Working your way through high school

Reason Magazine's August/September issue has a feature article on a private school in Chicago that caters to disadvantaged minorities where students work a few days a month to cover the greater part of their tuition. Here's how it works, basically:

At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families.

And the results are encouraging:

These start-ups are all committed to enrolling only low-income kids; network-wide, 72 percent of students qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. The schools are also committed to sending the vast majority of their graduates to college; of the 318 students who graduated from Cristo Rey Network schools in 2007, 316 were accepted to a two- or four-year college. That’s better than 99 percent. (Nationwide, just 67 percent of students who graduate from high school start college shortly thereafter, and in big cities that figure can be much lower. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley held a press conference last spring to boast that the Chicago public schools had sent almost half of the class of 2007 to two- or four-year colleges.)

The article recognizes that "[s]ociologists have long pointed to systems of free, compulsory public schools as the international gold standard," but that in light of piss-poor graduation rates and educational quality at many American public schools, the Cristo Rey method seems pretty appealing. And surely the idea would have gained traction a lot earlier (well, it actually did) if it weren't for the competition from free, subsidized public schools.

Was Larry Summers right?

You may have seen write-ups reverberating around the Internet about a recent study, in which the writers conclude that girls and boys have the same average math test scores, and therefore the long-standing assumption that boys are better at math than girls is false. However, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution digs a little deeper and finds that the story hasn't been very accurately portrayed. While average scores are similar, the variance among scores for boys and girls is very different: namely, boys are much more likely to be either very good at math or very bad at math than girls. So, at the upper end of the achievement scale, you're likely to see many more boys than girls. Which is exactly what you see in university-level math and science programs. Looks like Larry Summers might have been onto something, after all.

Is heroin really that bad after all?

The NYT Magazine this weekend has an article about Afghanistan's poppy problem written by an American drug warrior entitled "Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?". The article chronicles the failure of the anti-poppy efforts, and the author concludes – in the words of Jacob Sullum – that the problem "is everyone else's fault." But what I find most interesting about the article is that its premise – that "the evils of heroin" are truly evil – is uncritically accepted from the get-go, and the author doesn't even feel the need to explain why heroin is so evil. So, I'll try to take a stab.

First of all, heroin is expensive. Drug addicts end up having to steal and do other unscrupulous things (prostitution, perhaps?) to acquire the drug. But why is it expensive? Because it's illegal.

Second of all, intravenous drug use can lead to diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. Why? Because users share needles. Why do users share needles? Because it's illegal to get them without a prescription, and in America, having a heroin addiction won't get you a prescription.

Thirdly, heroin is notoriously impure. Dealers cut it with all sorts of things, including things much more deadly than heroin itself. Pure heroin is virtually impossible to overdose on, especially for the addicted user. The vast majority of deaths due to "overdoses" are actually deaths due to either impure product or a lethal combination of alcohol or benzodiazepines and heroin. And why do heroin dealers cut their product, while pharmacies dispensing morphine don't? Because heroin is illegal.

A fourth reason that heroin is detrimental is that heroin addicts often have damaged kidneys. However, researchers aren't sure that this is a result of heroin use, or if it's a result of the adulterants that dealers use to increase their product's salable weight. Again, you can chalk this up to heroin's illegality.

And the fifth reason – and only reason that's not directly attributable to heroin's illegality – is that heroin causes chronic constipation. Yep, you heard it here first (probably) – heroin's only proven long-term health consequence, other than physical dependence, is constipation.

So, out of the four major consequences of heroin use, all of the really bad consequences are due not to the drug itself, but the environment that governments create when they ban the drug. The only real health consequence – constipation – is a minor irritation at best compared to the harm caused by the larger war on drugs.

Goodbye and good riddance to software patents

The last couple have months have been exciting ones for opponents of intellectual property rights (myself included), as American courts have been considering cases that probe the essence of some of the most hated patents: software and business method patents. Whereas normal patents give the patent holder monopoly rights over a certain physical alignment of matter, software and method patents cover theoretical or digital arrangements. Over at the blog Patently-O, John Duffy examines the implications of a few landmark cases (including Bilski, which I covered a while ago), and concludes that software patents are more or less finished:

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.

In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”[1] Perhaps, the agency has conceded, some “new, unforeseen technology” might warrant an “exception” to this formalistic test, but in the agency’s view, no such technology has yet emerged so there is no reason currently to use a more inclusive standard.[2]

Duffy goes on to discuss the implications for a pretty famous software patent, that on Google's PageRank technology (a relatively simple algorithm for determining a page's importance based on links and the PageRank reputation of those links), which is arguable at the root of Google's internet search dominance. He believes that this patent is finished given the precedents being set by the courts. If it is indeed invalidated, it'll be interesting to see to what extent Google's success was predicated on the monopoly rights it was given by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

...and here is the archive of all my posts related to intellectual property.

Mao: The Unknown Story

I just finished a fascinating biography of Mao called Mao: The Unknown Story. I hadn't known much about Mao or Chinese history, so it was pretty enlightening. The book was apparently pretty controversial when it came out, with some people calling it brilliant, and some calling it an example of lazy research. I haven't looked too far into the critical claims about the book, but I find it difficult to believe that it's poorly cited, given the hundreds of pages of notes at the end, and the incredibly comprehensive list of very famous world leaders that the authors interviewed. In any case, I highly recommend the book. Here are some things that I learned from it that I hadn't even heard of before:

• For most of the Long March, Mao was carried on a litter and was comfortable enough to read.
• The Communists' success during the Civil War had everything to do with the Russians having planted sleepers among the Nationalists during the heady days of the Wampoa Military Academy, and nothing to do with the Communists' military skills.
• The Second Sino-Japanese War was started by Stalin when he activated a sleeper who was the commander of the Nationalists' garrison around Shanghai and Nanjing and had him incite the Marco Polo Bridge incident which began the conflict. The Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek had no intention of fighting that war at that time, but Stalin wanted to draw the Japanese into China proper to avoid them invading the Soviet Union from the east.
• The two Taiwan Straits crises in the '50s were engineered by Mao to provoke the US into threatening nuclear war, which would then compel the Soviet leadership to hand over to Mao blueprints for atomic weapons (the reason for the first incident), and missiles capable of carrying them (the reason for the second).
• Much (if not all) of the deaths by starvation in the late '50s and early '60s were due to Mao's generous support of would-be allies abroad. China became the biggest donor of foreign aid history has ever known, and was exporting food to Eastern Europe (places which barely knew food rationing, much less death by starvation) at a time when millions of Chinese laborers were receiving fewer calories than those at Auschwitz. Mao even exported food to the USSR while his own citizens were starving despite the pleas of the Russians not to.

Pirates at the Economist

It looks like the mainstream media might finally be catching on to the benefits of piracy – the Economist has an article this week called "Piracy: Look for the silver lining" in which they document the ways that owners of intellectual "property" are embracing piracy rather than attempting to litigate it out of existence. Though they skimp on some of the more interesting forms of piracy – namely music and video piracy – they quote Bill Gates as saying that piracy helps Microsoft compete against open source software in the developing world. I remember when I was in Romania Gates came to speak to Microsoft's Romanian employees (apparently the biggest nationality in Redmond aside from Americans), and Romania's president said that "[we] built our country on pirated Windows." Gates apparently looked a little uncomfortable after the comment, so I doubt his comfort with piracy is quite as strong as the Economist would make it seem, but nevertheless, still interesting. It's just a shame that pirates have to rely on the good will of content creators to see the benefit in relinquishing their intellectual property rights.

Athenians have second thoughts about Olympics

According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor, some in the city of Athens are reconsidering whether hosting the 2004 Olympic Games was really worth the $15 billion cost. The stadiums lie either empty or underutilized. Athens got some infrastructure out of the deal – the metro was revamped, the ancient city center was beautified, and the airport was enlarged – but all of those investments could have been made without hosting the Olympics. Beijing is spending an estimated $40 billion on their coming out party, but authoritarian regimes are insulated from the oversight and criticism that other Olympic hosts face from their citizens. The article also implies that Tokyoites are a lot less receptive to the idea of hosting the Olympics in 2016 than they were in 1964. The trend seems to be that citizens in booming, upcoming cities (Tokyo 1964, Beijing 2008) are more likely to welcome the Olympics than citizens of dynamic market-oriented cities who don't need to prove themselves to the world.

All my writings on Olympics-related topics here, with more examples of Olympics-gone-wrong in Sochi and Baku.

Possible false flag operations in Somalia

The NYT today has a story about Somalia and the recent spate of violence against aid workers, both foreign and domestic. At least twenty have been killed this year alone, something that is apparently unprecedented in the two decades since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime. But the funny thing about the killings is that no one can quite figure out who's behind them. Though the attacks are apparently committed by radical Islamists, the groups claiming responsibility are little known. The government maintains that the Islamists are behind it, though they have a good reason to present that picture: the current federal government was put into place on the back of an American-backed, Ethiopian-led invasion of the country that drove the Islamic Courts Union out of power in 2006. But not everyone buys it:

Some Western security analysts theorize that in the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who may be the government’s last hope for survival.

The government admits that it desperately needs peacekeepers. But it denies that it is attacking aid workers to get them.

“It’s obvious who’s doing this,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, a Somali ambassador at large. “It’s hard-liner Islamists who hate the West. They are forces of darkness, not forces of light.”

Considering that foreign intervention in Somalia is always a not-too-distant possibility, and that the current regime was installed by fiat, this theory isn't as crazy as it seems. The scepter of al-Qaeda led the Americans and Ethiopians to invade and expel the ICU two years ago, so hey, maybe it will work again.

Here's the archive of my posts about Somalia, everyone's favorite failed state, which includes a pretty long post I wrote taking the media to task for their uncritical look at how Somalia's fared since it descended into statelessness twenty years ago.

Professional pigs

The NYT has been doing a pretty long series called American Exception about unique aspects of the American law system. This month's article was about the exclusionary rule, a legal principle that since 1961 has automatically acquitted defendants whose prosecution rests on evidence obtained illegally, regardless of the magnitude of either the police violation or the defendant's crime. However, recent court cases have weakened the principle, and an upcoming Supreme Court case will reevaluate and clarify* the rule.

Scalia (along with Roberts) has already indicated that he thinks the rule is outdated, citing recourse through civil suits and "increasing professionalism" among police and "new emphasis on internal police discipline." Ironically enough, the comment was made in regards to a complaint that because the police did observe the knock-and-announce rule, the damning evidence found should excluded. Scalia brushes away concerns that with the exclusionary rule police won't wait before barging in, saying that "incentive is minimal" that this would happen, and that "ignoring knock-and-announce can realistically be expected to achieve nothing." Only, that's exactly what happens all the time, and it's what's happened even before 2006 when the Supreme Court struck down the exclusionary rule with regards to knock-and-announce violations in Hudson v. Michigan. And as for "increased professionalism," Radley Balko debunks that with his long-running "another isolated incident" watch.

Edit: Crime & Federalism brings up a point that I hadn't realized: the exclusionary rule, in practice, isn't as strong as the NYT article makes it out to be. According to a federal judge, a successful motion-to-suppress is "almost as rare as hen's teeth." All a police officer usually has to do is lie, and the motion will be denied.

* By which I mean arbitrarily legislate and regulate. I don't actually believe that these days the judicial branch makes objective decisions, and I think it's almost all political, even with regards to decisions I agree with. And though I'm not a big legal history buff, I have a feeling it's always been that way.

Putting the lid on Pandora's box

When the iPhone 2.0 software came out about a week ago, I downloaded one of the most popular applications for it: Pandora. Basically, you enter a genre/artist/song, and from there it uses data from the Music Genome Project to find similar songs, which it plays to you. You indicate to the software what you like by giving the songs it plays a thumbs up or thumbs down. The songs are pretty random, so it's a lot like radio – you can listen to lots of music, but you don't have precise control over what plays. It's great for discovering new bands and songs and it's free, and since the songs are unpredictable and streaming, you can't use it as a way to listen to whatever music you want without paying for it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it could be a boon for the music industry, as people buy music that they discover using Pandora.

So, naturally, the record companies are trying to shut it down. Just another example of government favors (in this case, copyrights) interfering with market signals and putting power in the hands of people who haven't legitimately earned it, who in turn are oblivious to true market forces and therefore litigate and legislate themselves out of business. It would be nice if artists stood up for themselves and their future profits and demanded that their labels stop this nonsense, but that doesn't seem likely.