thousand and nine was a fever dream before playing Torchlight; with the product in hand, I wonder if other people wouldn't just get in my way. As a design consideration, it was almost certainly the result of the eleven month development cycle ...

New Comic: The Price Of Loyalty

The Wayland Board of Health has received a limited supply of seasonal flu vaccine for residents ages 65 and older.

Call the Board of Health at 508-358-3617 to pre-register for a specific appointment (not walk-in) for a flu clinic on Thursday, Nov. 5 from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Wayland Town Building's Large Hearing Room.

Also seasonal flu mist for residents ages 2 to 49 without asthma or any underlying health issues will be available on Thursday, Nov. 5 from 3 to 5 p.m. on a walk-in basis.

The Board of Health will announce further clinics as supplies of vaccine are received on a rolling basis.

Note H1N1 flu vaccine is currently available only to those in the following high-risk categories -- pregnant, caregiver of infants 0 to 6 months, infants 6 months to adults 24 years old, adults 25 to 60 years old with chronic health issues, and health care providers and EMTs. Call the Board of Health to register. As more supplies become available, the Board of Health will make further announcements.

There will be a public forum on seasonal flu and H1N1 flu with regards to school-age children on Thursday, Nov. 5 from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Wayland Town Building's Large Hearing Room.

On Sunday, Nov. 8 from 1 to 3 p.m., Russell’s Garden Center will host Laura Carlo of WCRB as she presents traditional arrangements and designs for your home with a flare of new style.

Carlo will be joined by Russell’s own Sandra Baldwin, along with Russell’s flower shop staff, in the lush tropical greenhouse for an afternoon of holiday fun. You will learn how easy and affordable it is to create magnificent décor for your home that you can extend from Thanksgiving through New Year’s!

To compliment this feast for your eyes, enjoy free food sampling from WCRB sponsors Whole Foods Market, Fruit 2 Day, Cabot cheese, GaGa’s SherBetter and New England Cranberry. There will be wine tasting courtesy of Post Road Liquors in Wayland, and fresh brewed coffee from Keurig gourmet single cup home brewers.

Enjoy the whole event as you listen to the live music performed by Andrew Celentano and friends!

This event is free and open to the public; no pre-registration required. For more information visit "www.russellsgardencenter.com"

Residents of Wayland, watch out! Flocks of pink flamingos may be landing on your lawn soon. But don’t worry, these birds are not lost; they have landed in your yard for a good cause and they will not leave a mess.

Wayland High School’s Class of 2011 is holding a fundraiser. Your family, friends and neighbors may be donating money to have you "flocked."

For a fee ranging from $10 to $30 (depending on the number of flamingos to be placed in the yard), teams of flockers will be descending upon Wayland. Don’t want to be "flocked"? You can instead purchase insurance for $10 so no pink flamingos end up in your yard.

The fundraiser is being used to offset costs for junior class events, and the junior class has decided to donate 10 percent of their proceeds to the American Cancer Society. The pink flamingos seem like a logical bird for breast cancer awareness month!

The flamingos will begin landing this week and will perch for a full day on the victim’s lawn, with an optional note from the purchaser and instructions for their immediate removal if requested.

The flamingos will be returning home around the end of November to escape the cold, so don’t delay if you would like to purchase a flock. The fees are $10 for 10 birds, $20 for 20 birds, or $30 for 50 birds.

Please send your check made payable to Wayland High School Class of 2011, c/o Brett Baker, 197 Glezen Lane, Wayland MA 01778.

Please include your name, phone number and e-mail, as well as the recipient’s name, address, phone number and e-mail (if available). If you have any questions call 508-276-1568.

Last week, the Wayland girls soccer team finished its regular season in the Dual County League, and locked in the DCL Small Division title with a win against Tyngsborough on Thursday.
``This was really the last week of practices in terms of the regular season. Next week, practice will be geared for tournament preparation,'' said Wayland Coach Guy Enoch.
Wayland had just two practices last week while having three games. ``It was the right time to have back-to-back games (because) we are on the right track as far as how we are playing,'' said Enoch.
The Tyngsborough Tigers played the Warriors in Wayland on Tuesday, Oct. 27 for Senior Night.
In the fourth minute, Wayland set the tone when senior captain Mel Sperling scored. She was assisted by junior Claire Nishioka, who then scored one of her own just 14 minutes later when sophomore Nicole Noa passed the ball from the outside into the middle, where Nishioka settled the ball and shot far post scoring her 11th goal of the season.
In the second half, the Tigers had a short possession that allowed them an upper 90 shot on Wayland keeper and senior captain Liz Doyon. The ball hit the far post and went in.
Wayland came back with a goal in the 67th minute. Sophomore Maeve Moynihan received the ball from senior captain Lindsay Shelton, and Moynihan shot from the edge of the 18. The final result was a 3-1 win.
On Thursday, the Tigers and Warriors played again.
In the 20th minute, Sperling crossed the ball into the 18 where Moynihan made contact to volley the ball over the Tyngsborough keeper. It was Moynihan's eight goal of the season.
``Tyngsborough has really improved since last year, and so I knew they were going to be tough games. A little let down in the first Tyngsborough game, but we managed to get back on our feet,'' said Enoch. ``In addition, I think that we were suffering from our decision making when it came to our finishing touches. In the last two games this week, we could have done a better job finishing the ball (into net).''
``I knew that C-C was dying to get back at us. But I felt that playing the way we played against Concord-Carlisle after playing Tyngsborough on Thursday, was a good showing,'' explained Enoch.
Wayland played at Concord-Carlisle on Friday for the C-C senior night. Wayland had many opportunities on goal but had difficulty finishing. The ball got shot at the C-C keeper constantly.
Wayland goalie, Doyon, had just a few saves, including a crucial one-on-one, to record her seventh shutout of the season.
Wayland sweeper, junior McKenzie Jones, controlled the back unit and shut down the C-C offense.
``They are statistically the second best team in the league,'' said Enoch. ``We are still undefeated in the DCL Small, even though we were disappointed in the score I was proud of how we played.''
``This week we accomplished another goal of ours, which was to finish in first place in the DCL Small. We were extremely excited. Everyone has continued to work extremely hard - and our team chemistry is amazing,'' raved Sperling.
The Warriors will play their first tournament game - probably at the end of this week, after playing their final game in the regular season against non-league Brookline.
Said Enoch, ``Tournament can be done in a flash. You have to really grasp every opportunity that we have to prepare. Every practice before a game could be our last practice. There are No Regrets.''

 

Wayland started its important stretch last week with a big match at 20th ranked Hopkinton.
The Hillers came out with some early chances and possessed the ball. Twenty minutes in Hopkinton capitalized using its speed to fly up the right side past a defender and burying a shot into the far left corner.
The Warriors stepped up their play and began to fight back but later in the half Wayland suffered a huge loss. Captain Andy Bekenstein broke his leg after a sliding tackle by a Hopkinton defender.
Wayland went into the half down 1-0 but motivated after the injury.
The Warriors came out showing that intensity by equalizing just a few minutes into the half when senior captain Mike Trueblood controlled a ball loose in the six-yard box and pushed it past the Hopkinton keeper.
Wayland continued to dominate the possession but struggled to but the ball in the net until the last five minutes. Sophomore Chris D'Amico ripped a shot from 20 yards out the bounced of the crossbar, but fellow sophomore Nico Pascual-Leone was there to finish it and give Wayland the lead.
Two minutes later junior Griffin McGrail iced the win with a tap-in, putting Wayland up 3-1.
The Warriors went into the next game with revenge and clinching a tournament berth on their mind.
Wayland wasted no time asserting dominance and within one minute was up 1-0. D'Amico stole the ball from a Tyngsborough defender on the 18-yard line and buried the ball into the bottom left corner of the net.
Wayland added another later in the half when Or Efrat's long throw bounced around the box right into Pascual-Leone's path, he volleyed it on his weak foot into the back of the net giving the Warriors the 2-0 lead.
Wayland got one more before the half when captain Seth Harper beat his man in the left corner and played the ball across the box to senior Berin Senne, who controlled it, and finished giving Wayland the 3-0 lead at the half.
Wayland got one more in the second half when Trueblood controlled one another of Efrat's throws and sent it past the Tyngsborough goalie. The 4-0 victory secured a playoff spot for Wayland.
Friday was Senior Night for the Warriors and a big game with a shot at the DCL Small title up in the air against Concord-Carlisle.
C-C came out right away and - after stealing a pass - capitalized on a loose ball in the six-yard box, grabbing the lead 1-0.
But a little bit later, Wayland equalized when Mark Blahnik's free kick took a deflection, bounced of the post, where Harper finished it, making the score 1-1.
C-C grabbed the lead back a few minutes later making it 2-1. Later on though Wayland equalized when Pascual-Leone blasted a free kick from 20 yards out past the C-C keeper.
But Wayland was simply out matched as C-C took the lead 3-2 and held on for the win.
This win gave C-C the DCL Small title and showed the Warriors they had work to do before the start of the tournament.

 

It feels like the end of the telecom era in Massachusetts this evening, as the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council takes over the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, which over the past few years had been idling.

They're calling it a merger, but...

...Tom Hopcroft, president of MassTLC, will remain president of the new group. (Here's his blog post on the news.) Mark Horan, formerly chief of MassNetComms, will be a senior vice president. Aside from Horan, the two staffers who'd been helping to run MassNetComms won't join MassTLC. (Horan said they've already found other jobs.)

...About two-thirds of the 500 corporate members of the combined entity will come from MassTLC, with MassNetComms bringing the minority.

...And the Mass Network Communications name will disappear, as will most of MassNetComms' annual events.

Tycho: Historically, we've had a strange relationship with SOE's John Smedley - though I think it's more or less reached equilibrium now.  We received a press release for a new game he's catalyzed over there, namely Magic: The Gathering Tactics, but since we don't run press releases there's no place for that.  This being established, I think a lot of their work out of their Tucson and Denver studios is woefully underappreciated, and I want to show some support.  I gave him a call yesterday to see if I could find anything out, and while I don't know if I succeeded ...

When should you buy ads? Let’s assume your goal is for people to click on the ads and give you money. (Reasons this may not be true: persuasion, brand-building, budget-maximizing.) The return from a block of ads is thus revenue - marginal_costs - ad_costs. Ads are an investment like any other; you keep buying them until your return on investment (revenue - marginal_costs / ad_costs) equals your cost of capital (usually the interest rate).

For simplicity, we’ll assume your marginal cost is zero. (My marginal cost is almost always zero, so this doesn’t strike me as too unrealistic.) So how do you estimate revenue? You can track how much money people who click on your ad give you, but this has two flaws. First, customers often give you more money over time. Maybe they buy level one of your video game when they click on the ad, but then they may buy levels two and three the next day after they beat level one. The future is always in the future, so revenue-per-user numbers may be too small.

Second, they might have given you money anyway. Your video game ads probably run on video game review sites, where readers might buy your game just from the review, even if you hadn’t bought an ad. So your revenue numbers may be too big.

But these problems aren’t so serious. In the first case, the worst that happens is you don’t buy as many ads as you should. In the second, you don’t actually lose money, it’s just that some extra profit you could have kept has gone into ads.

---

Let’s turn to the ad seller. They probably want to maximize how much they charge per ad impression (CPM). (Reasons this may not be true: unseemly ads.) A good way to do this is to hold an auction. It’s impractical to have everyone bid live, so Google auctions work like eBay auctions: you enter the maximum you’re willing to pay and get charged just enough to beat the other bidders. (One can think of this as a computer-simulated auction where everyone keeps bidding up the price by pennies until they hit the maximum they’re willing to spend.)

But what are you bidding on? Ad sellers want to maximize revenue per impression, but ad buyers want to maximize profit per expense. In an ideal world, ad sellers auction off impressions (this is what Google Ad Manager does) while ad buyers bid per dollar of profit (entering their cost of capital).

Determining how much profit you make from an ad is hard. Can we just trust you? Let’s say you make $2 in profit per 1000 impressions and everyone else makes $1. Now you can lie and say you make $1 in profit and then pay twice as much per profit-dollar. Now you pay the same amount as before, but you win all the profit-dollar auctions. Now that’s not wrong — you’re clearly making more money than the other bidders, so you should win — but your bid isn’t cost-per-profit anymore, it’s cost-per-impression.

What if you paid based on revenue? Verifying revenue is difficult, but Google could do it if everyone was using Google Checkout. (If you sent some of your users to a non-Google Checkout system, Google could catch you and fine you.) Google offers nicer ads to Checkout users, but they still don’t have much market share, making this system impractical at present.

Some search engines apparently had cost-per-action (CPA) auctions, where you paid based on how many people actually bought things. I have no idea how they made that work, since lying about how many people took an action seems really profitable and easy. Maybe that’s why no one does this anymore.

That just leaves cost-per-click (CPC). Cost-per-click seems ideal, since it’s verifiable by both the ad seller (who uses a redirect link to track clicks) and the ad buyer (who sees the users show up on their page). It’s a nice half-way point between buyer and seller.

So the ad seller holds an auction for CPC and multiplies CPC by click-thru-rate (CTR) to calculate CPM. They shows the highest CPM ads, charging each the bidder below them’s CPC, times their relative CTRs. (In reality, Google doesn’t just use CTR; they also factor in the relevance of the ad and the quality of the page it goes to.) And, voila: we’ve derived the basics of an online ad system.

---

This works out great for the ad seller — they maximize CPM, just like they wanted — but the ad buyer is still stuck converting their ROI into CPC. The ad buyer, recall, wants to increase their spending on ads (now determined to be CPC) until their return on investment equals their cost of capital.

It seems like this should be pretty easy, and indeed Google does provide tools to calculate ROI, but apparently not to optimize it. What they do provide is a tool to optimize your cost-per-action. Does anyone know why this is?

It seems like an automatic ROI optimizer would lead many people to spend more money on ads. It’s hard to believe Google is leaving all that money on the table.

But Google does intelligently optimize the ads themselves. The variance in click-thru rates between different ads is huge — it’s not uncommon to see two very similar ads, but one gets ten times as many clicks as the others. Google lets you put in as many ads as you like and automatically rotates them, showing ads with better CTRs more often.

---

So far we’ve just had a single ad seller. In the real world, lots of people want to sell ads and lots of people want to buy them. How do you match them up?

One option is make the buyer choose. This is how Google Search works: Google holds an auction for each search query and buyers pick which ones they want to compete in. Another is to group related websites together and run ads evenly across all of them. This is how most smaller ad networks work. And then there’s AdSense. AdSense scans a page for relevant keywords, then runs the Google Search ads that won auctions for those keywords.

Google also knows a lot about ad viewers. By tracking what web pages you visit, they know what topics you’re interested in. I’m apparently interested in Unix, the environment, elections, government, and social science, so Google prefers to show ads on those subjects to me.

But there’s another way to think about ad matching: as a giant optimization problem. Which combinations of user, ad placement, and advertisement optimize click-thru rates (or, ultimately, ROI)?

For each of these, there are lots of variables. For each user, you know their history, geographical location, computer (browser, operating system, screen size), ISP, etc. For each ad placement, you know time of day, hosting website, page content, etc. And for each ad, there are numerous possible variations in phrasing and design that can be tested, as mentioned before.

The possible combinations are infinite. You can’t test all of them, so you need to come up with ones that are plausible. You can look at which combinations worked in the past: has this ad done significantly better in some cities than others, or at some times than others? And you can look for patterns across ads: do ads that do well on CNN also do well on MSNBC? These hypotheses can then be tested and, if they work, you start running ads more there.

Netflix claims they’ve made millions from slight improvements in their movie recommendations.¹ When they offered a prize for more, researchers found thousands of tiny patterns and came up with all sorts of innovative algorithms to try to get an edge. After 32 months, researchers doubled the algorithm’s effectiveness.

Imagine how much more is at stake for Google. Last year, they received $21 billion in ad revenue, of which 60% was apparently profit. Even tiny improvements would be worth the highest salaries — a 0.004% improvement would make $500,000. Doubling it would create unspeakable wealth.

Yet Google has no contest for improving ad click-thru rates. Indeed, press reports suggest they don’t even have an internal team working on it. The AdWords user-interface (recently redesigned from jaw-droppingly wretched to just wretched) would seem to suggest they don’t do this kind of optimization at all. Their blog asks people to optimize things manually. No doubt there are some things humans (even ad purchase reps) can do better than computers, but surely there’s a lot more they can do together — with humans giving the machine additional hints and hypotheses to test. But there doesn’t seem to be anything like that.

It’s hard to believe this is true. It’s hard to believe this can last.

---

Google’s chief economist claims that Google’s sewn up the ad market by being better than everyone else. What if you made an ad network that was better than Google?

Right now Google takes a 20% cut of every auction price. What if you were willing to take just 10%? You could give ad sellers a slightly higher CPM — they’d gladly run your ads when they paid more and Google’s the rest of the time. Then you can offer ad buyers a slightly lower CPC. As long as the money people made was more than the cost of setting things up, they’d switch. I’m actually not sure why this hasn’t happened.

Now imagine that you were a genius CS student who could come up with a better ad optimization algorithm. Your system would have a higher overall CTR, since it presented users with better ads. This means that, again, you can pay higher CPMs (since more people click per impression). And you can redirect some of the money you would spend on higher CPMs into lower CPCs, to attract advertisers.

But to develop the algorithms and do the optimization you need the data. Lots of it — lots of users, lots of advertisers, lots of ad spots. No startup will ever have that; it’s only left to Google (or whichever giant eventually replaces them).

I’m not normally one to be too concerned about improving Google’s bottom line (they seem to be doing alright), but as an ad buyer I’m frustrated I have to do this work myself. I’d rather solve the problem for everyone. And if Google wants to pay me for that, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

I hope that you all vote today if you can.

As the left gained power, many cities switched to off-year elections and non-partisan candidacy. Removing party affiliations from the ballot servers as a kind of poll tax, it forces people to spend time researching each candidate individually instead of just knowing they support a particular party. For those in Cambridge, MA, I have tried to help out by doing the research for you.

Cambridge has the additional complication of having a decent voting system, so you can list your candidates in order of preference. There are two questions on the ballot. For city council, there seem to be three basic categories: People with good ideas, people with no ideas, and people with bad ideas. I have listed them in that order:

1. Lawrence J. Adkins (more public services, affordable housing and health)
2. Mark Flanagan (homeless shelter)
3. Larry Ward (inclusionary zoning)
4. James M. Williamson (elected mayor, street nusiances)
5. Kenneth E. Reeves (Harlem Children’s Zone)
6. Charles Marquardt (fire the city manager)
7. Gregg Moree (energy efficiency, living wage)
8. Kathy Podgers (housing vouchers, parks)
9. Tim Toomey (fuel efficient vehicls)
10. Marjorie Decker (community engagement)
11. Neal Leavitt (achievement gap)
12. Silvia Glick (neighborhood protection)
13. Sam Seidel (afterschool)
14. Henrietta Davis (goo-goo)
15. E. Denise Simmons (311)
16. Minka vanBeuzekom (transparency)
17. Tom Stohlman (do nothing)
18. Craig Kelley (traffic enforcement, no TV for kids)
19. Leland Cheung (promote entrepreneurship, school reform)
20. David Maher (segregated schools, service cuts)
21. Edward Sullivan (tough on crime, homeland security)

School issues are inevitably depressing. Everyone says they oppose the achievement gap and so on, so my first test was to see how people felt about standardized tests (ordered from opposition to support):

1. Marc McGovern (community education centers)
2. Alice Turkel (portfolios, high quality preschool)
3. Richard Harding (no high-stakes)
4. Nancy Tauber (no teaching to the test)
5. Patty Nolan (no drill and kill)
6. Alan Steinert, Jr. (tests are “something to be endured”)
7. Joseph Grassi (desegregation)
8. Fred Fantini (more assessment)
9. Charles Stead, Sr. (tight ship principal)

Happy Election Day!

UPDATE: The winners were (in order): 9, 14, 15, 20, 5, 18, 19, 13, 21. And: 4, 3, 1, 8, 5, 2.

I'm an avid user of Twitter, so when the San Francisco company Peek offered to send me a new device designed especially for reading and writing tweets (and nothing else), I said yes -- even though I don't usually review products, and there's no local link at all here.

I think the concept behind the new TwitterPeek device (just out today) is that if you don't have a smartphone with a keyboard, and you are not very good at typing short messages with your dumbphone's number keys, you might want a device like this. (How big a market is that? We'll see...)

There's no long-term contract, and you can either pay $99 for the device and get six months of free service, or pay $199 and get a lifetime service plan (as always, this doesn't mean your lifetime, or the device's lifetime, but rather the lifetime of the company selling you the plan. Peek has been around since 2007, selling dedicated e-mail and texting devices with inexpensive connectivity plans.)

Here's my Twitter-length review, with a bit more after it:

Thinking Functionally in Ruby is a talk that British Ruby developer Tom Stuart gave at a recent London Ruby Users Group meeting. In it he covers what functional programming is, why it's a "pretty neat idea," and how to adopt functional programming principles in Ruby. Skills Matter took a video of the entire 47 minute presentation but there's also a 110 page PDF (1.5MB download) you should have to hand too (with Tom's slides).

I don't like to link to individual presentations on Ruby Inside too often, but in spite of poor audio quality on the video, Tom's presentation is top notch (the slides are particularly good) and Tom covers some interesting topics that I think Ruby developers could do with revising. If you've wanted to stay on the functional bandwagon but have found yourself slipping into imperative ways where you shouldn't, this presentation is well worth a watch.

[ad] Find duplication, code smells, complex code and more in your Ruby code with Caliper! The metrics are free and setup takes just one click. Get started!

There's this fancy Western European idea of abolishing death penalty. Wikipedia even has a nice map, with blue countries having abolished death penalty entirely, red still carrying it out, and green/orange having it on the books, but not in practice.
But reality is different than that. Most of the red countries almost never carry out the death penalty, reserving it for extremely unusual cases - in 2008 estimated 5727 people were executed, over 80% of them in mainland China, other than that only Iran and Saudi Arabia doing three-digit numbers. Other big red countries like India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan and so on very rarely execute people.

As 59 million people die every year, your chance of getting executed is like 1:10,000, or more like 1:200,000 if you don't like in relatively execution-happy China, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

Numbers like this are ridiculously uncommon - about 100 people die every year from peanut allergy in just United States. And "accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed", which sounds like a codeword for "BDSM gone awry" causes 327 deaths annually in just USA.

It's not just due to lack of crime - annually, half million homicides take place, and many countries have or had death penalty for lesser things. So if you're a killer, the chance of getting a lethal injection for it are 80:1 (assuming they get the right person), or more like 1500:1 unless you live in one of the three aforementioned countries.

Add to that the usual overconfidence criminals have, and it's clear that fear of death penalty is the least of criminals' concerns. Especially since even in United States you're over three times as likely to die as a result of a shootout with the police than due to legal execution, so we're talking at most 30% extra deaths factor here. The idea that people will stop carrying out crime due to fear of capital punishment is just highly dubious.

History lesson

So is this it? Did the abolitionists win? Not necessarily. Googling indicates that capital punishment for crime was never particularly widespread. Yes, governments killed loads of people - massacres during wars and occupations, killing political opponents, summary executions to quell social unrest, and some such. But legal capital punishment of citizen committing ordinary crimes after proper judicial process? Very unlikely.

Here's some statistics. Stalin killed about 60 million people, and Hitler about 20 million (estimates vary considerably, but let's take those numbers). How many actually received death penalties? Only 40 thousand from Nazis (1 in 500), and 750 thousands from Soviets (1 in 80). And these were mostly political opponents, war and civil war cases and such - not proper criminals.

How about other countries? Czarist Russia averaged less than 60 a year, and remember that many of them were political cases. Between 1770 and 1830 England had allegedly bloodiest criminal code on Earth, with death punishment for "writing a threatening letter", hanging out with gypsies, or "strong evidence of malice" and over 200 other crimes, while still averaging barely above 110 executions annually. Even the infamous Spanish Inquisition barely managed 20 burnings a year (but then, these were mostly religious and political opponents not criminals, so maybe they shouldn't be included here).

It's just really difficult to find any government, that routinely carried out large number of legal executions of criminals during time of peace.

When governments kill

That's not to say governments don't kill. But these killings rarely affect common criminals. Nazis killed people for being of wrong ethnic group. Soviets killed people for being of wrong social class, or just because. The same 18th century United Kingdom which was so cautious with criminals of right ethnicity, killed million people for being poor and Irish (and no, it wasn't any Malthusian bullshit, Ireland was a major food exporter even during this politically caused famine).

Even countries which don't execute criminals at all like Denmark with no executions since 1892, change their mind during and briefly after war time, when 54 people were executed (it's not really a legal capital punishment, as it's all ex post facto). Likewise in Finland, after not executing anyone since 1825, about 550 people were killed during war time (unlike Denmark where it was mostly proper war criminals and people supporting Nazis, here you could get a firing squad for conscientious objection, and without even a real trial).

What does it mean for capital punishment debate?

Other than perhaps in mainland China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the debate is purely speculative now. There is virtually no capital punishment anywhere. And other than during wars, occupations, major civil unrests and alikes, it was extremely rare for many centuries. Before that, executions might or might not have been more frequent, but it's hard to talk about proper legal proceedings, so they don't count.

People who support death penalty have a big problem, as there won't be any statistics showing serious effects of widespread application of it during time of peace, as it never happened. There are some bullshit statistics, like those in the original Freakonomics book (very entertaining book, by the way), but due to vast non-random annual variations in number of homicides and executions, we're talking about effects of a rounding error, and social science just cannot do anything useful with them.

So it's mostly about what makes you feel better. If you're a real Christian, then you should follow Jesus and be against death penalty. If you're a fake Christian like Southern Baptist, you should support death penalty because you hate black people more than you love Jesus. And if you're an atheist, do whatever you want, it's not like I can convince you.

Here, I solved it for you.

This is a guest post from Todd Broderick, a fellow Boston-area wine lover. I've received multiple E-mails looking for thoughts on how to easily and effectively preserve wine overnight and I think this approach is quite helpful.

So here is my dilemma, I like to drink wine with dinner but we’re having a baby so my wife is not drinking and I am probably not going to kill a bottle myself on a nightly basis. . .so what do I do with the rest of the bottle that I might not consume for a couple of days?

I have sometimes gone with the assumption that I am going to finish off that wonderful cab the next night, only to have it sit on the counter for 3 days with a vacuum stopper and end up barely drinkable. Over the course of the last year I have been on a mission to solve this problem, trying a variety of methods recommended by friends and professionals. My hope is that by sharing these experiences with you, I’ll help you savor just a little bit longer, that great bottle that you opened up on Tuesday night “just because.”

There are so many different ways to go about preserving your wine; you can use the cans of gas that put a protective layer of argon or some other gas in between the wine and the air in the bottle, you can use a special stopper that pulls the air out of the bottle, you can also fridge the leftover portion in hopes of slowing down the oxidation process. I have given most of them a shot and had varying degrees of success. I tried to combine the trial and error research I did with some basic logic and ended up with a pretty good result, that I think you might find helpful. I went under the premise that you want to limit the wines exposure to air and tried to keep the solution simple and inexpensive.

I had an extra half bottle (375ml) lying around and upon opening a new bottle for the night, promptly filled the half bottle, capped it with a vacuum stopper and put it in the fridge. 48 hours later I pulled the bottle from the fridge when I got home to let it warm up. By the time dinner was ready, I was able to give it a few swirls and enjoy a pretty good glass of wine. Here are a few other tips and observations worth noting:

• Use a funnel to fill the half bottle up as much as possible, but be careful not to use one that aerates the wine as you pour.
  
• The type of stopper used has not really made a difference; I have used both a vacuum stopper with pump and a standard one, and have had equally good luck. Here is a $1.95 alternative from Crate & Barrel (also available for $3 at Williams-Sonoma)
  
• Two to three days seems to be a relatively safe time frame in my experiences, I’ve gone as long as four and the wine had clearly faded, but was still drinkable.
• I wouldn’t advocate trying this with a really special bottle of wine that may need some decanting, but for a weekday wine it works well.
• If you fridge the wine, which I would suggest if you know you are drinking it over 2 plus days, make sure to give it time to warm up.
  

I like this approach because it is pretty straightforward and did not involving buying any more gear. All you need is the empty half bottle, the funnel and a stopper, pretty easy, right? I’m up for trying other alternatives if anyone has a suggestion, feel free to email me. Until then, this is going to be my preferred method of getting that bottle to last just long enough to enjoy ever last drop!

Cheers,
Todd

Want a second opinion? Here's an interesting take from The Shopping Bags (including a freezing technique!)

Question of the Day: What do you think of the half-bottle approach? Have you tried it? Does it work for you?

I promised at some point to get back to discussing the reviewing process for two conferences I am currently on the PC for, NSDI and LATIN. Since I happily just finished my "first drafts" of the reviews for both conferences, now seems like a good time. As usual, I've finished a bit early and most reviews are not yet in, so I'm writing this without benefit of seeing most of the other reviews yet.

I should point out that comparing NSDI and LATIN is definitely an apples and oranges comparison, and not just because one is systems and one is theory. LATIN is a "2nd tier" conference (and one would probably argue that was being polite), held every other year, with no specific theme other than theory; the acceptance rate is probably in the 25-35% range. That is not to say the papers are bad, but generally the papers generally utilize known techniques, and the question is whether the underlying question seems interesting, the paper was written well, etc. I'm not looking for papers that everyone would want to read; I'm looking for papers that I think somebody wants to read. Since interests vary greatly, I suspect there may be some substantial score deviations among reviewers, corresponding to different opinions about how interesting something is. I don't mean to sound negative about the conference; some very nice papers have appeared in LATIN, with my favorites including The LCA Problem Revisited, and On Clusters in Markov chains. But I don't think it's a first choice destination for many papers -- unless, of course, an author lives in Latin America or wants to go to Latin America.

NSDI is arguably a "1st tier" systems conference for networks/distributed systems. While it doesn't have the prestige of a SIGCOMM, it's certainly aiming at that level -- although I think perhaps even more than SIGCOMM there's a bit of bias at NSDI for concrete implementations demonstrating actual improvements. In the last two years the acceptance rate has dropped below 20% and I expect it to be there again. Generally I'm looking for a solid, well-explained idea or system design, with some experimental evidence to back up that the idea really could be useful. I admit I would prefer to have some definitions, equations, theorems, or at least well-structured arguments in these submissions -- this is something I push on regularly -- as for me these are highlights of having a well-explained idea, but a paper can still possibly be good without them (and sometimes a paper that is too theoretically oriented wanders too far off from reality, even for an open-minded idealist such as myself).

Now for concrete differences. For LATIN I only have 10 or so papers to review; there's a big PC and the meeting will all be electronic. I imagine I might get asked to read one or two more papers where the reviews don't agree but that's probably it. Most papers will probably have 3 reviews. There's a 0-5 point scale, from strong reject to strong accept, but no "percentages" assigned to the ratings. There's also a whole lot of other scores (originality, innovation, correctness, presentation, difficulty) I have to give that I think are overkill. Even though the number of papers is small, it seems a number of people are using outside reviewers. (I generally don't, unless I feel I'm so far from the area of the paper I need someone else to read it.) We're using Easychair, which these days seems passable, but is far from my favorite.

For NSDI, we have a first round of 20 or so papers. Each paper is getting 3 reviews in the first round, and then we'll probably cut the bottom X% (about 40-50%?). Everyone reviews their own papers. In the second round papers will probably get 1-2 more reviews (or more), and outside reviewers will be used if it's thought their expertise could help. (Usually the chairs, I believe, assign outside reviewers, often based on comments or suggestions by the first-round reviewers.) After the second round of reviews are in we have a face-to-face PC meeting. We're using the standard 1-5 networking scale with 1 being "bottom 50%", and 5 being "top 5%". I've actually found that helpful; I was going over my scores, realized I had bit less than 50% with scores of 1, and went back and decided that there were papers I was being a bit too generous to. (Giving scores of 1 is hard, but if everyone tries to follow the guidelines -- unless they really believe they had a well-above-average set of papers -- I find it makes things run much more smoothly.) We're using hotcrp, which I like much better than Easychair -- I can easily see from the first screen the other scores for each paper, the average over all reviews, how many other reviews have been completed, etc.

Once all the reviews are in, we'll see how things work beyond the mechanics.

As I was running to my car this evening I lost my grip on my keys, and they sailed directly into the mouth of a waiting storm drain. I laughed deliriously for about ten seconds, then tried to see if I could find them. I couldn’t see into the drain, and I couldn’t feel anything as far as I could stick my arm in, but I was able to dislodge the cast-iron grate and lift it enough to see that I might have a chance of getting it all the way off. I ran back to my apartment and recruited my roommate to come help me. Together, we lifted the grate clear of the opening.

With a flashlight, the glint of my keys was visible amidst a pile of fall leaves that appeared to be floating on the sewer muck. They were maybe four feet below street level. I tried to step in, but could feel no bottom with my boots. Instead, I handed my glasses to my roommate and went in upside-down from the waist up, my legs still on the street. I grabbed the keys, set them well clear of the drain, and together we replaced the cover.

It was an eventful evening.

A project I’ve been playing with recently is Ogg Theora’s Cortado, a free video player designed to be able to run on an extremely wide variety of computers, including old, obsolete systems. How old, you ask?

Really old:

This is a picture of Cortado running on Mac OS 7.5.5, in the Macintosh Runtime for Java 2.0, playing the video from the FSF’s freedom testimonials campaign. This operating system was released in 1996. The system is emulated in SheepShaver, which makes playback far too slow to be usable. Someone will have to test on real hardware to see what happens.

Nonetheless, I think this is strong evidence regarding how serious we are about backwards compatibility and inclusive software. Serious, or at least, enthusiastic.

I don't usually respond to illogical cheap shots from around the blogosphere (life is too short). But when the cheap shot comes from a Nobel prize winner in economics, I will make an exception.

Paul Krugman says I should be ashamed of myself for calling into question Obama administration estimates of how many jobs have been "created or saved." Here is what Paul says,

The Obama administration’s “jobs created or saved” is just a way of saying “other things equal” in non-economese. Of course it makes sense to ask how many more people are working than would have been the case without a given policy — and every administration makes assertions along those lines. During the 2001 recession and its aftermath, how many times did the Bush administration claim that the recession would have been worse without its tax cuts? And while many of us quarreled with that claim, I don’t think I ever argued that other-things-equal arguments are nonsense on their face.

Yet Paul is rebutting claims I did not make, and he is giving Team Obama more credit on this question than it is due. Here is what I wrote on the topic last February:

The 4 million job number is a counterfactual policy simulation of what the stimulus will do based on a particular model of the economy. As such, I have no objection to someone citing it in a policy discussion. In fact, macroeconomists use models to generate figures like this all the time. I have even done it myself.

But as an answer to the question "how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working?... What metric should they use?", citing the 4 million job figure is a non sequitur, or more likely a diversion. A metric has to be measurable, and the actual number of jobs "created or saved" by the policy will never be measurable from any data source.

That is, I do not object to claims such as,

A: "Based on our models of the economy, we believe there would be X million fewer jobs today without the stimulus."

But it is absurd to suggest that you can say,

B: "We have measured how many jobs the stimulus has saved or created, and the number is X."

Economists are capable of making statements such as A, but it is beyond our ken to make statements such as B. Statement B is,of course, much stronger than statement A, as it purports to be based on data rather than on models. Unfortunately, we are hearing statements like B much too often from administration officials. A good example is here, where can you "learn" that 110,185.36 jobs have been created or saved in California alone.

Unlike many artists who just work in their studios, David A. Lang builds his kinetic sculptures in a place he calls "the realm of the unlikely."

To construct one of his genre-busting pieces, the Wayland artist used 120 feet of copper welding rod, a bunch of clam shells and an equal number of tiny pictures of Venus rising from the sea, miniature gears, and crankshafts and strips of cloth for little angel wings.

Then he soldered them together with plenty of his signature whimsy and voila! "The Day the Castinetti Sisters First Learned to Fly."

Lang said "stuff happens" when visitors approach his sculptures.

When a visitor moves near "The Castinetti Sisters," a light sensor triggers a mechanism that makes the clam shells pop open with a gulping sound, offering split second glimpses of a voluptuous Venus. As little gear wheels turn, the shells open and close, making the wings above them flap like laundry on a clothesline.

Lang said he aims to make art that "does the unexpected because I like to take silly notions and go as far as I can."

Visitors to the Dana Hall School Art Gallery might feel they've wandered into the workshop of a compulsive inventor fascinated by spinning wheels, fluttering sea horses, flapping wings and philosophic conundrums.

Lang's pieces shudder into life when a sensor is tripped or a tiny switch flipped. He powers some of his works with motion detectors pulled from discarded surveillance cameras.

Resembling an early 20th century stream-driven auto carrying a large crumpled sack, the piece named "Brown Bag Lunch To Go" begins to shake as if its paper passenger was being consumed from within. Like banners on a ship's mast, three bright blue worms squirm beneath the topsails of "Blue Worm Group."

In "Straight Eight," eight pairs of scissors begin snipping away at strips of cloth suspended above them like bandages.

A licensed flight instructor for 24 years, Lang builds sculptures like gliders that take viewers on wondrous rides.

"Each piece provides a constant series of revelations," he said in the Dana Art Gallery where 11 of his works are displayed.

"I don't sketch them out before I build them. I make them in my head and go from there by guess and by golly."

That might describe Lang's personal approach to his own art which includes painting, sculpture and photography.

For 31 years, he taught art, chaired the art department and directed the art gallery at the Middlesex School in Concord before retiring in 2003.

Determined to devote himself to new creative projects, Lang bought a home in Ireland but suffered a stroke before moving there.

Though mostly recovered, he said the shock and recuperation has caused him "to see things quite differently."

Lang's earlier paintings were broadly realistic with an Impressionist twist, while the works at Dana Hall merge elements of conceptual art and sculptural installations and then some.

Lang does to his sculptures what Salvador Dali did to wristwatches and Rene Magritte did to gravity by taking them to unexpected places most artists don't find in their studios.

He has infused eclectic pieces pieces like "the Philosophers" and "Odysseus: The Return from Troy" with a weird slapstick humor and layers of philosophic inquiry into the very nature of things.

"These days my mind is in a whirl, trying to understand how to make very complicated things appear to be smooth, slow and coordinated," he said. "The stuff that interests me now is what interested me when I was 6 years old."

Sometimes Lang discovers things he didn't realize he built into his sculptures.

When the exhibit opened last week, he began drawing a violin bow across copper welding rods in one of his geometrically symmetrical works and was surprised to hear it "sing" with the deep sonorous tones of the undersea "songs" of whales.

"The work itself is expressing new things," said Lang. "It just trips the imagination."

At first glance, some sculptures just look fun.

Miniature American flags wave above a wagon-like frame as nine hanging wooden matches seem to march above a striking pad that would set them alight.

Consider its title, "First Strike." Perhaps Lang is offering a sly commentary on the potential for political combustion when Old Glory flies about Baghdad and Kabul.

Gallery Director Michael Frassinelli said he asked Lang to show his sculptures so Dana Hall students could experience "kinetic art with complex engineering and poetic beauty."

"David's work broadens the spectrum of what art can do. Students can look at it and wonder how does he bring his ideas to fruition," he said.

Like Lang, Frassinelli has created his own signature artworks, a complex installation, "The Myth of History" constructed from old piano parts.

Since joining the Dana Hall faculty in 2002, Frassinelli said he's bringing more exhibits to the gallery that will inspire students considering careers in art.

"I want to encourage young students in areas of art that are often underrepresented. The most common reactions to David's works have been 'I never saw anything like it' and 'I like it."' said Frassinelli. "David's works help expand students' definition of art. It gives them an idea I think is very important: Art isn't just about beauty. It can also be about ideas."

THE ESSENTIALS:

"David A. Lang: Kinetic Sculpture" through Nov. 24 at the Dana Hall Art Gallery, 45 Dana Road, Wellesley

HOURS: 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday and Friday.

INFO: 781-235-3010, www.danahall.org/arts/gallery

In my Sunday Times column, I discussed the marginal tax rates implicit in the Senate Finance Committee version of the health reform bill. CBO has just released some numbers on the version of health reform being considered in the House of Representatives.

The bottom line: The implicit marginal tax rates are even higher in the House bill.

If you are interested in a more specific comparison, here is what I wrote about the Senate Finance bill on Sunday, with the new numbers for the House bill added in brackets:

A family of four with an income, say, of $54,000 would pay $9,900 [$6,200] for healthcare. That covers only about half [a third] the actual cost. Uncle Sam would pick up the rest.

Now suppose that the same family earns an additional $12,000 by, for example, having the primary earner work overtime or sending a secondary worker into the labor force. In that case, the federal subsidy shrinks, so the family’s cost of health care rises to $12,700 [$10,000].

In other words, $2,800 [$3,800] of the $12,000 of extra income, or 23 [32] percent, would be effectively taxed away by the government’s new health care system.

And remember: This implicit marginal tax hike of 32 percent is added on top of the explicit marginal tax rate the family already faces from income and payroll taxes.

The venture capital firm Greylock Partners announced today that they've just raised a new $575 pool of capital, one of the biggest of 2009, and that they've added LinkedIn's founder as a new west coast partner. Greylock has invested in LinkedIn, Facebook, Red Hat, Digg, and Zipcar.

And Bill Helman, one of Greylock's partners, called me this afternoon to add a little tidbit to the news: while Greylock made waves earlier this year when the firm relocated its headquarters from Waltham to Silicon Valley, Helman said that Greylock's local outpost will move from Waltham to Cambridge as of January 1st.

Why?

Modern marriage is not always a "'til death do us part" affair, but in Massachusetts, alimony can last a lifetime.

Many local legislators and family law attorneys agree time has come to update the state's alimony system, which they say allows judges little leeway to set a limit on the duration of spousal support payments.

"It really is not fair the way the statute is drafted now," said attorney Patrick Hart, of Hart Law Offices in Marlborough.

The best route for reform, however, is up for debate in two very different bills before the Legislature.

Nine legislators from MetroWest and the Milford area are among 72 lawmakers who have cosigned a proposal filed by Rep. Steven Walsh, D-Lynn.

Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem, D-Newton, chairwoman of the joint Judiciary Committee, filed the other bill, which is cosponsored by Rep. Alice Peisch, D-Wellesley.

After a hearing on the proposals in September, the joint Judiciary Committee charged a task force led by Rep. John Ferndandes, D-Milford, and Sen. Gale Candaras, D-Wilbraham, with recommending a next step.

"It's going to be headed to some more serious review," Fernandes said Friday.

Creem's bill is only one sentence and would add the words "and duration" to a list of criteria judges must consider in ordering alimony.

Those criteria already include the length of the marriage, both parties' conduct in the marriage, age, health, occupation, income sources and amount, and job skills.

The other proposal is far more detailed. The goal, it says, is "any party needing alimony shall be self-supporting within a reasonable period of time."

It defines that period by capping alimony awards at half the duration of a marriage, with a maximum of 12 years unless the supported spouse still has custody of a child or children under 16 years old.

The House bill also would require alimony payments after five years to drop 10 percent annually, with the same caveat on custody of minors or if a recipient is unable to be gainfully employed.

Paying alimony would end upon retirement age. Increases in payments would be tied to the Consumer Price Index. The ability to pay would be determined by recent income, not including the resources of new significant others.

Finally, the bill says many alimony orders that do not comply with the new rules should be amended in court.

Peisch said the existing law is ambiguous at best on the duration of alimony payments. She said she is not married to the language in Creem's proposal, but she thinks the other bill is too inflexible.

For a younger and educated couple, "one doesn't want to encourage one to spend 50 years being supported by someone else," she said. But a 65-year-old homemaker would face a harder time joining the workforce.

"I personally come down on the side of maximum flexibility, just because I think each case is so unique," Peisch said.

Fernandes signed onto Walsh's bill along with Rep. Danielle Gregoire, D-Marlborough, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee.

Other cosponsors are bipartisan: Sen. Karen Spilka, D-Ashland; Sen. Jamie Eldridge, D-Acton; Rep. David Linsky, D-Natick; Rep. Thomas Conroy, D-Wayland; Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham; Sen. George Peterson, R-Grafton; and Rep. Karyn Polito, R-Shrewsbury.

Fernandes said he, too, is flexible on the hard-and-fast guidelines in the bill he supports.

"At the same time, what I am looking for and what I think is fair is consistency in which the way the law of alimony is applied," he said.

While the duration of payments addressed in Creem's bill was a major concern in testimony at September's hearings, another overriding complaint was that different courts apply alimony law differently, Fernandes said.

Several family law attorneys saw flaws in the House bill. At his law office in Marlborough, Hart called Creem's bill "long overdue," but said Walsh's proposal would "place some shackles on judges."

"It's kind of like the mandatory sentencing bills. ... One size doesn't always fit all," Hart said.

Framingham attorney Maria Ioannou-Begin said she supports the idea that a spouse getting alimony needs to try to become self-sufficient, but she worried the House bill does not allow for catastrophic illnesses or disability.

"The changes are too drastic," she said.

However, Chesley Oriel, another Framingham attorney, said the House bill could result in more agreements being reached and fewer divorce trials.

Still, he is worried the final section on revising existing alimony orders could "open the door to all kinds of problems."

Steve Hitner of Marlborough, president and founder of Massachusetts Alimony Reform, said the bill was drawn up at his group's request. Some pieces may need to be tweaked, he said, but it's the best solution presented to date.

He chalked up some of the criticism to attorneys protecting their business in handling divorces.

Hitner cited horror stories of ex-husbands unable to retire because of alimony payments that went on for decades and second wives whose income was considered in order to boost their husband's alimony obligations.

Creem's bill would only lead to more litigation and does not address inconsistency in the courts, he said.

"In every court you go to, you'll get a different answer," Hitner said. "If you have a system that you admit is broken, that is in total disarray, how does it fix it by adding more discretion?"

(David Riley can be reached at 508-626-3919 or driley@cnc.com.)

Scott Brown knows he faces an uphill battle as a Republican seeking to fill Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat.

Until last week, when Jack E. Robinson filed nomination papers, Brown was the only member of the GOP seeking the seat, which is also the goal of four Democrats.

Although the seat has been in Democratic hands since the 1950s and more than a decade has passed since Massachusetts voters sent a Republican to Congress, Brown, one of just five Republicans in the state Senate, says there is no inevitability to a Democrat victory.

"This isn't a Democratic seat, it's a seat of the people of Massachusetts," said Brown, 50, whose victory in a 2004 special election to fill a state Senate seat vacated by a Democrat was one of the last Republican legislative victories.

Brown has easily held the seat since, winning by a 59-41 percent margin in 2008 that gathered more votes in his district than Barack Obama. Brown attributes his strength as a candidate to his bipartisanship.

"I would not have been overwhelmingly re-elected if I didn't know how to work across party lines," said Brown, a Wrentham resident. "If the Democrats have a good idea, I'd be happy to vote with them."

Massachusetts has three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans, but more than half the state remains independent or unenrolled. Brown believes there are many who don't feel represented by the 12 Massachusetts Democratic congressmen in Washington.

Republican strategist Charley Manning agrees. "All four of the Democratic candidates are running far left campaigns," he said. Manning worked on Mitt Romney's Senate campaign against Kennedy in 1994. "I know what a good campaigner Scott is - he's a good guy and holds a good, moderate position for voters."

State Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-North Attleborough, said Brown will represent people who aren't being heard.

"Frankly, we need balance," said Poirier. "Scott will provide the other point of view."

She said voters should be confident in Brown's ability to represent them in Washington. "We've worked together, we've campaigned together," said Poirier. "He's very diligent and compassionate."

A fiscal conservative who has never voted for a tax increase, Brown said he's running, in part, to offer an alternative to the spending policies of Washington.

"I'm for free enterprise, low taxes, and less government involvement," he said. "Government has a place - it absolutely has a place, but we need to know when to get out of the way."

He's particularly worried about the government's role in the growing national deficit.

"I have some very great concerns about how our children, and at this point our grandchildren, will pay this back," he said.

Brown has two daughters with his wife of 23 years, WCVB reporter Gail Huff. Arianna attends Syracuse University; Ayla is a basketball standout at Boston College. In 2006, Ayla made it to the top 16 on "American Idol."

Her fame led to a moment of controversy for Brown in 2007 when he was invited to speak at King Phillip Regional High School in Wrentham. Brown opened his speech by reading Facebook comments, obscenities and all, directed at his stance against gay marriage. He also named King Phillip students who had directed similar comments to his daughter, Ayla.

He has since told reporters that he does not regret sticking up for his family, and points out that he does support civil unions for same-sex couples.

Brown grew up in Massachusetts, a graduate of Wakefield High School, Tufts University and Boston College Law School. While in law school, Brown posed for a centerfold in Cosmopolitan as the winner of the magazine's "America's Sexiest Man" competition. He put the $1,000 toward his law school tuition.

The magazine joked this September about Brown's appearance in the June 1982 issue, suggesting a range of new campaign slogans for the candidate, asking "Who needs Joe Plumber when you can have Scott six-pack?"

In 1982 Brown told the magazine he was "a bit of a patriot," a fitting description for someone who went on to spend 30 years as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard where he is now a lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General's Corps. He said his service gives him experience his competitors lack.

"I have a good feel for what role we have in the world," said Brown. "I take that seriously."

Brown's military experience has informed his stance on the wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he appreciates President Obama's thoughtfulness about American involvement in both countries. "I know the president thinks long and hard before sending our men and women into harm's way," said Brown.

But Brown believes, when it comes to strategy, generals, not politicians, are best equipped to make those decisions. "If they say we need to adjust, adapt or add more troops, we should do that," Brown said.

In between his responsibilities to his family, his constituents and his country, Brown still manages to find time for a more personal pursuit. He is a keen triathlete, competing in races across the country.

"I don't sleep a lot," he laughed.

Brown will get even less sleep over the next few months as he campaigns and raises funds, but he promises constituents it won't interfere with his state Senate duties. "I haven't missed a vote yet since I started running, and I don't plan to," said Brown. "I have an obligation."

Brittany Abery and Justin Meisinger are part of the Boston University State House reporting program.

The Board of Selectmen and the Conservation Commission this week will each discuss the ongoing negotiations about using herbicide to control weeds in Lake Cochituate.

Selectmen tonight will hear from Carole Berkowitz, spokeswoman for Protect Our Water Resources. POWR opposes a plan by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) to use chemicals to fight milfoil, a non-native weed infesting parts of the lake. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. in Town Hall.

POWR and the Natick Conservation Commission have both appealed a state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) decision allowing the DCR to use herbicide. In the decision, DEP officials stripped many conditions set by the Conservation Commission when it agreed to let the DCR use the herbicide diquat on five acres of the lake near the public beach and boat ramp.

The conditions removed from the commission's ruling included: monitoring the amount of the chemical in the lake water; posting warnings of the chemical use; and requiring the DCR to run a pilot project to study how well a diver-assisted suction harvester (DASH) boat removes the weeds.

A hearing is scheduled for Dec. 15, and Berkowitz said witness statements and reports for the hearing will soon be available.

Natick Conservation Agent Bob Bois said there is still a chance the hearing will not be needed. He and other town officials recently met with representatives from DCR to try to come to an agreement.

"There was a good discussion. We looked for common interests and we agreed to meet again," he said. "Our hope is we can reach a settlement between DCR and the Conservation Commission, which includes restoring the original order of conditions."

The lake weeds will also be the topic of discussion at the Conservation Commission's Wednesday night meeting, Bois said. Officials from the DCR will give an annual report on Lake Cochituate starting at 7:15 p.m. in Town Hall.

Bois said he hopes they will tell the commission about how well a DASH boat fared in a test run on Lake Cochituate during the spring.

"We're hoping it's one of the things DCR will talk about - the effectiveness of the DASH boat used in April," he said. "It would be nice to share that information with the board."

Berkowitz said POWR want to use a DASH boat to control the milfoil in the lake. She said she had a professional diver, who may be interested in bidding to run the DASH boat, come out to look at the lake last week.

The DCR used the boat to clear a channel in Snake Brook Cove, which lies between North and Middle ponds.

"The diver looked at it and it's good," Berkowitz said. "It was clean (of weeds). He was very impressed."

Other items likely to be covered by DCR officials are the harvesting of water chestnut plants in Fiske Pond, and the management of milfoil in Lake Cochituate's South and Middle ponds, Bois said.

(Charlie Breitrose can be reached at 508-626-3964 or cbreitro@cnc.com.)

Gabe: -My D&D campaign is featured over on the Obsidian Portal site this month. You can check out a little interview with me as well as take a look at a bunch of info from my campaign. If you are not familiar with it, Obsidian Portal is a site full of tools to let you build and manage campaign websites for tabletop games like D&D. The basic stuff is free but they also have a pay option that has a few more features. They call this their ascendant level service and they have been kind enough to give me a coupon ...

As pointed out many places, the paper for the (strangely named) new theory conference Innovations in Computer Science are out, with the list here and list with abstracts here.

I suppose the future will tell how "innovative" these papers are compared to, say, the normal collection at FOCS/STOC/SODA. I'm not surprised to see the trendy areas of game theory and quantum fairly heavily represented. I was a bit shocked, however, to see a number of papers on what I would consider "mainstream" coding/information theory, in that I wouldn't be at all shocked to see papers with similar abstracts (but different authors) at say an International Symposium on Information Theory. The example nearest and dearest to me would have to be

Global Alignment of Molecular Sequences via Ancestral State Reconstruction
Authors: Alexandr Andoni, Constantinos Daskalakis, Avinatan Hassidim, Sebastien Roch

which, while sounding all biological, is really just studying trace reconstruction problems on a tree. I'm a fan of the under-studied trace reconstruction problem, as it's tied closely to insertion and deletion channels; I was a co-author on a paper on a different variant of the problem back in SODA 2008. (I also cover the problem in my survey on insertion/deletion channels.) I guess I'm glad to see that work on this very challenging problem is considered "innovative".

The tireless crew at DartBoston, which already organizes a weekly gathering and Webcast for young entrepreneurs, is debuting a new event this month called Capitalize. I love the concept: it's a chance for a young entrepreneur to get into a local venture capital firm, pitch their business, and receive candid feedback. And other entrepreneurs get to be there to observe. There will also be a live Webcast, since most VC boardrooms won't fit more than 15 or 20 people.

I suspect tickets to the monthly Capitalize event will be tough to get; one of the DartBoston organizers, Cort Johnson, says they'll be given out to people who go to their weekly Pokin' Holes event, or who watch the Webcast.

As to how companies will be chosen for the chance to pitch a VC, he writes in an e-mail:

...[We] are hand-selecting all of these companies to the extent that they believe they are ready to raise capital and they have some participation level in Dart like going to a Family Dinner or Pokin' Holes.

The company that will be pitching at Venrock is RiotVine and they're going to be on PH next week...

Capitalize will take place at Venrock this month (where Cambridge partner David Beisel is also the organizer of the monthly Web Innovators Group gatherings); Flybridge Capital Partners in December; and Bain Capital Ventures in January.

Interesting, is it not, that all of the VC firms who've decided to make themselves more accessible to young entrepreneurs are in Boston and Cambridge, not Waltham...? (The stodgy residents of Mount Money insist I'm painting them with too broad a brush, but I'd argue that they're doing the painting themselves.)

Update: Kepha Partners in Waltham has just signed on to host Capitalize in February.

President Obama's plan:

What we are not doing -- what I have no interest in doing -- is running GM. GM will be run by a private board of directors and management team with a track record in American manufacturing that reflects a commitment to innovation and quality. They -- and not the government -- will call the shots and make the decisions about how to turn this company around.

So how is that working out for you, Mr President?

In May, even before the government's ownership became official, lawmakers erupted when GM disclosed it planned to produce a new subcompact car at its factories in China. Under congressional pressure, GM dropped those plans and promised instead to retool an existing U.S. facility in Michigan, Wisconsin or Tennessee for the new model.

Lawmakers from those states demanded and received high-level meetings in Washington to quiz GM on the criteria for site selection and to tout their states. GM in the end picked a site in Michigan.

That same month, GM dealer Pete Lopez in Spencer, W.Va., received notice that GM was giving him just over a year to shut down his Chevy, Pontiac and Buick dealership, which he'd acquired two years earlier. GM's move to shutter more than 1,300 dealerships -- about one-quarter of its network -- was central to its restructuring because it cleared out underperforming showrooms and brought the network more in line with its shrunken sales.

With an assist from his mayor, Mr. Lopez took his complaint straight to one of his state's senators, Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman of the powerful Commerce
Committee.

Sen. Rockefeller sent a letter to GM headquarters on Mr. Lopez's behalf, according to a staff aide. He arranged for Mr. Lopez to come testify before a Senate panel in early June, alongside GM Chief Executive Frederick "Fritz" Henderson. The senator introduced the two men, giving Mr. Lopez a chance to make a personal pitch.

"He couldn't have been nicer," Mr. Lopez said of the GM CEO. "He said to me, 'We've made some quick decisions and now we're going to look it all over again.' "

The GM chief executive put Mr. Lopez in touch with Mark LaNeve, then the company's top official for North American sales. The dealer received a response on the last Saturday in June while fishing on a lake near his house.

"Mr. LaNeve called and said, 'I've got some good news for you. We're going to save your dealership,' " Mr. Lopez recalls. He says he owes it all to Sen. Rockefeller.

Thanks to everyone who left a comment, tweeted, or subscribed to enter in the wine glass towel review/giveaway we ran last week. And thanks again to all of the vendors who submitted towels for review. I really appreciate it.

I took a quick video of the drawing:



Congratulations to @HeathStone and @troutmonster! I'll follow-up with you on Twitter to see which towels you'd like and I'll ship them out ASAP.

If you didn't win the drawing, I'd highly recommend you consider purchasing the Top Pick available at Wubeez.com. No affiliation for me on that one- just a great product.

We've got a great week of content ahead on the site. Tomorrow, we have a guest post on a simple and effective wine preservation technique. Later in the week, ever wonder if those dinners they auction off at charity events are a good deal? I'll review a Chef's Table wine dinner at a top area steakhouse I attended recently with friends. I'd love it if you subscribed via E-mail for updates.

It's astonishing how popular Malthusian catastrophism is, in spite of such spectacular evidence to the contrary. As disaster keeps failing to come, its details are changed, but the core prediction that we're all doomed doesn't budge. In this post I'd like to explore some evidence against Malthusian ideology - as with so much evidence to the contrary, it like creationism long ceased to be anything else than ideological view.

Classical Malthusianism

But first, let's say what I'm criticizing. Malthus' idea was that population growth is exponential, while food production growth is arithmetic, therefore we're all going to fall back into extreme poverty due to overpopulation, until we're poor enough to be dying in sufficient numbers to counteract that.

The second part is, and I'm not making this up - "therefore, we should starve and abuse people who lost their jobs in a recession to lower taxes on the rich". That's a forerunner of the Real Business Cycle theory if there ever was one. The predictable result of being tough on the poor was that the working poor were starved to the point of eating pig fertilizer, beaten, and sexually abused.

But that's not the worst of Malthus-inspired politicians - they decided to starve one million poor people in Ireland. During the alleged "famine", Ireland was a major exporter of food, with its food production even at lowest point estimated to be enough to sustain population twice as high as it had. And there was well known solution to such famines already tried in 1782–83 of temporarily stopping food exports, but those good Malthusians would rather have a bit of a genocide than to stand in ways of profits.

Anyway, I'm not here to criticize consequences of Malthus' ideology, just its factual basis. It's been 211 years since Malthus' infamous essay, how far behind are we in food production?

Oh wait, actually food production looks pretty exponential on this graph, while population growth looks rather linear. It's not even that - according to virtually all projections population growth is slower than linear, and world populations are due to stabilize fairly soon, here's Wikipedia:
Unfortunately I haven't found any useful food production statistics going all the way back to 18th century, but by now it should be very clear that these relationships do not hold.

Yet, Malthusianism refuses to die. The most popular mid 20th century's neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in 1968:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Or more specifically - "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971" and "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

That was in the middle of yield increases so spectacular they caused major difficulties to even harvest it all (High yields led to a shortage of various utilities — labor to harvest the crops, bullock carts to haul it to the threshing floor, jute bags, trucks, rail cars, and grain storage facilities. Some local governments were forced to close school buildings temporarily to use them for grain storage. as Wikipedia says). India became net exporter of cereals by 1978.
You'd think that after two centuries of predictive failures people would have given up, but no. The latest neo-Malthusian fad just a few years ago was "peak oil". It sort of fizzled since, but in case you forgot, here's an awesome YouTube video describing peakoilnik ideology while dancing:



"There won't be much food anyway, as oil is used to make fertilizers and pesticides. Up to two thirds of the world population may not make it. Four billion people may not survive."

Because as they say, we're basically "eating oil" as the meme says. It doesn't bother them much that oil is used at no step of fertilizer production - it's all natural gas, and entire 3-5% of world natural gas (1-2% of world energy use) is spent on fertilizer production (not even as energy source, more as convenient hydrogen source easier than electrolysis of water), but alternatives based on coal, and hydroelectricity are well known and used depending on local availability. China already produces most of its fertilizer with coal. The first commercial hydroelectricity-based fertilizer plant was opened in 1905, over a century ago, and in case you're wondering use of electric plowing equipment dates to late 19th century.

Pesticide production is so ridiculously low, by some back of an envelope estimates takes about 0.06% of world's oil, and is trivially replaceable by coal if need be (I know of no serious estimates, as it's too small to bother anyone with a clue).

What a Malthusian world would look like

So why so many people believe in Malthusian-inspired catastrophism? I have a two-fold hypothesis. First, some people just enjoy beliefs that we're all going to die. It seems that virtually every disaster scenario, no matter how plausible or not - attracts countless believers.

But there are people smarter than that who still believe in Malthusianism. Here's the second part of my hypothesis. When people look at history, to see if it matches some theory, they just look at things that would be observable if theory was true, and see if there are present. They don't do proper Bayesian updating.

Here's a simple example - let's say you have a theory which says that clash of civilization causes warfare. Then the naive thing to do would be to look at history, note a few wars between civilizations, and take it as evidence for the theory. It would also be wrong, as far more numerous wars were fought within civilizations, and proper Bayesian thinking must look at both.

So let's take a look at evidence for Malthusian worldview against the null hypothesis that food production is just like any other commodity, and not any more connected to population than production of clothes, bricks, or paper.

If Malthusianism was true, food production per capita would be pretty much constant - because any increase in food production would result in increase in population, and decrease in food production would cause mass starvation, and adjust population accordingly. But if Malthusianism was false, food production per capita would also be pretty much constant, because what would be the point of growing more food if there was nobody to eat it? So there's no evidence either way.

If Malthusianism was true, everyone would be poor. Not only is this ridiculously false, now, historical estimates of life expectancies vary wildly from 18 to 60 for the same time period.

Malthusianism predicts almost all food production would be in whatever generates highest number of calories per hectare. Non-Malthusianism predicts food production would be much more varied - and it is so. Just the fact that we're keeping farm animals, which by their nature only destroy and not produce nutrients, proves Malthusianism wrong. There might be exceptions, but most grazing lands would produce more calories when cultivated, not to mention Malthusian ridiculousness of feeding animals human food as we do.

If Malthusianism was true, any sudden decrease in population, due to wars, famines and such, would result in rapid rebound, as agricultural capacity existed to support much larger populations, proven by its previous existence. If Malthusianism was false, population would have no particular reason to rebound. Here the evidence is very clear - there are numerous example of major population loses which were not recovered for centuries. Two best examples affect entire Europe, which used to have high populations at height of Roman empire, then fell to very low levels and didn't recover until 12-13th centuries, almost a millennium later. Second fall was due to Black Death, recovery from which wasn't complete even two centuries later.

Malthusianism predicts that it would be extremely unlikely for vast amount of spare arable land to exist - yet this was exactly the situation for centuries in early Medieval Europe, with vast tracks of unused lands.

Malthusianism predicts that famines would happen during times of higher population a lot, while almost never happening during time of low population. But even a brief look at Wikipedia's List of famines shows plenty of major famines both during population lows of early middle ages (5th century famines in Western Europe, 750's famine in Spain, 809 famine in Frankish Empire, 963-964 in Ireland, 1005 in England, 1016 all Europe, 1030-1032 France, 1066 England again, 1097 France again). There were supposedly 95 famines on British Isles alone during Middle Ages. In spite of very low population levels, we can see plenty of them, and we'd probably know about more if it wasn't for horrible Medieval record keeping. Notice that during all that time there was plenty of undeveloped arable land!

During second period of low populations after Black Death, there are major famines 1390 in England, 1481-1483 in France, 1504 in Spain, 1518 in Venice and so on. I'm not even going to mention that modern periods of European population explosion had fewer famines than any other time in history.

Non-Malthusian view correctly predicts that famines and population levels are completely uncorrelated. Famines are caused not by the mythical "overpopulation", but commonly by wars, government action (like in Ireland, and 1930s' Ukraine, notice how democratic governments have virtually spotless track record of no famines, in spite of plenty of agricultural disasters), and most of all - simply by major delay between increase in agricultural inputs and outputs. It doesn't matter that there's plenty of unused land around, developing it would take years, and plenty of labour, capital, seed, and farm animal input, before any food was grown on it - all of which being in short supply during famine anyway. By the time food was growing the famine would be long over. To give you some indications of time scales involved, settlers in new developments were freed from any taxation for up to 24 years. During that time net effect on food production would be negative.

Most of all, current overwhelming explosion of wealth is completely and utterly incompatible with Malthusianism. Even the second worst country in the world - Angola - has life expectancies far greater than world had 100 years ago (one tiny country which doesn't has 26.1% HIV infection rates, and is too poor to afford HIV drugs - hardly a Malthusian reason). In spite, or maybe even due to, population explonion, world's average life expectancy is 66.57 now. This is level not reached by even the richest countries before 1930, and by most developed countries well into 1940s an 1950s.

However hard I try, I cannot find any evidence for even very broadly constructed Malthusianism that cannot be explained as well or better by treating food as a normal commodity. So worry not - we're not doomed.

Tycho: Gabriel brought to my attention a post in a dungeonmastering board he reads, which detailed the circumlocutions some people go through trying to square their plans for a vibrant scenario and the Received Wisdom of official campaign materials. It might be because we think of every event, action, sentence, or phrase as something to pervert for our use, but I was made genuinely distraught by the notion that those books - which are suggestions, at best - would conspire to dilute your joy. Those things are tools, and what's more they're your tools, which means that they serve you. Our ...

New Comic: Assertion Twelve

Achewood strip for Monday, November 2, 2009