CBC’s “The Nature of Things” premiered a documentary called The Hobbit Enigma last night. I’ve covered this topic briefly in a series of posts I called Pygmy vs. Hobbit. The documentary was awesome…. at least for an off-by-one nerd like me. 

“The Hobbit” is a set of hominid remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores. These remains have been dated to be 18,000 years old which means they were contemporary with modern humans. 

The question is whether this is a completely new species (Homo floresiensis) or a subspecies/variant of an existing known hominid including possibly ourselves. You can find more details about the Homo florensiensis debate on Wikipedia. 

The evidence demonstrating that the small size was not due to microcephaly was interesting, however, ruling out a single pathology does not rule out ALL pathologies. The most pursuasive evidence supporting a new species was the demonstration that the carpal bone system matches early hominids or chimps.

The documentary also suggested that The Hobbit may be Australopithecus, that is, the same species as Lucy. 

The implications of this debate are far reaching. It is not simply a matter of adding a new species to the Hominid family tree, but one that challenges the “out of Africa” assumption. The head scratcher is how this species got to Flores. We know Homo erectus (much earlier) and us (Homo sapien sapien) were in this area, so The Hobbit being subspecies/variant of one of these two species does not challenge any long standing assumptions. If The Hobbit is Australopithecus or something completely new it is means we have to go back to the evolutionary drawing board.

Canadians rejoice!!!! The National Do Not Call List is now live. You can register your telephone number to prevent telemarketers from calling.

In a post about the prevalence of smokers in China I challenged the assumption that smoking is caused by misinformation promoted by Big Tobacco:

My skepticism has its roots in anecdotal evidence from a couple of scuba trips to Indonesia. A high number of the dive masters in Indonesia smoke. Misinformation does not seem to apply. These young men (all have been men) have a good grasp of health issues dealing with the risk of decompression sickness and poisonous stings (rarely lethal but painful) for themselves and the divers in their charge. They speak English and are exposed to westerners who preach the evils of smoking to them daily. Yet they smoke in droves.

A paper named So You Want To Quit Smoking: Have You Tried a Mobile Phone? provides another hint.

Using panel data from 2,100 households in 135 communities of the Philippines collected in 2003 and 2006, the analysis finds that mobile phone ownership leads to a 20 percent decline in monthly tobacco consumption. Among households in which at least one member smoked in 2003, purchasing a mobile phone leads to a 32.6 percent decrease in tobacco consumption per adult over the age of 15.

What I find most interesting about this paper is not the idea that cell phones can reduce smoking but that smoking and cell phones are somehow similar.

What I think is similar is that both cell phone use and smoking represent a type of public conspicuous consumption that takes place in a social setting. They are both social signals.

Failures fascinate me, they always have. The current financial crisis is no exception. There is no shortage of opinion on the cause of this crisis. Housing, mortgages, financial institutes, and government regulation are all involved but I see little clarity or consensus on what caused the failure and what interventions might help alleviate the crisis.

I have wondered in the past what is different between the Canadian and U.S. systems. Recently a report claimed that Canada may be heading for an American-like meltdown. Although Canada’s economy is very much tied to the U.S. economy, the fundamental components of the meltdown are different, in my opinion.

I have heard the crisis referred to as a “perfect storm”. In my mind, the perfect storm analogy refers to a well understood system in which independent variables simultaneously reach a state that produce maximum nastiness. Watch the variables and you can predict when it is time to pray.

The U.S. financial crisis is not like a perfect storm. It is a classic nonlinear system in which we don’t understand the critical variables nor their expected behavior when these variables change. Here is my guess at what the critical variables are/were in this crisis:

1. Government policy/agencies that promote home ownership
2. Shift to mortgage-backed securities
3. Foreign investors (e.g. sovereign wealth funds) looking for safe U.S. money market investments
4. Lowest interest rate in history during 2001-2004
5. An oversupply of housing

Compared to Canada, the U.S. has many more incentives for people to buy homes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with an implied government insurance policy, tax deductible mortgage interest, and laws that required lending to traditionally high-risk individuals.

Mortgage-backed securities for years were hailed as a major innovation in the financial industry (Canada lagged in this department). Risk was measured by 3rd party rating agencies and shifted in bulk to all the owners of the securities. The incentives in this system encouraged deceit and sometimes fraud by both lenders and borrowers. 

The incredible growth of China and other nations produced central banks and sovereign wealth funds that were flush with cash. There was a great deal of demand for safe money market financial instruments and mortgage-backed securities looked attractive compared to treasury bills at historic lows. Only the U.S. economy is large enough to meet the safety requirements these institutions demanded.

Some blame Alan Greenspan for this mess because he did not investigate the early signs of this crisis and because the historically low interest rate. This interest rate was set low to bolster the economy after 9/11 fueled the mortgage meltdown. Low interest rates together with government incentives for home ownership made buying a home seem “free”. Low interest rates made traditional money market products unattractive and a race was on to offer new alternatives (i.e. mortgage-backed securities). 

Finally, an over-supply of housing made sure that the housing bubble would eventually pop rather than deflate. 

Was there greed? Sure, pockets of it but it was not a key driver like it was for the Internet stock bubble. Fraud, again, pockets of it but certainly many orders of magnitude less than with Enron. Over enthusiastic investors? I find it hard to believe that anyone thought that mortgages were anything other than a safety play (but I certainly could be wrong). Regulators asleep at the wheel? Considering how complex this crisis is, I find it hard to believe that anyone could have prevented the crisis with prescient regulation. I doubt anyone can create new regulations now that would do less harm than good moving forward. 

So will the 700 Billion plan fix things? I dunno. It makes for good theater though doesn’t it. Who says government doesn’t support the arts.

Continuing the Imponderable Decisive Moment Compact Camera Challenges post I made some time ago and continued with a post about the Sigma DP1 it looks like the new Micro Fourth Thirds standard is coming close to the mythical UnicornCam I describe. Luc Saint-Elie has a Lumix G1 series of images on his flickr site that show-off the small size of Panasonic’s Micro Fourth Thirds entry.

Lumix G1 by Luc Saint-Elie

So is it a baby SLR or a big Point-And-Shoot? The body is 12.7 oz and 45mm thick. Digital Photography Review has a Lumix G1 Preview.

It is common to describe someone as the type of person who “wear their heart on their sleeve”. I’ve been thinking about this idiom since reading Nicholas Carr’s post about The OmniGoogle. Carr’s piece ends with a comparison between Microsoft and Google:

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It’s been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it’s on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you’ll find that either comforting or discomforting.

This post is neither about technology nor economics but about the concept of motivations. Google and Microsoft are similar in that they both hold an almost unassailable position of power in terms of their core product (desktop OS and search respectively) but that Google differs in that it cares about something deeper than money and this makes them somewhat scarier than Microsoft (in Carr’s view which I think I agree with).

How can this be? How can we trust purely monetary motivations more than moral ones? I think understanding this paradox is key to certain left-vs-right divisions. 

What it comes down to is whether or not you wear your motivations on your sleeve. I am not taking a left-misunderstands-the-right position here. The reverse can also be true. I believe one of the most important left-vs-right political divisions is a religious one (especially in the U.S.). It is not the belief in a higher being per se that is the root of the problem, it is potential motivations that are hidden from clear view. Small “L” liberals do not generally trust anyone that has religious motivations. The key to having faith and being accepted by people who do not share your faith is displaying a clear record of being able to demarcate the decisions you make in life from the religious doctrine you ascribe to. Catholic politicians must answer questions about contraception. Mitt Romney has to answer whether or not The Garden of Eden is in Missouri.

If you don’t know me, the question most likely going through your head right now is whether or not I am religious… it is important for you to understand my motivations when reading my opinions on the topic. And that is the point. Microsoft, with a history of self-interest based choices, can be more trustworthy than The OmniGoogle because Microsoft wears their motivations on their sleeve.

The “messianic bent” Carr describes is key. Al Gore has a messianic bent when it comes to Global Warming. We add the -ism and -ist suffixes to certain ideas to make this bent clear. Global Warm-ism and Global Warm-ist (who go to battle against Denial-ists). Hilary Clinton is a National-Healthcare-ist. Ralph Nader is a Corporations-Are-Evil-ist. Barack Obama is all of the above. Neocons are Bush-Doctrine-ists. America is imperial-ist. This new -ists are similar to the terms racist and socialist that have been proven over time to be negative forces. Like the word propaganda, the messianic -ism/-ist words are only used by people that are against the -ism or the messianic bent of the supporters of the -ism (the -ists). 

If you are an agent of change, you should check your sleeves often and ensure you are -ism proof.

David Brooks’ Op-Ed in the NY Times yesterday takes a swipe at the notion of individual liberty:

Near the start of his book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” Barry Goldwater wrote: “Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being.” The political implications of this are clear, Goldwater continued: “Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”

Goldwater’s vision was highly individualistic and celebrated a certain sort of person — the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.

The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.

Ummmm…. I’m a little confused. I don’t see how the notion that individuals should be free to make their own choices rather than have others force choices onto them is lessened by the knowledge that humans are extremely social animals. 

I don’t think I have to re-read (or re-watch) “A Clockwork Orange”. The question is not the degree to which Alex and his droogs are social, the question is whether we have a right to hold their eyes open with intrusive machinery against their will.

A friend writes:

Dear Rad,
Please start commenting on the federal election because right now I need to hear your rational defense of conservative policies. A Stephen Harper majority is giving me nightmares.

If I remember correctly, fear of a Stephen Harper government was the main argument against the Conservatives in the last election, no? Something about Harper wielding The-Clause-Of-Conservative-Destiny (Tenacious D rules!!!).

I think Harper’s Conservatives are as centrist as they come. I don’t think fiscal conservatives (like myself) or social conservatives (pro-family types) or the keep-your-stinkin’-paws-off-of-our-oil-revenue types (Albertans) are licking their chops with the prospect of a Harper majority. We expect small tweaks to policies that have been embraced by both Liberals and Conservatives for decades now and we don’t even expect the tweaks to be in a direction we favor. The current brand of Lost-Liberals, NDP, Bloc, and Green Party promote policies that would give me nightmares if I thought they had any hope of taking power.

I think we all have to get used to the idea of the current Conservatives being in power for quite some time. The fact that the Conservatives were in power this long with a coaltion-free minority government is mind boggling. There is only one centrist choice currently while all the other federal parties have taken a left-ward turn (including the Bloc). 

Splitting votes across different parties/candidates with almost identical policies is not a recipe for success. Just look at the impact of a Ralph Nader or Ross Perot on U.S. politics.

So personally I am not terribly excited by the Canadian federal election. The views of the “left” vs. the “right” I find fascinating. Obama vs. Palin I find fascinating. Whether or not there is any such thing as a “rational defense” I find infinitely fascinating.

An article in the Globe and Mail discusses the City of Toronto’s plan to Crackdown on Blue-Box Scavengers.

“A lot of people tend to think it’s providing cash to homeless individuals, whatever, but from a solid-waste perspective, we do want to crack down on it,” Mr. Rathbone said, acknowledging that the city does not yet have a firm estimate on how much money scavengers are costing the blue-bin system.

Once the material is at the curb, Mr. Rathbone said, it is legally city property, adding that the city won a court case a few years ago against companies that were scavenging cardboard from blue boxes when prices for that commodity shot up.

This makes me giggle endlessly, mostly because it shows what a smarty-pants I am. I think a new breed of blue-box scavenger has emerged who are mostly after beer/liquor bottles. When Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a new program to bring Ontarians “out of the dark ages” by adding a deposit to wine/liquor bottles together with a beer store return program I asked why?

But why? Doesn’t the Blue Box program work? The claim is that this program will help “divert about 25,000 to 30,000 additional tons of glass from landfills”. Wow. That can’t be right. That claim feels false to me mostly because, personally, the Blue Box is the absolutely best way to get rid of bottles and glass. I don’t want to put them in the garbage. Bottles are big, heavy, and they break. So where does this 25,000 tons of LCBO orginated landfill waste come from?

Read the rest of the full post to get my guess at an answer which I still think is correct. What I find interesting is that people continue to put wine/liquor bottles in the blue-bin despite the lost deposit and disdain from our elected officials.

The lesson here is that incentives are funny things and politicians should be careful about what they wish for. Incentives should be tied to intended outcomes. The desired outcome of the wine/liquor bottle program was to “divert about 25,000 to 30,000 additional tons of glass from landfills”. I suspect the program has done no such thing.

I have been playing with some new applications for my iPod Touch including a WordPress application.

Seth Godin writes a post explaining that marketers often forget to ask one critical question: Are they ready to listen? He goes on to describe a potential book selling opportunity in the early 90’s that did not pan out:

… I had published a book about a political issue. An activist’s handbook. I had 20,000 copies in my garage when I found out about a large march in Washington. I bought an outdoor booth and trucked the books down to DC. I stood on the Mall in my little booth and watched more than 250,000 people walk by in less than two hours. Every single one an activist. Every single one a demographically perfect match for my handbook. After 100,000 people had walked by and we’d sold only one book, I lowered the price from around $10 to $1 just to prove my point–that it wasn’t the book and it wasn’t the price, it was the ability of the audience to listen that mattered. This group, in this moment, was there to march, not to shop.

Most people, most of the time, steadfastly refuse to pay attention.

This is a great story that punctuates Seth’s claim that the question “are they ready to listen” is key. I’d like to generalize (and probably ruin the simplicity of his message) by claiming that the activist book selling failure at the march disrupted the marcher’s/customer’s “Flow of Expectations”.

A booth selling an activist book at a march disrupts the marcher’s Flow of Expectations at several levels. 1) carrying a book during a march is inconvenient and it is not how people see themselves marching, 2) most people have some kind of expectation of how they evaluate a book to purchase which does not involve serendipitously finding a booth during a march selling a previously unheard of book by an author they do not know, 3) reading a book requires a commitment of hours over potentially many days/weeks/months and people do not want to make that decision under tight time constraints, 4) there is a physical Flow in a march and people do not want to be left behind, 5) activists are often distrustful of profit motives and do not want to be seen as susceptible to marketing tricks, and 6) buying a book can be done at a time that does not take away from the meaning of what the marcher’s are doing.

There are probably many more disruptions in the marcher’s Flow of Expectations. Rather than asking “are they ready to listen?” we can ask “are we disrupting their flow of expectations” and take steps to minimize or eliminate the disruption.

The best case scenario is that you are enhancing the flow of expectations.

“Taking an orphaned animal home is not legal in New Brunswick without a permit,” said Mr. Delong. “And permits are not generally issued for someone to take an animal home to take care of it.”

This from a Globe and Mail story about a man who performed a caesarean section on a pregnant deer that layed dying at the side of the road after being struck by a pick-up truck.

So I’m curious whether the journalist who wrote the article is emphasizing the legal/illegal aspect to add tension to this interesting story. It is hard to believe that the Department of Natural Resources officials in New Brunswick are debating whether or not to charge this man.

Global warming may lead to an increase in kidney stones disease.

Rising global temperatures could lead to an increase in kidney stones, according to research presented at the 103rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA). Dehydration has been linked to stone disease, particularly in warmer climates, and global warming will exacerbate this effect. As a result, the prevalence of stone disease may increase, along with the costs of treating the condition.

Objective science at its best.

So let me get this straight… the Liberals propose a favorable change to the current RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) rules that passes and the Conservatives turn around and want to squash the bill because it represents an irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy.

Mr. Flaherty defended the government’s approach as adequate and affordable. He said he was unconcerned about a backlash from voting parents excited by the prospect of a new tax break because only wealthier families would benefit from Mr. McTeague’s proposal.

“If you’re rich, it’ll be a popular plan,” Mr. Flaherty said.

Perhaps the backlash will not come from voting parents but from conservatives/libertarians that cringe when politicians use socialist talking points. No Comrade Flaherty, we shall never allow those nasty bourgeoisie take more money from the proletariat.

First those nasty retirees getting filthy rich off of income trusts were knocked down a notch or two now its time to go after parents trying to save for their kids education. Privileged SOBs… you go get’em Jim.

In response to an audience question during Mix 2008, Steve Ballmer downplayed Apple’s aspirations for the iPhone in the enterprise.

We’ve licensed ActiveSync for a while. That’s been an option that’s been available to Apple. It was certainly an option we knew Apple might take advantage of.

The Microsoft Exchange Protocol License is the key to Apple’s announcement and is a major enterprise coup for Apple. There is no way that Apple could have made any kind of headway in the enterprise space without it. This will hurt microsoft’s enterprise business as much, if not more, than RIM’s. Microsoft Exchange push e-mail/calendar is the only viable competitor to the Blackberry Enterprise Server (an adapter/plug-in for Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Groupwise).

The iPhone is a very different device than the Blackberry. With its thumb keyboard the Blackberry is the device of choice for writing e-mail. The iPhone, with its built-in WiFi and very functional mobile browser makes an ideal platform for any kind of enterprise application that does not require a great deal of free form text entry.

I’m not sure I.T. will embrace the iPhone but I don’t think this is required for it to be successful in the enterprise. The iPhone will be brought into the enterprise by employees who have purchased the device themselves. WiFi access is an effortless first step. Access to existing enterprise web applications is the next step. Exchange push is a natural third step, especially if Microsoft Windows Mobile devices are already supported.

I love stories like these… strategic decisions that have unintended consequences that reach far beyond the original scope. Microsoft has enabled a new competitor in the mobile enterprise space when their only intent was to knock RIM down a notch or two.