Mind the Gap, liberals

As a self-claimed independent, it is fun to read Kevin Drum's Hack Gap.

I didn't watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn't just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn't even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama's entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.

Yes, it is expected that Foxnews or Drudgerport would just look other ways, if Romney had lost. MSM! hit the panic button!

He was my hero, once - Jack Welch

Jack Welch wrote an essay at Wall Street Journal defending his "questioning" of the latest job data on twitter. If those twits could be explained as lack of understanding of how BLS works, this piece proved that he is and was just trying to manipulate the public opinion.

I am no expert in labor statics, but all the economists who I respect and have followed in years agreed, republicans included, that it was impossible to manipulate the data. The trend line of the data agrees with overall big picture and other data, such as car retails etc.

To question the government data is one thing, to accuse the President of United States manipulating a key piece of data without any proof is another.
The data could be biased, skewed, or just an outliner due to statistical error. Manipulating the data could be a felony but I don't think any of the truthers can provide something to the DOJ.
Pointing out that the data contain errors and it is not golden is OK. We can try to compensate for the bias, take into account the statistical error, and we can defer our judgement till later. Data are all like this, but it is trust-worthy. Jack, don't dismiss it when you don't like it, and cite it all the time when it is in your favor.

Repressing the freedom of speech by the government is one thing. Pointing out the lies by experts is totally another.
Repressing of the freedom of speech happens in Soviet Russia or China. And the repressed do not have the opportunities to write a long defense on one of the most respected and widely-circulated newspaper. Questioning the sitting president does not absolve you from legitimate refute. 

Trying eliminate those differences, and implying that he was targeted based on political reasons by the government is flat out lie.

The WSJ piece contains certain valid points, but overall it is just propaganda. I sincerely doubt how much Jack knows about the real American economy. GE is a giant, where the head of a $1B business can hardly get face time with the CEO. I don't think Jack knows any one who is struggling to find a job. Not even his almost criminal friends once headed the Wall Street firms need to do that.

Here we are. One of the parties is determined that defeating a sitting president is job No.1 and will not even hesitate to kill any measures that could help the perspective of getting him reelected, even if, especially if that measure would help American people. When the number is going up, sending the heavy weight to publicly devalue the data, to stir the water, and at the same time, the campaign can play safe.

No wonder that same party wants to kill PBS and NPR. If they can, they probably are going to kill anything which is not Foxnews. 

Unfortunately, it works. At least if judged from the comments on the WSJ website. When only half the population believe that the President is even eligible, it is so convenient to accuse him of not cooperating. If we have poll today about the BLS data, it would be fairly close to the birth certificate one, I bet. It is a success of the GOP.

So, let's back to the definition of a moderate Republican. It used to some one who is willing to support tax increase under circumstances. Now any one who think that President Obama might have been born in the United States is definitely a moderate. Today, any one who thinks that President Obama did not manipulate the BLS data is already is a moderate, or a traitor to the GOP, who is trying the repress the respectable almighty Jack.

Mitt Romney might be a competent president, but he will bend to the pressure from his own party, just as he did in the primary. It scares me to imagine such an extreme party to control both chambers of the congress and the White House. And they may appoint more justices who think corporates are people, but care about the well beings the insurance companies more than the uninsured. 

So, Jack, you have enjoyed your retirement; why are you doing this?

The first debate between Obama and Romney

Almost everyone agrees that Obama lost it. He came in the debate unprepared for:

1. Romney's "pivot" to moderate,
2. Romney's attack lines, some of which predictable, 
3. his own data, such as $5 trillion tax cut, which Romney's denial met no challenge, 
4. his own opening and closing statement.  
5. and everything else. 

It seems he watched too much the well received Clinton's convention speech. The lines lost charm, when he was facing a energized, prepared, and confident opponent. He missed so many chances of hitting back. He appeared that he was not even there.

 Different theories why he lost and many  talks about how he appeared less confident. My question is that whether he was not confident.

Four years in White House does not lead to the eager to renew the lease of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.His achievement is nowhere up to the hopes he set up four years ago. The hostile congress won't change. His family is probably already exhausted.

The weak performance last night is not an outliner. His recent bounce is a Clinton bounce. Obama's own convention as weak as last night's.

The remaining question is whether we are going to see the Obama bounce.

An Unfortunate Decision by Peter Orszag - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic

James Fallows discussed An Unfortunate Decision by Peter Orszag, and, "change we can believe in."

US charges scientist with economic espionage: Scientific American

US charges scientist with economic espionage: Scientific American:

By Sharon Weinberger

Could publishing a scientific article constitute an act of economic espionage? That question lies at the heart of charges against a Massachusetts-based scientist accused of passing U.S. trade secrets to China.

Ke-xue Huang, a Canadian citizen and permanent U.S. resident, was arrested on July 13, and has been charged under a law designed to protect intellectual property held by U.S. companies. At a bail hearing last week in Massachusetts, the U.S. government claimed that the scientist provided secrets belonging to Dow AgroSciences, based in Indianapolis, Ind., to the Hunan Normal University in Changsha, China. If convicted of passing the secrets, said to be worth some $100 million, Huang could face up to 15 years in prison for each of 12 counts of economic espionage.

Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1996 to counter an apparent rise in foreign spies trading in commercial, rather than military, secrets. Six other cases have been prosecuted under the law, but Huang's could set a precedent for the law to be applied to industry scientists and academic researchers publishing in the open literature. This isn't the first time a scientist has faced prison time for sharing research with China; a physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was last year sentenced to four years in prison for violating export control laws. He had provided technical data to scientists in China and worked on sensitive technologies with foreign graduate students.

"It is interesting that there are--or seem to be--more cases of research triggering some government reaction, whether this is due to export control or other issues," says Thomas Zurbuchen, a space scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been involved in efforts to reform export control restrictions on universities.

Huang's problems stem from research related to a review article. Co-authored with scientists at Hunan Normal University and James Zahn, a researcher at Coskata, a biofuel company in Warrenville, Ill., the paper describes work on a new class of insecticides that Dow has been making and marketing. The government alleges that the article contains confidential information--and that publishing it constituted theft of a trade secret, says James Duggan, Huang's lawyer. At the hearing, however, prosecutors indicated that the article is not the sole basis for the charges, which also involve e-mail communications relating to the research.

Huang worked for Dow from 2003 to 2008, but by the time of his arrest had moved to Qteros, a company based in Marlborough, Mass., that works on biofuels.

Originally from China, Huang had studied biology at China's Jilin Agricultural University, and earned a PhD in Japan. After a two-year postdoctoral stint in the mid-1990s at Texas A&M University in College Station, where he worked on sequencing biosynthetic genes for vitamin B12 production, he went to Rice University in Houston. His postdoctoral adviser there, George Bennett, says he "couldn't imagine" Huang intentionally doing something illegal. Dow has declined to comment on any specifics of the case.

Todd Sullivan, an attorney in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in trade-secret laws, compares economic espionage prosecutions to "unicorn sightings" because the government so rarely pursues them. The government has, in fact, successfully tried only one of the other six economic espionage cases. In another case, last year, a jury acquitted two Chinese-born engineers who had been charged with stealing secrets from a Californian semiconductor company and passing them on to China.

Huang's case resembles the others in that all but one involved China and Chinese scientists. The challenge for the U.S. government will be proving that he provided intellectual property to benefit a foreign government, or an entity controlled by a foreign government. June Teufel Dreyer, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida who follows Chinese espionage cases, says it will be "devilishly difficult" for prosecutors to prove that a university is controlled by the Chinese government.

But the Department of Justice is clearly determined to try. The government is fighting attempts to release Huang on bail, and has asked that, even if he is released, his use of the Internet and e-mail be restricted.

In the meantime, Duggan says that he does not concede that his client stole trade secrets, or even that he violated any employment agreement with Dow. He says that Huang was motivated not by espionage, but by his desire to improve insecticides and benefit crop production. "His motives were excellent motives," Duggan insists. "Dow's motives are to protect its profits."

Best Summer Jobs

Via NPR, a girl remembers her summer job at Seaworld Ohio:

And I would then pluck out the oyster, open it up with a knife and then just really plum around, dig around in that oyster for the pearl. I'd be really excited to find this pearl. If I wasn't excited, I'd feign the excitement. Then I'd wash it over, measure the diameter, and then I would tell them, I would appraise the pearl for them.

Mind you, I'm 15 years old, and the only instructions I really got from my supervisor was just to name two things: the color, the size. Then it was really my choice of how much price value to assign the pearl. So I would say: This rare black pearl measures eight millimeters in diameter. This would fetch you about $30 on the market, but here at SeaWorld, you only paid for the price of the mug. And, you know, of course, how could you not be excited by that? Look at that deal you just got, this treasure? These were seed pearls. They weren't, like, 100 percent pure, natural, rare pearls, of course not. Like, a seven-millimeter plastic ball with the thickness of, like, a fingernail coating of pearl on top. So kind of a sham, the whole appraisal.

I am kind of embarrassed to have been a teenage huckster in my very first job, but I'm really glad that I did. I think it's given me a lot of confidence. It really helped me to deliver what I have to say with assurance, and I can really see that now as a teacher.
No one wants a teacher who's just going to stand up and lecture about metaphor or simile or personification but, you know, if you can kind of make it more fun and deliver it in such a way that makes it interesting, then you're golden.

So, we were told that a sham appraisal experience as teenager helped her to gain confidence and be a good teacher.

I agree that teacher should make it fun and deliver it in an interesting way, but it is another thing when you try to make, or sell, a point by making things up. The distinction seems not to matter any more. Even those buying the pearls at Seaworld knew that the pearls are not authentic. A small "trick" is accepted. To tell "small" lies confidently is one of the most important traits needed for any job you can find today. If you can tell lies of any size confidently, that is even better. Maybe every teenager should take a job a husker or car dealer to help them to pursue their career later on.

World Cup 2010 and Referees

Every one seems to be frustrated by the frequency of mistakes of referees in the important matches. FIFA insist on not allowing the referees use video recording and other technologies means to resolve the problem. It is simply ridiculous to reject the means at hands to make huge improvement. Yes, injustice is part of life, and mistakes are inevitable even equipped with the best technology. Accepting the status quo is another matter. Most of the mistakes nowadays are so obvious to everyone in the world in front of the screens, but not those referees in the field. Do they need such information most? It takes only a second of replay to find out that the first goal of Argentina today should be discredited, but after we saw the replay, we witnessed that referees discussed it for another minute surrounded by feverish members from both teams and made the wrong call. What is the justification of refusing the access of such information to the referees in the field when they need it, especially when the rest of the world can see it?