sociopathy is running the u.s. - part two

zerohedge | If I'm correct in my assessment, it would imply that the prospects are dim for conventional investments – most stocks, bonds and real estate. Those things tend to do well when society is growing in prosperity. And prosperity is fostered by peace, low taxes, minimal regulation and a sound currency. It's also fostered by a cultural atmosphere where sociopaths are precluded from positions of power and intellectual and moral ideas promoting free minds and free markets rule. Unfortunately, it seems that doesn't describe the trend that the world at large and the US in particular are embarked upon.

In essence, we're headed towards economic and financial bankruptcy. But that's mostly because society has been largely intellectually and morally bankrupt for some time. I don't believe a society can rise to real prosperity without a sound intellectual and moral foundation – that's why the US was so uniquely prosperous for so long, because it had such a foundation. And it's also why societies like Saudi Arabia will collapse as soon as the exogenous things that support them are pulled away. It's why the USSR collapsed. It's the reason why countries everywhere across time reach a peak (if they ever do), then stagnate and decline.

This isn't a matter of academic contemplation, for the same reason that it doesn't matter much if you're in a first-class cabin when the ship it's in is taking on water.

Economics and Evil
When I was a sophomore in college, I asked my father – a worldly wise man but one of few words – some cosmic question, as sophomores are famous for doing. His answer was, "It's all a matter of economics." Some months later I asked him another, similar question. His answer: "It's all a matter of psychology." They were unsatisfactory to me at the time, but those simple answers stuck in my mind. And I've since come to the conclusion that they comprehend most of what drives human action.

Let's look at the "matter of economics" only briefly, because it's covered at length elsewhere and because it's not nearly as significant as the "matter of psychology."

One definition of economics is: The study of who gets what, and how, in the material world. Unfortunately, it's been distorted over the years into the study of who determines who gets what, and how, in the material world. In other words, economic power has gradually been transferred from producers to political allocators. This has had predictably bad results, including not only the bankruptcy of the US government but of large segments of US society.

But what's happening today is much more serious than an economic bankruptcy; you can recover from financial woes by cultivating better habits. We're talking about psychological and spiritual bankruptcy. The word psychology comes from psyche, which is Greek for soul. When you look at the word's origin, it's clear that psychology is about much more than mental peculiarities. It's not just about what a person has or what he does. It's about what he is. The real essence of a man, his soul, is revealed by his philosophy and his beliefs.

In any event, it's rare that anyone goes bankrupt because of a single bad decision. It takes many missteps, and consistently bad decisions aren't accidents. Consistently bad decisions are the product of a flawed moral philosophy. Moral philosophy guides you as to what is right or wrong. The prevailing moral philosophy has so degenerated that Americans think it's OK to invade other countries that not only haven't attacked it but can't even credibly threaten to attack it. I'm not talking just about Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya – pitiful non-entities on the other side of the world. They were preceded by even weaker prey, closer to home, like Granada, Panama, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Not only that, but they think coercion should be used to steal wealth from the people who produce it, and give it to those who've done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

the ascendence of sociopaths in u.s. governance

zerohedge | What the ascendancy of sociopaths means isn't an academic question. Throughout history, the question has been a matter of life and death. That's one reason America grew; every American (or any ex-colonial) has forebears who confronted the issue and decided to uproot themselves to go somewhere with better prospects. The losers were those who delayed thinking about the question until the last minute.

I have often described myself, and those I prefer to associate with, as gamma rats. You may recall the ethologist's characterization of the social interaction of rats as being between a few alpha rats and many beta rats, the alpha rats being dominant and the beta rats submissive. In addition, a small percentage are gamma rats that stake out prime territory and mates, like the alphas, but are not interested in dominating the betas. The people most inclined to leave for the wide world outside and seek fortune elsewhere are typically gamma personalities.

You may be thinking that what happened in places like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and scores of other countries in recent history could not, for some reason, happen in the US. Actually, there's no reason it won't at this point. All the institutions that made America exceptional – including a belief in capitalism, individualism, self-reliance and the restraints of the Constitution – are now only historical artifacts.

On the other hand, the distribution of sociopaths is completely uniform across both space and time. Per capita, there were no more evil people in Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Amin's Uganda, Ceausescu's Romania or Pol Pot's Cambodia than there are today in the US. All you need is favorable conditions for them to bloom, much as mushrooms do after a rainstorm.

Conditions for them in the US are becoming quite favorable. Have you ever wondered where the 50,000 people employed by the TSA to inspect and degrade you came from? Most of them are middle-aged. Did they have jobs before they started doing something that any normal person would consider demeaning? Most did, but they were attracted to – not repelled by – a job where they wear a costume and abuse their fellow citizens all day.

Few of them can imagine that they're shepherding in a police state as they play their roles in security theater. (A reinforced door on the pilots' cabin is probably all that's actually needed, although the most effective solution would be to hold each airline responsible for its own security and for the harm done if it fails to protect passengers and third parties.) But the 50,000 newly employed are exactly the same type of people who joined the Gestapo – eager to help in the project of controlling everyone. Nobody was drafted into the Gestapo.

What's going on here is an instance of Pareto's Law. That's the 80-20 rule that tells us, for example, that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your salesmen or that 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the crime.

As I see it, 80% of people are basically decent; their basic instincts are to live by the Boy Scout virtues. 20% of people, however, are what you might call potential trouble sources, inclined toward doing the wrong thing when the opportunity presents itself. They might now be shoe clerks, mailmen or waitresses – they seem perfectly benign in normal times. They play baseball on weekends and pet the family dog. However, given the chance, they will sign up for the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, the TSA, Homeland Security or whatever. Many are well intentioned but likely to favor force as the solution to any problem.

But it doesn't end there, because 20% of that 20% are really bad actors. They are drawn to government and other positions where they can work their will on other people and, because they're enthusiastic about government, they rise to leadership positions. They remake the culture of the organizations they run in their own image. Gradually, non-sociopaths can no longer stand being there. They leave. Soon the whole barrel is full of bad apples. That's what's happening today in the US.

It's a pity that Bush, when he was in office, made such a big deal of evil. He discredited the concept. He made Boobus americanus think it only existed in a distant axis, in places like North Korea, Iraq and Iran – which were and still are irrelevant backwaters and arbitrarily chosen enemies. Bush trivialized the concept of evil and made it seem banal because he was such a fool. All the while real evil, very immediate and powerful, was growing right around him, and he lacked the awareness to see he was fertilizing it by turning the US into a national security state after 9/11.

Now, I believe, it's out of control. The US is already in a truly major depression and on the edge of financial chaos and a currency meltdown. The sociopaths in government will react by redoubling the pace toward a police state domestically and starting a major war abroad. To me, this is completely predictable. It's what sociopaths do.

There are seven characteristics I can think of that define a sociopath, although I'm sure the list could be extended.

• Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
• Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
• Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren't burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they're above all that. They're arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
• Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they're responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You'll never hear a sincere apology from them.
• Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.
• Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.
• Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors and they'll falsify information to damage others.
  

The fact that they're chronic, extremely convincing and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies, means they aren't easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be "politically correct" in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy? They're expert at using facades to disguise reality, and they feel no guilt about it.

Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively, composed of sociopaths. It's not just that they aren't normal human beings. They're barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results won't be good.

a kid with skittles

Kunstler | The crucial moment in this recent history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.

The expectation was that the removal of legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a mystery never solved.

I believe the black separatist movement of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural racism."

Bill Moyers did not even attempt to address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school? Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or exercises in reality-testing?

I doubt even that question can be settled conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war.

the fastest growing and most profitable form of incarceration in the u.s.

aljazeera | Immigration is a key issue in the US presidential election, with the Republican candidates trying to demonstrate their tough stance on undocumented immigrants.

But under the Obama administration, the detention and deportation of immigrants has reached an all-time high.

Every day, the US government detains more than 33,000 non-citizens at the cost of $5.5mn a day. That is a lot of money for the powerful private prison industry, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and now operates nearly half of the country's immigration detention centres.

Fault Lines travels to Texas and Florida to investigate the business of immigrant detention in the US and to find out how a handful of companies have managed to shape US immigration laws.

the evolutionary roots of the base revisited...,

In the above CDC map, the key indicates the number of births for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19 in a state. For example, in dark green states, there are 50 or more pregnancies for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19.

TheAtlantic | In 2009, a landmark study found a strong correlation between religion and teen pregnancy. The CDC's newest data suggests not much has changed. Teen pregnancy closely follows the contours of America's Bible belt, according to the map (above) from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

There is good news: teen births are at their lowest level in more than 60 years (10 percent lower than 2009, 43 percent below their peak in 1970). But the geographic variation is substantial.

Teen birthrates are highest in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico,. There are slightly lower concentrations in the neighboring states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arizona. New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have the lowest rates of teen births.

What factors lie behind this geographic pattern?

With the steady statistical hand of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look. Of course, the correlations we found are not the same thing as causation. Other factors we have not considered may come into play.

Teenage births remain high in more religious states. The correlation between teenage birthrates and the percentage of adults who say they are “very religious” is considerable (.69). The 2009 study posited that attitudes toward contraception play a significant role, noting that "religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

Teen birthrates also hew closely to America’s political divide. They are substantially higher in conservative states that voted for McCain in 2008 (with a correlation of .65) and negatively correlated with states that voted for Obama (-.62).

Class plays a substantial role as well. Teen births are negatively associated with average state income (-.62), the share of the workforce in knowledge, professional, and creative class jobs (-.61), and especially with the share of adults who are college graduates (-.76). Conversely, teen birthrates are higher in more working class states (with a positive correlation of .58).

Overall, teen birthrates remain highest in America’s most religious, politically conservative and blue-collar states.

the case against kids: is procreation immoral?

TheNewYorker | In “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate” (M.I.T. Press), Christine Overall tries to subject that decision to morally rigorous analysis. Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we’re going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.

Of course, people do give reasons for having children, and Overall takes them up one by one. Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex.

Overall rejects this argument on two grounds. First of all, nonexistent people have no moral standing. (There are an infinite number of nonexistent people out there, and you don’t notice them complaining, do you?) Second, once you accept that you should have a baby in order to increase the world’s total happiness, how do you know when to stop? Let’s say one kid eating ice cream represents x amount of added pleasure. In that case, two kids eating ice cream represents 2x, four kids 4x, and so on. The family with eight kids could perhaps afford to buy ice cream only half as often as the one with four. Still, provided the parents were able to throw in a bag of M&M’s, they (or, at least, the world) would fare better, total-happiness-wise, with the larger brood. And, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, things would be even better if the parents kept pumping kids out. Generalize this process, and the world would teem with more and more people leading less and less satisfying lives, until eventually the happiness of each individual would start to approach nil. This reductio ad Duggar Family was first articulated by the British philosopher Derek Parfit; it is known in academic circles as the Repugnant Conclusion. Overall considers it dispositive: “A simplistic utilitarianism is wrong about the ethics of having children.”

Overall finds most of the other frequently invoked rationales to be, philosophically speaking, similarly inadequate. Some people justify the decision to have children on the ground that they are perpetuating a family name or a genetic line. But “is anyone’s biological composition so valuable that it must be perpetuated?” Overall asks. Others say that it’s a citizen’s duty to society to provide for its continuation. Such an obligation, Overall objects, “would make women into procreative serfs.”

Still others argue that people ought to have children so there will be someone to care for them in their old age. “Anyone who has children for the sake of the supposed financial support they can provide,” Overall writes, is “probably deluded.”

Finally, lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don’t. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy. In an instantly famous study, published in Science in 2004, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman asked nine hundred working women to assess their experiences during the preceding day. The women rated the time they’d spent taking care of their kids as less enjoyable than the time spent shopping, eating, exercising, watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone. One of the few activities these women found less enjoyable than caring for their children was doing housework, which is to say cleaning up after them.

But none of this really matters. Procreation for the sake of the parents is ethically unacceptable. “To have a child in order to benefit oneself is a moral error,” Overall writes.

apocalyptic daze

CityJournal | Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. “There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”

So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of people who have decided not to reproduce, has announced: “Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory.” The British environmentalist James Lovelock, a chemist by training, regards Earth as a living organism and human beings as an infection within it, proliferating at the expense of the whole, which tries to reject and expel them. Journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us envisions in detail a planet from which humanity has disappeared. In France, a Green politician, Yves Cochet, has proposed a “womb strike,” which would be reinforced by penalties against couples who conceive a third child, since each child means, in terms of pollution, the equivalent of 620 round trips between Paris and New York.

“Our house is burning, but we are not paying attention,” said Jacques Chirac at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. “Nature, mutilated, overexploited, cannot recover, and we refuse to admit it.” Sir Martin Rees, a British astrophysicist and former president of the Royal Society, gives humanity a 50 percent chance of surviving beyond the twenty-first century. Oncologists and toxicologists predict that the end of mankind should arrive even earlier than foreseen, around 2060, thanks to a general sterilization of sperm. In view of the overall acceleration of natural disorders, droughts, and pandemics, “we all know now that we are going down,” says the scholar Serge Latouche. Peter Barrett, director of the Antarctica Research Centre at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, is more specific: “If we continue our present growth path we are facing the end of civilization as we know it—not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century.”

One could go on citing such quotations forever, given the spread of the cliché-ridden apocalyptic literature. Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians, and scientists compete in the portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: they alone see clearly while others vegetate in the darkness.

The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds on it, and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed a feeling of anxiety that was already there, looking for some content. In six months, some new concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cell-phone radiation.

genetic roots of civilization? partial explanation of why civilization is not found equally across different "cultures"?

Vanderbilt | The codification of social norms into laws and the institutionalization of third-party punishment “is arguably one of the most important developments in human culture,” the paper states.

According to the researchers’ model, which is based on the latest behavioral, cognitive and neuro-scientific data, third-party punishment grew out of second-party punishment and is implemented by a collection of cognitive processes that evolved to serve other functions but were co-opted to make third-party punishment possible.

In the modern criminal justice system, judges and jury members – impartial third-party decision-makers – are tasked to evaluate the severity of a criminal act, the mental state of the accused and the amount of harm done, and then integrate these evaluations with the applicable legal codes and select the most appropriate punishment from available options. Based on recent brain mapping studies, Buckholtz and Marois propose a cascade of brain events that take place to support the cognitive processes involved in third-party punishment decision-making. Specifically, they have localized these processes to five distinct areas in the brain – two in the frontal cortex, which is involved in higher mental functions; the amygdala deep in the brain that is associated with emotional responses; and two areas in the back of the brain that are involved in social evaluation and response selection.

According to Buckholtz and Marois’ model, punishment decisions are preceded by the evaluation of the actions and mental intentions of the criminal defendant in a social evaluation network comprised of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ).

While it is often assumed that legal decision-making is purely based on rational thinking, research suggests that much of the motivation for punishing is driven by negative emotional responses to the harm. This signal appears to be generated in the amygdala, causing people to factor in their emotional state when making decisions instead of making solely factual judgments.

Next, the decision-maker must integrate his or her evaluation of the norm-violator’s mental state and the amount of harm with the specific set of punishment options. The researchers propose that the medial prefrontal cortex, which is centrally located and has connections to all the other key areas, acts as a hub that brings all this information together and passes it to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), where the final decision is made with the input from another rear-brain area called the intraparietal sulcus, involved in selecting the appropriate punishment response. As such, the DLPFC may be at the apex of the neural hierarchy involved in deciding on the appropriate punishments that should be given to specific norm violations.

The current model focuses on the role of punishment in encouraging large-scale human cooperation, but the researchers recognize that reward and positive reinforcement are also powerful psychological forces that encourage both short-term and long-term cooperation.

Marois adds: “It is somewhat ironic that while punishment, or the threat of punishment, is thought to play a foundational role in the evolution of our large-scale societies, much research in developmental psychology demonstrates the immense power of positive reinforcement in shaping a young individual’s behavior.” Understanding how both reward and punishment work should therefore provide fundamental insights into the nature of human cooperative behavior. “The ultimate ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’ here is to promote a criminal justice system that is not only fairer, but also less necessary,” said Marois.

This work is the latest contribution of Vanderbilt researchers to the newly emerging field of neurolaw and was supported by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, directed by Owen Jones, New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law and professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt.

middle-school chess team wins national high-school championship

NYTimes | The chess team at Intermediate School 318 Eugenia Maria de Hostos in Williamsburg, a perennial powerhouse that has won so many championships that its coach can’t remember the number, managed to top its already-impressive record on Sunday by winning the National High School Championships.

The team’s victory is the chess-world equivalent of a scenario that was frequently tossed around by college basketball pundits several weeks ago: that the University of Kentucky Wildcats might be so good they could beat the Toronto Raptors or another of the worst N.B.A. teams. If anything, I.S. 318’s victory is even more impressive: they beat the best high school teams in the country.

“This is the greatest achievement we’ve ever had, and probably ever will have,” John Galvin, one of the coaches, said in a telephone interview from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

The victory might be a first for a middle school chess team.

Bill Hall, the executive director of the United States Chess Federation, which organized the championships, said he had never heard of a middle school winning the high school championships. “To my knowledge, it has never happened before,” he said.

Officially, I.S. 318 and Hunter College High School are co-champions. They tied for first place, but I.S. 318 was able to take home the first place trophy because its team had better tie-breaker scores.

To achieve the co-championship, I.S. 318 beat several other city chess teams this weekend, including Stuyvesant High School and Edward R. Murrow High School.

The I.S. 318 team has won at least two dozen national championships of various types in the last 12 years, Mr. Galvin said. Two team members — Justus Williams and James Black, both 13 — are rated as masters. And the team is the subject of a new documentary, “Brooklyn Castle,” which had its debut last month at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where it won the audience award.

cooperation and the evolution of intelligence

Royal Society | The high levels of intelligence seen in humans, other primates, certain cetaceans and birds remain a major puzzle for evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists. It has long been held that social interactions provide the selection pressures necessary for the evolution of advanced cognitive abilities (the ‘social intelligence hypothesis’), and in recent years decision-making in the context of cooperative social interactions has been conjectured to be of particular importance. Here we use an artificial neural network model to show that selection for efficient decision-making in cooperative dilemmas can give rise to selection pressures for greater cognitive abilities, and that intelligent strategies can themselves select for greater intelligence, leading to a Machiavellian arms race. Our results provide mechanistic support for the social intelligence hypothesis, highlight the potential importance of cooperative behaviour in the evolution of intelligence and may help us to explain the distribution of cooperation with intelligence across taxa.

political divides begin in the brain

NewScientist | JOHN HIBBING used to be a traditional political scientist. He studied elections, ran opinion polls and researched why some politicians opt to retire rather than wait around to be defeated by challengers. "About as traditional as it gets," he says.

Roughly a decade ago, though, Hibbing shifted to a new approach that is starting to revolutionise how we think about politics. He began to explore whether political preferences might be partly based in biology. The idea initially met with great scepticism from his peers. But Hibbing and his collaborators at the Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln now have a stack of scientific publications backing the idea.

For example, when they measure the physical reactions of liberals and conservatives to aversive stimuli, they find major differences. Tough-on-crime, pro-military conservatives have a more pronounced startle reflex after hearing a sudden loud noise. They also show stronger skin responses when shown threatening images and look at them more rapidly and for longer.

It is conventional to think about political ideology as a set of ideas people consciously hold about the way society should be ordered. A tacit assumption is that we come to these beliefs rationally, by reading and thinking about the issues. If we differ, it is because we reason to different conclusions.

Hibbing's results suggest otherwise. "One of the things we're trying to get people to realise is that those who disagree with them politically really do experience the world in a different fashion," he says.

Many other seemingly apolitical differences between liberals and conservatives have also been discovered. For example, they tend to organise their living spaces differently, with conservatives favouring tidiness and conventionality, and liberals more tolerant of clutter. They also seem to have different art preferences and even senses of humour.

Most recently, and controversially, focus has shifted to differences in brain structures and functions. In one experiment, conservatives on average had a larger right amygdala, a region of the brain that processes responses to fear and threat. Liberals, in contrast, had more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, an error-detecting region that is thought to be involved in causing us to stop repeated patterns of behaviour and change course.

stiglitz: is mercantilism doomed to fail?

businessinsider | At the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Berlin, economist Joe Stiglitz delivered a presentation titled Is Mercantilism Doomed to Fail? China, Germany, and Japan and the Exhaustion of Debtor Countries.

The basic idea is: A few powerhouses like China, Germany, and Japan, plus some commodity based economies, have thrived in a system where they do all the exporting, and a few countries like the US run massive trade deficits.

But that system is coming to an end, as countries realize that their trade deficits are unsustainable, and seek to become trade surplus countries at the same time. Of course, not everyone can run surpluses, so this becomes a game of hot potato, with everyone pushing the deficit to someone else, via currency devaluation and other aggressive trade moves.

In this presentation, Stiglitz explains why the system is heading towards collapse.

Stiglitz hints a globalist solution, with a non-dollar reserve currency, and more coordination of monetary policy to avoid currency wars and competitive devaluations.

inside chernobyl

Stern | inside the Sarcophagus the radiation levels are as high as 3400 Roentgen per hour [1 R = 2.58 * 10^-4 C/kg]. The working time of the engineers is determined by the radioactivity they are exposed to. When the dosimeter each of them carries starts to beep alarmingly, they need to leave the reactor immediately.

Sergeij K. who recorded this footage usually stays a little longer. The white dots that can bee seen on the pictures that look like snow are also caused by the radiation which the digital cameras are quite prone to.

The clock in this control room stopped at the exact time the incident took place: 1:23 am, april 26th, 1986

Despite the strongly limited time, work is done without hurry to avoid mistakes. The mounting teams know exactly where the other ones interrupted their repairing right there.

Inside the exploded reactor block, additional staircases were installed to reach most of the locations but this isn't possible. Totally, only one third of the entire reactor block has been explored. The sectors have names and numbers which the workers shout out to one another.

Every now and then men can be heard wading through water. Rain and melting water are the biggest enemy of the Sarcophagus. These caused gradual decay during the past 20 years.

Sergeij likes to compare the inside of the Sarcophagus to a mine field. Each step can decide upon what radiation dose one is exposed to. At this place it is really dirty as can be seen by the black speckles on the yellow gloves.

"dirty" is what the workers call the radiation reaching extreme levels. The cotton dress and the plastic overall offer only limited protection against (alpha) radiation. The helmets are considered much more important because pieces of stone could fall down from the ceiling. The once molten, highly radioactive material has been cast to bizarre forms.Temperatures exceeded 1000 degrees Celsius at the time of the disaster. Sergeij gave names to these lumps. This one he calls "elephant's foot".

Sergeij is now right underneath the ceiling of the Sarcophagus. It's cracked, corroded and full of holes. it's area measures 100 square meters. The extent can be by the light shining inside.

Should The Sarcophagus one day collapse, a large nuclear dust cloud would be generated. Experts consider it the safest way to build another Sarcophagus around the first, older one. A hall larger than the Statue of Liberty, called "Arche", that would cost about 650.000.000 Euros.

Here, the white dots caused by radioactivity can be seen again. This sprinklers were
installed to bind the floating, radioactive dust particles. At least a little protection in this hazardous job.

their worst sin is obliviousness?

The Atlantic | Randy Barnett says that I have ignored his argument about why Justice Scalia's opinion in Raich "in no way bound[s]" him in the Obamacare.

That's not true.

Randy made two "legal arguments": (1) That the Court could create a new constraint, emanating from the Necessary and Proper Clause, that limits legitimate Necessary and Proper Clause legislation to laws that "carry into execution" other laws. (2) That mandates are an improper means to carry Congress's laws into effect.

But I explicitly said that "Scalia could change his test" -- which is what recognizing "a new constraint is." And the whole point of my piece was to underline the significance of statutes that created mandates at the founding -- specifically, that they negate the suggestion that such "means" were "improper." Randy calls this mandate "unprecedented." Except, of course, for these precedents.

Randy also says that for the Court to take account of the mix of laws that it strikes down -- assuring that the mix would not lead reasonable observers to believe they only found unconstitutional laws they don't like -- "would be acting entirely politically."

That too is not true.

"Political" in this context means partisan. It is perfectly appropriate (and not in this sense "political") for the Court to account for how its behavior weakens or strengthens its own institutional integrity. As I've described it elsewhere (my own "legal arguments" that Randy is "skipping over") there is a fidelity to mean-ing and a fidelity to institutional role. A Court that ignores either is not behaving properly.

Finally, Randy says (or his title says) that I argued: "If the Republican Justices Do Not Agree With Me They Will Be Acting Politically."

That too is untrue, as Randy in his very first sentence almost acknowledges, but even that take back isn't complete. For this is the last sentence in my piece

Even I would have to concede the appearance that it's just politics, even if I don't believe I could ever believe it.

What that sentence says is that "I don't believe" the Court is acting politically -- precisely the contrary of Randy's title. I don't believe that the Court is political in the sense most seem to think it is -- i.e., partisan. Their worst sin is obliviousness -- which is precisely what a pattern of intervening exclusively on the Right would be.

if the republican justices do not agree with me they will be acting politically

volokh | Well, that is not exactly what he says. Instead, in Why Scalia Could Uphold Obamacare, Larry Lessig actually says that if the “conservative” Justices do not accept his reading of their prior decisions, his students and other cynics would think the justices were acting politically, and he would be powerless to defend the Court, which would sadden him greatly.

Most non-lawyers have been bemused by the confidence that constitutional lawyers once had about the Supreme Court’s likely decision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka, the Obamacare) case. The idea that this Republican Court would not give the Republicans their victory seemed silly to most, or at least naive. What possible reason would there be to imagine the Court would hold its punches?

But indeed, there was a confidence, at least among those whose career is focused upon the intricacies of commerce clause jurisprudence, that the Court would uphold the statute. When I read that my colleague Charles Fried – Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said that he would eat his hat if the Court struck the statute, I didn’t think Fried was being brave or reckless: the point seemed too obvious to remark. Whether wise or not, Obamacare is plainly constitutional under the Court’s existing precedents. That’s not to say the Court couldn’t make up a new rule by which the law was deemed unconstitutional. But against the history of the repeated embarrassments that the Court has suffered as it has tried to police Congress’ commerce authority, it seemed genuinely unimaginable that it would again make the same mistake. [My bold added.]

For my pre-argument analysis of why Justice Scalia’s Raich concurrence in no way bound him to uphold the insurance mandate in this case of first impression see Understanding Justice Scalia’s Concurring Opinion in Raich. Skipping over Lessig’s analysis of this Raich decision (in which he considers none of these contrary legal arguments, while he relies uncritically on Einer Elhauge’s questionable examples of previous “purchase mandates”), Lessig offers this reason why he is pained by the thought that the Court might strike down the mandate

So to say Scalia’s Raich test should yield an obvious and clear answer is not necessarily to say that five justices will vote to uphold the law. Scalia could change his test. The Court could launch itself on a new mission to supervise the scope of Congress’s economic authority.

But here, then, is a second recognition that leads both scholars on the right (like Fried) and scholars on the left (like Laurence Tribe) to pray that the Court doesn’t take this disastrous step. Fried and Tribe (and I and many others) want the ability to present the work of the Court in a way that belies the common but (we believe) uninformed view that all law, especially constitutional law, is just politics. If the Court strikes this law, then that hope fades. . . .

When the Frieds, or Tribes (or Lessigs) of the world want to insist that “it’s not all just politics,” the cynics (including most forcefully, our students) will insist the facts just don’t support the theory. Even I would have to concede the appearance that it’s just politics, even if I don’t believe I could ever believe it.

Larry Lessig became a hero of mine with his stalwart and brilliant defense of finding judicially-imposed limits on the Copyright Clause.

why scalia could uphold obamacare

The Atlantic | Most non-lawyers have been bemused by the confidence that constitutional lawyers once had about the Supreme Court's likely decision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka, the Obamacare) case. The idea that this Republican Court would not give the Republicans their victory seemed silly to most, or at least naive. What possible reason would there be to imagine the Court would hold its punches?

But indeed, there was a confidence, at least among those whose career is focused upon the intricacies of commerce clause jurisprudence, that the Court would uphold the statute. When I read that my colleague Charles Fried -- Ronald Reagan's solicitor general -- said that he would eat his hat if the Court struck the statute, I didn't think Fried was being brave or reckless: the point seemed too obvious to remark. Whether wise or not, Obamacare is plainly constitutional under the Court's existing precedents. That's not to say the Court couldn't make up a new rule by which the law was deemed unconstitutional. But against the history of the repeated embarrassments that the Court has suffered as it has tried to police Congress' commerce authority, it seemed genuinely unimaginable that it would again make the same mistake.

The simplest way to see this point is to focus on the jurisprudence of a key vote in any hypothetical 5-4 decision to strike the law -- Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia's commerce clause jurisprudence is among the most careful, and, in my view, precise among the justices likely to impose a constitutional limit on Congress' authority. His concurring opinion in Gonzales v. Raich, a case about whether Congress had the power to regulate home-grown marijuana, maps a very clear formula for testing Congress's authority. If you apply that test to Obamacare -- especially in light of the evidence just published by my colleague Einer Elhauge -- there can be little doubt about the answer.

tyrant banks is a slave-catching pimp caricature...,

zap2it | On "America's Next Top Model," Azmarie Livingston was eliminated after her refusal to don the butt pad in Tyra's booty tooch teaching seminar. She tells Zap2it that she knew it was coming and she doesn't regret her decision.

Were you surprised you were the one to go?

"No. I knew the minute I told Tyra no, I wasn't gonna wear the butt pad, that I was gonna get sent home, especially when she said you can't participate in the booty tooch session."

The show is pretty infamous for putting the models through some kind of ridiculous stuff. Did you expect that going in?

"I was aware of it. Going in, I knew if there was anything I wasn't comfortable with doing, I had the right to say that I didn't want to do it, even though it could jeopardize me being a part of it. And that was the situation I ended up in ... I wasn't getting eliminated for my body of work."

What exactly about the butt pad was off-putting to you? Or was it the booty tooch exercise in general?

"It wasn't the tooching in general, it was just the pad. I don't know. I didn't feel comfortable. In my mind, I'm like, 'I don't mind tooching, I tooched the other day in the syrup shoot.' But when she was like you gotta wear the pad, I don't know, everything in me just kind of shied up and I backed away. I was like, no, I'm not gonna do this."

Do you regret your decision?

"No. No, I don't. It was something I believed in not doing. I wasn't comfortable. Everything else was fine for me, I just felt like at that point -- I don't know what this has to do with modeling, as far as using a pad, not so much learning the positioning ... Then I got shown in a whole other light 'cause I said no ... I'm glad they showed me apologizing to Tyra, 'cause it had nothing to do with me trying to make her look bad, or say anything towards Tyra or the opportunity she was giving me."

What's next for you?

"Since the show wrapped, I've kind of been low key. Now I've had a lot of offers come in, scripts for TV and for film, as far as the music side of things, I've met some really awesome producers that I've had the opportunity to play them some stuff.

I plan to continue modeling. I'm not represented by anyone at the moment, but I do plan on going back out an seeking representation so I can continue moving forward with my career."

the wealth defense industry

alternet | In 2005, Citigroup offered its high net-worth clients in the United States a concise statement of the threats they and their money faced.

The report told them they were the leaders of a “plutonomy,” an economy driven by the spending of its ultra-rich citizens. “At the heart of plutonomy is income inequality,” which is made possible by “capitalist-friendly governments and tax regimes.”

The danger, according to Citigroup’s analysts, is that “personal taxation rates could rise – dividends, capital gains, and inheritance taxes would hurt the plutonomy.”

But the ultra-rich already knew that. In fact, even as America’s income distribution has skewed to favor the upper classes, the very richest have successfully managed to reduce their overall tax burden. Look no further than Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, who in 2010 paid 13.9 percent of his $21.6 million income in taxes that year, the same tax rate as an individual who earned a mere $8,500 to $34,500.

How is that possible? How can a country make so much progress toward equality on other fronts – race, gender, sexual orientation and disability – but run the opposite way in its policy on taxing the rich?

In 2004, the American Political Science Association (APSA) tried to answer that very question. The explanation they came up with viewed the problem as a classic case of democratic participation: While the poor have overwhelming numbers, the wealthy have higher rates of political participation, more advanced skills and greater access to resources and information. In short, APSA said, the wealthy use their social capital to offset their minority status at the ballot box.

But this explanation has one major flaw. Regardless of the Occupy movement’s rhetoric, most of the growth in the wealth gap has actually gone to a tiny sliver of the 1% – one-tenth of it, or even one-one-hundredth.

Even more shockingly, that 1 percent of the 1% has shifted its tax burden not to the middle class or poor, but to rich households in the 85th to 99th percentile range. In 2007, the effective income tax rate for the richest 400 Americans was below 17 percent, while the “mass affluent” 1% paid nearly 24 percent. Disparities in Social Security taxes were even greater, with the merely rich paying 12.4 percent of their income, while the super-rich paid only one-one-thousandth of a percent.

It’s one thing for the poor to lose the democratic participation game, but APSA has no explanation for why the majority of the upper class – which has no shortage of government-influencing social capital – should fall so far behind the very top earners. (Of course, relative to middle- and lower-class earners, they’ve done just fine.)

For a better explanation, we need to look more closely at the relationship between wealth and political power. I propose an updated theory of “oligarchy,” the same lens developed by Plato and Aristotle when they studied the same problem in their own times.

A quick review

First, let’s review what we think we know about power in America.

We begin with a theory of “democratic pluralism,” which posits that democracy is basically a tug-of-war with different interest groups trying to pull government policy toward an outcome. In this framework, the rich are just one group among many competing “special interests.”

Of course, it’s hard not to notice that some groups can tug better than others. So in the 1950s, social scientists, like C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, developed another theory of “elites” – those who wield more pull thanks to factors like education, social networks and ethnicity. In this view, wealth is just one of many factors that might help someone become the leader of a major business or gain a government position, thereby joining the elite.

But neither theory explains how the super-rich are turning public policy to their benefit even at the expense of the moderately rich. The mass affluent vastly outnumber the super-rich, and the super-rich aren’t necessarily better-educated, more skilled or more able to participate in politics; nor do the super-rich dominate the top posts of American government – our representatives tend to be among the slightly lower rungs of the upper class who are losing the tax battle.

Also, neither theory takes into account the unique power that comes with enormous wealth – the kind found in that one-tenth of the 1%. Whether or not the super-rich hold any official position in business or government, they remain powerful.

Only when we separate wealth from all other kinds of power can we begin to understand why our tax system looks the way it does – and, by extension, how the top one-tenth of 1% of the income distribution has distorted American democracy.

Enormous wealth is the heart of oligarchy.

So what’s an oligarchy?

Across all political spectrums, oligarchs are people (never corporations or other organizations) who command massive concentrations of material resources (that is, wealth) that can be deployed to defend or enhance their own property and interests, even if they don’t own those resources personally. Without this massive concentration of wealth, there are no oligarchs.

In any society, of course, an extremely unequal wealth distribution provokes conflict. Oligarchy is the politics of the defense of this wealth, propagated by the richest members of society.

Wealth defense can take many forms. In ancient Greece and Rome, the wealthiest citizens cooperated to run institutionalized states that defended their property rights. In Suharto’s Indonesia, a single oligarch led a despotic regime that mostly used state power to support other oligarchs. In medieval Europe, the rich built castles and raised private armies to defend themselves against each other and deter peasants tempted by their masters’ vaults. In all of these cases oligarchs are directly engaged in rule. They literally embody the law and play an active role in coercion as part of their wealth defense strategy.

Contemporary America (along with other capitalist states) instead houses a kind of “civil oligarchy.” The big difference is that property rights are now guaranteed by the impersonal laws of an armed state. Even oligarchs, who can be disarmed for the first time in history and no longer need to rule directly, must submit to the rule of law for this modern “civil” arrangement to work. When oligarchs do enter government, it is more for vanity than to rule as or for oligarchs. Good examples are New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former presidential candidate Ross Perot and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Another feature of American oligarchy is that it allows oligarchs to hire skilled professionals, middle- and upper-class worker bees, to labor year-round as salaried, full-time political advocates and defenders of the oligarchy. Unlike those backing ordinary politicians, the oligarchs’ professional forces require no ideological invigoration to keep going. In other words, they function as a very well-paid mercenary army.

Whatever views and interests may divide the very rich, they are united in being materially focused and materially empowered. The social and political tensions associated with extreme wealth bond oligarchs together even if they never meet, and sets in motion the complex dynamics of wealth defense. Oligarchs do overlap with each other in certain social circles that theorists of the elite worked hard to map. But such networks are not vital to their power and effectiveness. Oligarchic theory requires no conspiracies or backroom deals. It is the minions oligarchs hire who provide structure and continuity to America’s civil oligarchy.

pool near U.S. city contains more radioactive cesium than released by fukushima, chernobyl and all nuclear bomb tests COMBINED

zerohedge | The spent fuel pools at Fukushima are currently the top short-term threat to humanity.

But fuel pools in the United States store an average of ten times more radioactive fuel than stored at Fukushima, have virtually no safety features, and are vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks.

If the water drains out for any reason, it will cause a fire in the fuel rods, as the zirconium metal jacket on the outside of the fuel rods could very well catch fire within hours or days after being exposed to air. See this, this, this and this. (Even a large solar flare could knock out the water-circulation systems for the pools.)

The pools are also filling up fast, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The New York Times notes that squeezing more rods into pools may increase the risk of fire:

The reactor operators have squeezed spent fuel more tightly into the pools, raising the heat load and, according to some analyses, raising the risk of fire if the pools were ever drained.

Indeed, the fuel pools and rods at Fukushima appear to have “boiled”, caught fire and/or exploded soon after the earthquake knocked out power systems. See this, this, this, this and this.

Robert Alvarez – a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States Secretary of Energy – notes that there have also been many incidents within the U.S. involving fuel pools

hide not slide...,

WSJ | U.S. securities regulators are conducting a wide-ranging investigation into the complex relationships between rapid-fire trading firms and stock exchanges, according to the official overseeing some 20 probes into computerized trading.

The inquiry into ownership and other ties is part of a broader probe into whether high-speed traders have unfair advantages over other investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

"We're interested in understanding the ownership structure and history" of the firms, said Daniel Hawke, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's market abuse enforcement unit, in an interview. "How the firm got started, who was behind it and who wrote the [computer] code that might be at issue."

One such area under SEC scrutiny is the use of routing and trading instructions, known as order types. Many investors use relatively simple order types, such as limit orders, which specify a price at which an investor is willing to buy or sell a stock.

But exchanges also offer more sophisticated order types commonly used by rapid-fire traders that could potentially give them an edge over other investors, according to industry experts. Some allow computer-driven traders to hide orders and prevent them from routing to other exchanges, where the traders may have less control over the order execution.

One order type, called "Hide Not Slide" and offered by the exchange operator Direct Edge Holdings LLC, is among those being scrutinized by the SEC, according to people familiar with the matter. The agency is also looking at a similar order type offered by computerized stock exchange BATS Global Markets Inc., the people said.

Other exchanges also offer order types that share similar characteristics. Representatives of Direct Edge and BATS declined to comment.

The SEC is examining whether such order types unfairly allow high-speed traders to jump ahead of other investors in an exchange's "order book," or the queue of buy and sell orders that are typically ranked by price and when they were received, according to people familiar with the matter.

Another area of focus for the SEC are the rebates some traders earn from exchanges even as other investors pay fees to complete trades, say people familiar with exchange operations and the SEC probes.

The SEC stepped up its scrutiny of these high-speed trading firms and exchanges after the May 6, 2010 "flash crash," when computerized trading triggered a 9% selloff within minutes.

Some aspects of the SEC's inquiry are tied to at least one whistleblower, according to people familiar with the matter.

One of the most prominent lines of inquiry involves BATS, which last month pulled its initial public offering after halting trading due to what it described as a software glitch. On the morning BATS shares began trading, The Wall Street Journal disclosed details of the SEC's investigation into whether superfast-trading firms have exploited their links to BATS and other exchanges to gain an unfair advantage over other investors.

high frequency trading is cuckoo

BusinessSpectator | In the Australian Stock Exchange’s Sydney data room, which is about the size of a big lounge room, there are six “cuckoos”. These are the banks of servers installed by high frequency traders.

They sit against the wall opposite the ASX servers and each is connected directly into the host by a fat fibre optic pipe. Each cable is precisely the same length by agreement with the ASX so that none gets an advantage; if one server is closer to the input, its cable is looped around to lengthen it.

Think about that: one less metre of optic fibre carrying data at 299.8 million metres per second would give one share trader an unfair advantage over the rest. It suggests that something pretty quick is going on.

The question is whether it’s fair to the rest of us; whether those six parasites with their suckers fastened directly into the heart of the ASX should be allowed to get away with it.

The ASX is no longer a regulator, just a business, so it says that if the practice is legal and it pays a fee – not to mention a handy rent in the data room – then it can’t and won’t stop them.

For global regulators it’s actually too late: high-frequency trading accounts for as much as 70 per cent of the volume on American stock exchanges, including the NYSE; the time to control it was ten years ago.

What do the computers and their algorithms do? Well, as my relatively low-frequency brain can understand it, these machines constantly monitor order flow into the ASX servers and the sophisticated programs can pick up patterns that indicate when a reasonably large order has been placed. What they then do, in effect, is “front-run” – that is, they buy ahead of the order and make a small spread selling into it.

In other words, by operating at the speed of light they can “feel” a buy order coming and can dart in front of them and ensure that the buyers pay a little bit more than they were going to, without noticing a thing.

These operators begin each day owning no shares and end each day in the same position but they make a lot of money by doing thousands of trades every day: it’s a high volume, low margin business.

It’s not known how much money the HFT traders make, but whatever it is they weren’t making it 10-15 years ago, and stockmarket returns have not gone up in that time, so whatever they make has come out of someone else’s pocket.

That someone, of course, is you.

where has all the trading gone?

cnbc | It’s one of the biggest mysteries on Wall Street. How can stocks be in their fourth year of a bull market and trading activity be so low?

During March, average daily volume in equity shares was at their lowest level since December 2007, according to new data from Credit Suisse. This is the same month that marked the three-year anniversary of the bull market that caused the Standard & Poor's 500 to double from its March 2009 credit-crisis low.

Credit Suisse tried to solve the riddle by blaming the growing popularity of options and futures markets, a drop in high frequency trading and stock splits.

“There’s no way to sugar-coat it: Volumes are down and trending lower,” wrote Ana Avramovic of Credit Suisse, in a note to clients. “A growing preference for other asset classes may be drawing money away from equities.”

Daily equity volume in March was 6.59 billion shares a day, the lowest since a sub-6 billion volume month in December 2007, according to Credit Suisse. (The firm adjusted December 2011’s low figures to account for the holiday-skewed week.)

Avramovic noted that options and futures volume set a record in 2011, as investors hungry to add risk looked for a place where they could use leverage.

“The options market has been breaking records for nine straight years and the shift has been a growing field that provides protection and leverage,” said Pete Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com, an options and equity brokerage.

The Credit Suisse analyst also notes that high-frequency trading, which accounts for half of all market activity, has been on the decline since last summer. What’s more, Citigroup alone accounted for 7 percent of all volume in the second half of 2009 before its 10 for 1 reverse split, according to the report.

But the answer may be simpler than this. After two vicious bear markets in a decade, the average investor simply doesn’t trust this market anymore.

“There is no fresh money going into the markets,” said Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners. “Why should we be surprised the retail investor is not there? We’ve had two huge drawdowns in stocks since 2000, a flash crash two years ago and real incomes are stagnating.”

fear of a black republican..,

aljazeera | In the southern US state of Mississippi nearly 40 per cent of the population is black. But during the state's March 13 Republican primary, only two per cent of the voters were African Americans - and it was a similar picture throughout other Republican contests.

For years Republican leaders have said they would work hard to increase African American support for their party, but so far, those efforts appear to be a failure.

When asked during an interview why the Republican party is poison for so many African Americans the only black candidate to run for the 2012 Republican ticket, Herman Cain, said it was because "...they have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view."

A documentary titled Fear of A Black Republican was just released here in Washington DC and it posed a similar question: Does the Republican party really want more black people?

So why has the Republican party not been successful in reaching out to black voters? And why are they also losing the hispanic voters?

To discuss these issues, we are joined by James Braxton Peterson, the director of Africana studies at Lehigh University; Ana Navarro, the National Hispanic co-chair for both John McCain and John Huntsman; and Kevin Williams, the director of the film, Fear of a Black Republican.

"I think there is a core cultural competency challenge here that the Republican party... has lost it's sense and its ability to connect with communities of colour. You've got to be competent about the cultural issues that are important to these communities and then we can talk about the different strategies for trying to secure their votes." James Braxton Peterson, analyst on black politics

---

LOSING THE BLACK VOTE:

• The Republican party has currently little support among black voters
• Since the early 1960's black voters have overwhelmingly voted the Democratic party
• Richard Nixon was the last Republican candidate to get significant black support
• Nixon got 32 per cent of black vote in his loss to John F Kennedy in 1960
• President Lyndon Johnson got 94 per cent support from black voters after he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964
• Republicans promoted the abolition of slavery, gaining black votes
• President Dwight Eisenhower got 39 per cent of black vote in 1956
• In the 2008 election John McCain received just 4 per cent of black votes
• In the 2008 US presidential election 95 per cent of African Americans voted for Obama

the taint of social darwinism

NYTimes | Given the well-known Republican antipathy to evolution, President Obama’s recent description of the Republican budget as an example of “social Darwinism” may be a canny piece of political labeling. In the interests of historical accuracy, however, it should be clearly recognized that “social Darwinism” has very little to do with the ideas developed by Charles Darwin in “On the Origin of Species.” Social Darwinism emerged as a movement in the late 19th-century, and has had waves of popularity ever since, but its central ideas owe more to the thought of a luminary of that time, Herbert Spencer, whose writings are (to understate) no longer widely read.

Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” thought about natural selection on a grand scale. Conceiving selection in pre-Darwinian terms — as a ruthless process, “red in tooth and claw” — he viewed human culture and human societies as progressing through fierce competition. Provided that policymakers do not take foolish steps to protect the weak, those people and those human achievements that are fittest — most beautiful, noble, wise, creative, virtuous, and so forth — will succeed in a fierce competition, so that, over time, humanity and its accomplishments will continually improve. Late 19th-century dynastic capitalists, especially the American “robber barons,” found this vision profoundly congenial. Their contemporary successors like it for much the same reasons, just as some adolescents discover an inspiring reinforcement of their self-image in the writings of Ayn Rand .

Although social Darwinism has often been closely connected with ideas in eugenics (pampering the weak will lead to the “decline of the race”) and with theories of racial superiority (the economic and political dominance of people of North European extraction is a sign that some racial groups are intrinsically better than others), these are not central to the position.

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).

mitX aims to enhance education

MIT | Speaking to students in Simmons Hall on Wednesday evening, Provost L. Rafael Reif and Chancellor Eric Grimson explained how MITx — the Institute’s new initiative for online learning — could not only bring aspects of MIT’s education to the world at large, but also enhance and enrich the educational experience of students on campus.

“Our goal is to use this as a platform to strengthen the residential student experience,” Grimson said. The informal meeting was one of a series of sessions with undergraduates and graduate students to explain MITx, as well as to gather input and suggestions on “how you would imagine using this, and what you would like to see,” he said.

The MITx concept, Reif explained, grew out of a series of meetings over the last five years in which faculty, administrators and student representatives explored “ways we could use technology to enhance what we do on campus.”

MITx’s pilot class is now under way: 6.002x, Introduction to Circuits and Electronics. So far, more than 120,000 people worldwide have signed up for the course, which is now about halfway through its semester, Grimson said. At least 20,000 of those students have been actively keeping up with the course’s lectures, exercises and online tests.

For MIT’s own students, Reif said, materials developed for MITx classes will add an extra dimension to their on-campus experience. In some cases, he said, MITx might replace existing lecture components with online versions students could watch at their own pace, repeating segments if necessary to make sure they understand. Instead of a classroom experience defined by passive listening, MIT students might actually “experience increased face-to-face interactions” with each other and with instructors, Reif said.

When MIT students used online lectures and exercises, instructors would also have access to data about which sections students sailed through and which were more challenging. When students got to recitation sections, teaching assistants would have a clearer sense of which topics they needed to focus on, Grimson said.

MITx itself is an experiment, Reif said, and will be closely monitored so that course materials and the interactive experience can be improved as needed. The software platform developed for MITx is open-source and will eventually be released to the public: Beneficial modifications made or suggested by anyone around the world will be incorporated into the platform at any time.

“We believe this is the future,” Reif said of interactive online education as a supplement to campus learning. The software platform will be offered to other institutions for use in their classes — providing an alternative to a trend toward online educational materials developed by for-profit companies, he added. Fist tap Dale.

personal informatics for self-regulated learning

quantifiedself | Although the internet has fundamentally changed the speed and the scale of accessing information, that change has not seen such an impact in traditional forms of education. With popular new efforts like the video and exercise resource Khan Academy and online courses from Stanford (now spinning off into sites like Udemy and Coursera), people are talking about a revolution of personalized education – learners will be able to use computer-delivered content to learn at their own pace, whether supplementing schoolwork, developing job skills, or pursuing a hobby.

How personal informatics can help learning

There’s a problem here: learning on one’s own is not easy. Researchers have repeatedly found that people hold misconceptions about how to study well. For instance, rereading a passage gives the illusion of effective learning, but in reality quizzing oneself on the same material is far more effective for retention. Even then, people can misjudge the which items they will or will not be able to remember later.

The process of self-regulated learning works best when people accurately self-assess their learning and use that information to determine learning strategies and choose among resources. This reflective process fits well into the framework of personal informatics used already for applications like keeping up with one’s finances or making personal healthcare decisions.

For most people, their only experience quantifying learning is through grades on assignments and tests. While these can allow some level of reflection, the feedback loop is usually not tight enough. We are unable to fix our mistakes, making grades feel less like a opportunity for improvement and more like a final judgement.
How personal learning data can be collected

With computer-based practice, there is a great opportunity for timely personalized feedback. Several decades of research in the learning sciences have developed learner models for estimating a person’s knowledge of a topic based on their actions in a computer-based practice environment, often called an intelligent tutoring system. For example, a learner model for a physics tutor may predict the error rate of responses in defining the potential energy as a step in a physics problem — we see that the error rate decreases over the number of opportunities to use that skill, indicating learning (see below; from the PSLC DataShop). Such systems can not only track progress and give feedback but also make suggestions for effective learning strategies. Fist tap Dale.

3 major publishers sue open-education textbook startup

Chronicle | Open-education resources have been hailed as a trove of freely available information that can be used to build textbooks at virtually no cost. But a copyright lawsuit filed last month presents a potential roadblock for the burgeoning movement.

A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. The publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed their joint complaint last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.

“Notwithstanding whatever use it claims to make of ‘open source educational content,’ Defendant distributes ‘replacement textbooks’ that are created from, based upon, and overwhelmingly similar to Plaintiffs’ textbooks,” the complaint reads.

The complaint attempts to distance itself from attacking the legitimacy of open-education resources, but goes on to argue that Boundless is building its business model by stealing.

“Whether in the lecture hall or in a textbook, anyone is obviously free to teach the subjects biology, economics, or psychology, and can do so using, creating, and refining the pedagogical materials they think best, whether consisting of ‘open source educational content’ or otherwise,” it reads. “But by making unauthorized ‘shadow-versions’ of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, Defendant teaches only the age-old business model of theft.” Fist tap Dale.