“Is Facebook Damaging Your Brain?”

My brother Bill sent me this youtube link last night – Is Facebook Damaging Your Brain?.

The journalist understandably seizes on the most exciting aspect of neuroscientist Lady Susan Greenfield’s concerns for the title. The edited clips suggest that she sees a possible correlation between social networking and rising rates of ADHD and Autism “over the last 10 years.” Perhaps that suggestion is only in the editing, as she must be aware that social networking is much more recent. Facebook itself was limited to college students and faculty until recently.

Then she says, “…depending on what kind of person you want the next generation to be…”

I wonder if aging adults have a primal fear of losing the attention of their descendants even while becoming more and more dependant upon them. After all, it’s one thing to share photos with Grandma over Facebook, and quite another to drive over with the photos and visit her, and maybe clean the gutters or clear some snow and ice while you’re there.

I’m all for studying the effects of computing on the brain but I wouldn’t worry too much about Facebook as a cause of autism. Instead, I recommend that you make sure you have frequent facetime with Grandma and Grandpa, if you’re fortunate enough to still have them. Go and see what they might need but aren’t asking for.

If you want to worry about brain damage, maybe you should worry more about common chemicals in your environment, for example, Ammonia (
It’s What’s For Dinner).

What Year Is It, Anyway?

Suddenly I’m hearing the following question come up:

“Is it Twenty-Ten or Two-Thousand and Ten?”

Is it just me or should the answer be obvious? It’s Twenty-Ten.

No one in the 1900’s described a year as “One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine.” No, it was Nineteen plus the two digit year.

Of course, seeing a four digit number as two separate two digit numbers was one factor that led us to the whole Y2K mess.* That’s the power of perspective at work.

Is it too much to hope that we’ve since become wiser and more aware of how language and perspective are intertwined?

But that’s a whole ‘nother topic.

[* For those of you who weren't business programmers in the nineties and think Y2K was a non-issue, I assure you it was a mess. Not for my long-term clients so much, as my code was Y2K compliant beginning about 1991. But many companies didn't even to begin to think about it until late in the decade, even though their every business transaction was about to go from nicely organized to a state of scattered disarray. Imagine if search engines like Google shuffled all of your 200,000 + search results. How useful would Google or the web be to you then? Worldwide, business programmers worked really hard to prevent that from happening to your companies, and they succeeded.]

posted to myspace and kkostuck.WordPress.com 2009.01.31

Reading Between The Lines: NY Times

Stuff I Read In The New York Times

Food Industry fights back in the battle for healthy food, creates a label calling sugar, fat, sodium “Smart”.
(For Your Health, Froot Loops)

Wall Street Innovates a New Way to Reach Out and Harvest Your Savings.
(Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance)

Boeing Throws a Big Project over the Wall, Gets Broken Wings in Return.
(A Dream Interrupted at Boeing)
Comment: Isn’t engineering and design a key strength at Boeing? Why would they outsource that?

Some Good Advice for Freshmen, Take a Composition Course! Stanley Fish says that if you can’t write a clean English sentence, “…you can’t do anything.”
(The Hunt for a Good Teacher)
Comment:Spoken like a writer and of course I agree. I could easily have gotten out of the freshman composition class but it was well worth the investment. Please. Forget that you think you can write and your high school teachers said you could too. Swallow your pride. Take the course.

Released CIA documents support FBI agent’s claim that Osama Bin Laden is still Free Because of Torture.
(What Torture Never Told Us)

The New York Times Editors Don’t Seem to Know What Socialism Is, Either.
(Respect Your Children)

In Case You Haven’t Already Figured This Out, Rising Health Care Costs Hold Wages and Jobs Down.
(Let’s Get Fundamental)
Comment: Guess what? If your employer can’t afford the health premiums for you, welcome to the Great LayOff. If your employer can cover them but then can’t afford to give you a raise, then you don’t get a raise. Welcome to Reality!

No Surprise: One Of the Kidnapping Couple Is Described As Likable, Kind, Caring.
(Few Clues to Puzzle of Suspect in Abduction)
Comment: Folie a deux

Amazon Thinks College Students Want To Pay More For Textbooks
(Texting? No, Just Trying To Read Chapter 6)

Nanny Robots Build Emotional Ties With Children, Useful For Nagging Them To Brush Their Teeth.
(Gadgets Now The Target of Marketing for the Ages)

Amazon: Sorry We Snuck Into Your Libraries and Took Your Books. We Thought You Couldn’t Mind.
(Amazon.com Offers To Replace Copies of Orwell Book)

Pour On The Coal! Pollution May Be Saving Us From An ICE AGE.
(Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age)

The Classic American Word Salad

If you felt confused after watching Sarah Palin’s resignation speech on Friday, it’s probably because you were supposed to. The type of meandering, disjointed, excited speech patterns that she used are typical of a person who is trying to obscure her true motivations, not reveal them. These are the elements of an anti-speech, a miscommunication, red herrings tossed out to throw the audience off track.

In the parlance of the on-line support groups that I moderated for several years, her speech was classic American Word Salad, just in time for our picnics.

We’d borrowed the term ‘word salad’ from psychology, where it’s used to refer to the nonsensical syllabic sounds that schizophrenics sometimes substitute for real words. In the support groups we used the term a little differently. One of the important tasks in the group was to learn to recognize when a person was trying to control our opinion by confusing us, and for short hand we called it ‘word salad.’

It isn’t necessarily intentional; people often use word salad when they themselves are confused about their own true motives.

And word salad can be revealing once you know how to parse it. The details vary from person to person, but in general, just flip everything over and turn it inside out. Reasons given are for the benefit of the audience. These are the things that the speaker feels you’ll accept as valid or even desirable, the things she thinks you want to hear. Keep in mind the broad appeal of concepts such as ’sacrificing for the family’ or hailing the troops, or sports analogies. These are American cultural values that are guaranteed to provoke emotional responses, at least in the members of the audience who matter most to the speaker.

Watch out too for the the things the speaker condemns. Sometimes condemnation reveals clues to what the speaker is actually doing or considering doing. You’ve experienced this, right? It’s confusing when you find out that a person you know has done the exact thing that he’d previously criticized others for doing.

Only time will tell what Sarah Palin’s real motivations and intentions are but try not to put too much credence into the reasons she gave.

A speech like that one isn’t meant to enlighten you.

Why why WHY does our federal government keep bailing out AIG? Simple.

Ok, I’ve racked my brain over this one. And I’ve finally figured it out. It’s very simple. It’s so simple I was missing it even though it is right there out in the open. Big duh on me.

It’s because the US Government is a counterparty to AIG’s credit default swaps. You know, CDS, the insurance policies that were written against the mortgage and other credit securities that you remember from the beginning of this little debacle. A counterparty is the one who is on the hook if the buyer of the insurance comes to collect. They’re on the hook because they have the right to receive the income from the insurance payments that the buyer made. Like any insurer, they receive payments with the understanding that if something bad happens, they pay money back out.

The US Government may possibly be the biggest counterparty of all. And something bad has happened.

You ask, how is that possible? That can’t be right. You’re crazy. We didn’t give those crappy politicians permission to speculate with our money. We haven’t seen any insurance payment income. How can our government be one of the ones on the hook for this? We didn’t agree to this.

They (we) didn’t have to speculate or agree to this. It works like this.

Remember the FDIC?

The FDIC insures depositors. When a bank goes under, the FDIC pays the depositors. This prevents bank runs. The FDIC is now warning that its funds could go negative this year because of all the banks that have gone under already. It tried to raise fees recently to cover for that and all the little banks across the country screamed because the proposed fees would eat up all of their 2008 income. Gone. But if the FDIC goes under, the bank runs begin. It wouldn’t take much of a spark at this point.

These are your neighborhood banks, and savings & loans, and credit unions. They aren’t Wall Street. They are small town banks with small town names. Drive down Main Street of any small town and you’ll know the name of the town because it’s right there on the LED sign of the most prominently placed bank in town. These are the banks where the local farmers do business, and the town gas stations, and the little grocery stores and cafes.

The FDIC could not possibly cover all of the deposits in all of those banks at the same time. Not even close. It was never meant to. Such a situation, where all of the banks went under at the same time, would be a total disaster. It would be like hurricane Katrina taking out the entire country. The FDIC is just insurance, not God.

Mr. Ben Bernanke, our Princeton economist-Great Depression expert-Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve is well aware that the loss of the localized small town banks was the last straw that put this country into the Capital-D Depression and kept it there for so long. It sucked the blood right out of the heartland if you’ll forgive the expression. Once those banks were gone, it became extremely difficult for the federal government to pump money back into those areas. There was no infrastructure left to pump money through and no local banker who knew everyone by name to know who deserved a loan. There was no clear way to distribute funds. The economy shriveled and dried up everywhere.

If so much as one single bank is a counterparty to AIG credit default swaps, then the FDIC is also a counterparty, and if the FDIC is a counterparty, then the U.S. government is a counterparty.

The media talks about credit default swaps (CDS) as if they are these big pieces of paper sitting in a vault and about counterparties as if there is this one person or hedge fund or some shadowy entity holding a single piece of paper as if it’s a betting stub, just waiting for it to pay off big [cue evil laughter]. Who cares about evil financial masterminds? Let’s just not pay that bet, right?

But that’s not exactly the situation. Wall Street securitized the CDSs too. That’s how they sold so many and so much, estimated to be more than the GDP of the entire world. They chopped them up into little bits and sold them to investors all over the planet. Is your 401K or your pension invested in a bond fund? Then you might be invested in part of a CDS. Correction: you ARE invested in a CDS.

How many localized small town banks own some of these AAA rated-supposedly-safe securities (bonds) and are therefore counterparties? 1? 20? ALL OF THEM? Do you want to take bets on it? This stuff was sold to school boards and pensions. Where do you think the school boards and pensions got them? They bought them through their trusted local financial advisor / banker.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to think that if AIG fails then every single small bank in the country is at dire risk. And by extension the FDIC. And therefore the United States government. It’s right there in front of us. That’s what we’re facing. That’s why the government is feeding the bottomless pit of AIG.

Because it’s holding us hostage.

Best iPhone / Twitter photo so far!

“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” – Janis Krums, Sarasota, FL

Hey, just how big is this problem anyway?

“We basically had a $10 trillion shadow banking system shrivel up and die. Having the Fed add $700 billion to its balance sheet, or whatever it is by now, is not enough to make up for that.” – Paul Krugman, Nobel prizewinning economist

THE MONEY CULTURE : ‘Depression Economics’ – Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman on America’s financial crisis
By Daniel Gross | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Dec 3, 2008 | Updated: 12:22 p.m. ET Dec 3, 2008

If we spent $3 million dollars on a planetarium in Iraq, would McCain notice?

My favorite class in high school was astronomy. That’s because my high school housed an actual planetarium, an unusual feature that attracted field tripping students from across the city. I still remember taking constellation and star quizzes in darkness so enveloping that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone my pen crawling cautiously across my notebook. My biggest fear was that I’d write one answer over the top of the previous answer and that when the lights came up I’d find a big scrambled scrawled illegible mess. Fortunately that never happened and the memory of stars circling in the darkness still brings a smile.

I guess Senator McCain never felt that way about astronomy because the incredulous comment he made last night about Senator Obama requesting a federal earmark for the famed Adler Planetarium in Chicago is only the most recent of many attempts to single the Adler out as an example of wasteful spending.

I’ve been to the Adler and I’ve taken my children there. They were as excited as I was to visit it. I don’t know how many millions of people, young and old, students, would-be or someday astronomers have visited the Adler Planetarium since it was opened in 1930 but it doesn’t seem that Senator McCain is one of them.

Visit the Adler Planetarium website here.

The Adler Planetarium released this statement to the press about Senator McCain’s remarks in the debate last night.

On credit, CDOs, SPVs, credit swaps, and mark-to-market: A Bedtime Story

Once upon a time there was a merchant in Hong Kong who sold sardines along with many other things. Ever filled with schemes and ideas and plans to make more money, one day he packaged mud into a sardine can. He sold the can to another merchant, who added on his own brokerage fees and profits and sold the can to another merchant. The sardine can was passed along in this fashion from merchant to merchant, its cost growing as each made money while passing the can along to the next.

The fifth merchant opened the can and discovered to his dismay that the can was filled with mud instead of sardines. Indignant, he confronted the original merchant with his discovery.

The first merchant replied, “Why did you open the can?”

(cross-posted from subterrain)

Was Friday the ‘tipping point’ for the economy?

On Sunday the Fed jumped in to prop up Fannie and Freddie. The problem is that they are holding a lot of souring assets that are worth a lot less than they’re booked for. That value is going to collapse from a lack of substance. If it’s not there, then it’s just not there! It’s just a matter of time.