If only the US had this problem.

Apparently, the Netherlands are importing criminals from Belgium because there aren't enough in the Netherlands. (and Belgium is paying them a cool 30 million euros to do so.)

Hmmm, let's see, the Netherlands have 16 million people (according to Wikipedia) and 12,000 criminals in prison. That equates to about 75 detainees per 100,000 in the population.

By comparison, it is 751/100,000 in the US, or about 1% of all adults. Is crime rate actually 10 times higher in the US, or are we 10 times more likely to put people in jail for the crimes they commit (compared to the Netherlands)? My guess is that it is more of the latter than the former, given that the Netherlands has much laxer laws on drugs, which is one of the main causes for the high prison population in the US.

Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that the US will ever change on this, because there's very much a self-righteous view on punishing people for their crimes (rather than rehabilitating them to be useful to society). That, plus the prison union is pretty sizable and has an obvious interest in keeping themselves employed by supporting laws that put more people behind bars for longer.

Mmm, technology

There's an interesting new feature on Amazon, where you can "upgrade" your book purchases, allowing you to view the entire contents online, make annotations, and print pages. Seems like an excellent idea, except for the price. For the benefit of viewing the books you already bought, you have to shell out some extra dough. I'm not sure exactly what the rate is, but it looks to be around 20% of the book's retail price. That's quite a lot of moolah to digitize your collection. I understand that redoing old works in new technology costs money, but there should be few costs once the infrastructure is in place. Plus, I'm sure there is the potential to have much higher volume of sales for pure digital works via Kindle and the like.

My belief is that if you buy a book, you shouldn't have to pay extra for different formats of the same thing (well, audio recordings are a bit different, as are different editions). I think a better business model would be to charge some sort of flat rate for books of different genres/lengths that is reasonable, rather than something based off of retail prices. (Actually, I'm not sure what the pricing scheme is, it would certainly be ridiculous if they charged more to upgrade a hardcover book than the identical paperback version.) As it is, I'm already miffed at the prices to buy things for Kindle. I would like to see a world where pure digital downloads are 3/4 price with the option to have the physical copy packaged and shipped for the 1/4 difference, with free digital versions included for all physical purchases.

this is NOT fiscal responsibility

Apparently, the governator intends to take the unconstitutional law on selling violent video games to minors all the way to SCOTUS after having been rejected by the 9th Circuit court of appeals. (via ars technica)

Still, I guess it's chump change compared to the massive amount of bond-based borrowing that was authorized by last year's Prop. 1 to build a high speed rail.

Fisheries, Finance, and Physics

[edited for clarity]

See what I did there with the phonetic alliteration? :)

Q. What is the difference between the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and Banks?

A. Black holes created by the LHC are more transparent about where stuff goes...



One theory about the potential dangers associated with the LHC puts the risk of it destroying the Earth at 50-50 (watch the clip!). Of course, this must be qualified by examining the probability that this theory of assessing the risk of the LHC is correct (0%). Other estimates of the risk posed by the LHC suggest that the probability of destroying the Earth is at 10^-9. As Ord, HIllerbrand, & Sandberg rightly point out, this should be qualified by the possibility that the model is incorrect or that calculation errors have been made.

In most cases, it is impossible to gauge the failure probability for something like a single bolt on the space shuttle. In these cases, mathematical models are often used. Clearly, estimates of the probability of "rare" events need to take into account the possibilities that the models used to generate such probabilities are accurate.

Andy Haldane describes a similar problem with how the financial industry assessed risk: some of the initial events that sparked the issue were "unlikely"* Well, either we are extremely "lucky" or the model is incorrect. Unless you can demonstrate to me that the probability of the latter is less likely than seeing that kind of impossible event, I'm going to bet that someone somewhere screwed up. In fact, it's plain to see from Chart 1 of the notes for Haldane's speech how this could happen. In the chart, data collected over the last 10 years (1998-2007) suggested that the probability of negative GDP growth was, effectively, zero. Looking over the whole sample of time (1857-2007) in which this data has been collected, however, suggests that negative GDP growth occurs maybe 15% of the time. That doesn't seem like a big difference, but when you bet billions of dollars on what you think is a sure thing (non-negative GDP growth), but actually occurs maybe 1 in 7 times, that's an f-ing big risk.

What does this have to do with Fisheries, you ask. Well, according to the Magnuson-Stevens Act (yep, THAT Ted Stevens), "Conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available.". I suppose this means that fishing should not be a level where there is a significant risk of collapse. (whatever significant means...) Of course, the estimation of collapse risk is done using a model, which is fallible, possibly with high probability. If your best available science is not very good, is that sufficient to go plowing (or trawling, I guess) ahead? Your "best" model may suggest that you can fish 100,000 tons per year with < 1% chance of collapse, but if your model is only ~80% accurate (which is really good for fisheries models!), the upper bound on the probability of actual collapse is closer to 21% (0.8 * 1% + 0.2 * x, where x is unknown, but up to 1, potentially).

Logic and stats are nice when they're applied correctly, but more often than not, their use is exaggerated. And part of the blame does rest on the shoulder of scientists, who necessarily play up their results to get funding/acclaim/jobs. Still, that *is* why we have scientists advising the government, right? So that government officials will be able to take the best information available to make decisions? (and then we cross our fingers that our elected officials (or their appointees) know enough to weigh information properly...)

* shifts on the order of 25 standard deviations, which Andy calculates to occur roughly once every 10^135 years or
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years.

1) Ord, T., Hillerbrand, R., & A. Sandberg. Probing the improbable: methodological challenges for risks with low probabilities and high stakes. [preprint] (2009).

2) Haldane, A.G. Why banks failed the stress test. [speech] (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2009/speech374.pdf) (2009).