Relevant History

Greater job insecurity = poorer health

In addition to the obvious problems created by job loss, The New York Times reports that "a growing body of research suggests that layoffs can have profound health consequences."

One 2006 study by a group of epidemiologists at Yale found that layoffs more than doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke among older workers. Another paper, published last year by Kate W. Strully, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany, found that a person who lost a job had an 83 percent greater chance of developing a stress-related health problem, like diabetes, arthritis or psychiatric issues.

In perhaps the most sobering finding, a study published last year found that layoffs can affect life expectancy. The paper, by Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, and Daniel G. Sullivan, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, examined death records and earnings data in Pennsylvania during the recession of the early 1980s and concluded that death rates among high-seniority male workers jumped by 50 percent to 100 percent in the year after a job loss, depending on the worker’s age. Even 20 years later, deaths were 10 percent to 15 percent higher. That meant a worker who lost his job at age 40 had his life expectancy cut by a year to a year and half.

None of this is terribly surprising, but the degree of the impact is striking, as is another study showing that "'persistent perceived job insecurity' was itself a powerful predictor of poor health and might even be more damaging than actual job loss."

That article [doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2003.10.071], incidentally, is pretty interesting.

Economic recessions, the industrial shift from manufacturing toward service industries, and rising global competition have contributed to uncertainty about job security, with potential consequences for workers’ health..... [P]ersistent perceived job insecurity is a significant and substantively important predictor of poorer self-rated health in the American's Changing Lives (ACL) and Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) samples, and of depressive symptoms among ACL respondents. Job losses or unemployment episodes are associated with perceived job insecurity, but do not account for its association with health. Results are robust to controls for sociodemographic and job characteristics, negative reporting style, and earlier health and health behaviors.

This is in keeping with other research showing that anticipation of losses or punishment can be as bad as the punishment itself.

Okay, back to work....

[To the tune of Nina Simone, "I Shall Be Released," from the album The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl (1967-1972) (a 5-star song, imo).]

New U.S. embassy in London

The U.S. consulate in London will be moving from its current location in Grosvenor Square...

via flickr

to a new building. But not until 2017.

(via the Telegraph)

Actually, that's a pretty cool-looking building, even if kind of looks like the sort of thing that architects in Dubai were expected to design and construct with a 48-hour deadline.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4: III. Menuetto (Allegretto) & Trio," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 4) (a 4-star song, imo).]

I know California is in trouble, but...

We're not in this much trouble, are we?

  
(from the Telegraph)

To its credit, the actual article doesn't make the same mistake.

Evoutionary fitness

Over the last couple years, I've lost about fifty pounds. (It was sixty, but then I started going to the gym, and have built up muscle mass. A fair trade-off.) I'm one of those people who can't lose weight steadily: a diet works, then I hit a wall, and an enormous amount of effort is necessary to start losing again. Playing on a concept from evolutionary biology, I jokingly called these "out-of-fitness plateaus." But it turns out that there are people who actually have thought about applying evolutionary biology to fitness.

A couple days ago I posted about weight loss and long-term thinking about the future, and how the challenges of dieting are a nice example of how the challenges we face in all long-term projects. In response, someone pointed me to a fitness guru named Arthur De Vany, and explained, Nassim Taleb "often credits Devany when discussing... [his] weight loss and new found fitness (which incorporates.....randomness)." (Taleb is author of The Black Swan, and one of my favorite people.)

Turns out De Vany is a professor emeritus in economics at UC-Irvine, and an expert on complex networks and natural resources. He's also author of a major book on the economics of Hollywood. As Taleb says, "at seventy two, [De Vany] looks like what a Greek God would like to look like at forty two." It's true-- the guy is seriously ripped (and I suspect he makes more as a fitness expert than an economist).

Essentially, the idea is that we didn't evolve to work out three days a week, eat three balanced meals, etc.: we're built for long periods of light activity (picking berries) and sudden bursts of intense stress (chasing the mastadon, running away from the tiger), and for eating episodically. As De Vany describes his approach,

Brief moments of high intensity are mixed with exercise on all scales in a way that trains all the metabolic pathways. Power Law training follows the natural patterns of all wild living things and mixes intensities of all scales in a healthful, fractal pattern. It is how children play when they are left to their natural patterns.

Taleb's description of its effect on him (from the introduction (pdf) to the new edition of The Black Swan) is worth quoting at length, if only for the swipes at bankers:

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles to fuel.

Brainwashed by the cultural environment and by my education, I was under the illusion that steady exercise and steady nutrition were a good thing for one's health --not realizing that I was falling into the rationalistic arguments; the Platonic projection of wishes into the world. Worse, I was brainwashed while having all the facts in my head.

From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations will experience Extremistan-style variability, hence the predator will necessarily go through periods of feasts and famine. That's us, humans --we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance. So our food intake had to have been fractal. Not a single one of those promoting the "three meals a day", "eat in moderation", idea tested it empirically to see if it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.

After my Aha! flash, under guidance from Art de Vany, I embarked on an Extremistan barbell lifestyle: long, very long, slow meditative (or conversational) walks in a stimulating urban setting, but with occasional (and random) very short sprints, making myself angry imagining I were chasing the bankster Robert Rubin with a big stick trying to catch him to bring him to human justice. I went to the weight lifting rooms in a random way for a completely stochastic workout --typically in a hotel when I was on the road. Like the Grey Swan event, these were very, very rare, but highly consequential weight lifting periods, after a day of semi- starvation, leaving me completely exhausted, then I would be totally sedentary for weeks and hang around cafés. Even the duration of the workouts remained random --but most often very short, less than fifteen minutes. I put myself through thermal variability as well, exposed, on the occasion, to extreme cold without a coat. Thanks to transcontinental travel and jet lag, I underwent periods of sleep deprivation followed by excessive rest. When I went to places with good restaurants, like Italy, I ate in quantities that would have impressed Fat Tony himself, then skipped meals for a while without suffering. Then, after two and a half years of such apparently "unhealthy" regimen, I saw serious changes in my own physique on every possible criterion --the absence of unnecessary adipose tissue, the blood pressure of a 21 year old, etc. I also have a clearer, much more acute mind....

The only thing currently missing from my life is the absence of panics, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night.

[To the tune of Derek and the Dominos, "Got to Get Better in a Little While," from the album Live at the Fillmore East (New York NY), 24 February 1970 (a 3-star song, imo).]

Profound... if it's true

From the new edition of Taleb's Black Swan:

[L]iving organisms (whether the human body or the economy) need variability and randomness. What's more, they need the Extremistan type of variability, certain extreme stressors. Otherwise they become fragile.

[h/t to Steve McHale]

[To the tune of Derek and the Dominos, "Let it Rain," from the album Live at the Fillmore East (New York NY), 23 October 1970 (a 3-star song, imo).]

Edmund White on the delirious professions

I love this concept of "delirious professions," which I found via Some Came Running and James Wolcott:

[N]o wonder people social-climb in New York, since it has more genuine social mobility than London or Paris, where clothes, accents, and manners reveal all too much about origins and where there are no more than three degrees of separation between any two people. Everyone already knows every single bad thing about you. In all three cities, people practice what Paul Valéry called the "delirious professions," those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinions of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I'd hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, all of the media.... [T]he delirious professions, having no agreed-upon standards, require introductions and alliance, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short, they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation. (Edmund White, City Boy)

Or, as Valéry wrote:

Paris contains and combines, and consummates or consumes, most of the brilliant failures summoned by their destinies to the delirious professions... This is the name I give to all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of oneself, and whose raw material the opinion others have of you. Those who follow these trades, doomed to be perpetual candidates, are necessarily forever afflicted with a kind of delusion of grandeur which is ceaselessly crossed and tormented by a kind of delusion of persecution. This population of uniques is rules by the law of doing what no one has ever done, what no one will ever do. This is at least the law of the best, that is to say, of those who have the courage to want, frankly, something absurd.

It dovetails almost too nicely with the critiques of knowledge work by the likes of Matthew Crawford, whose Shop Class as Soulcraft I found to be quite brilliant. (Too brilliant and close to home, perhaps; it looks like I never blogged about it. I'll have to correct that one day.)

[To the tune of Joe Jackson, "Steppin' Out," from the album Night And Day (a 3-star song, imo).]

I was right about Chuck E Cheese

Years ago I wrote a post about how the bad design of Chuck E Cheese made it difficult for me to keep track of my (then very young kids), and how I thought this was kind of a flaw:

I spent the several hours feeling like Marlin in Finding Nemo-- in a vaguely threatening environmnent, wondering where my kids had gone. But I finally figured out what bothers me about the place. Not the fact that Chuck E Cheese combines the noise level of a Metallica concert, the franticness of the Filene’s Basement wedding dress sale, and the visual stimulation of the Akihabara; nor that their pizza is terrible and overpriced.

Actually, all those things do irritate me.

But what makes me feel like there’s something actually dangerous about the place is that it’s almost impossible to know where your kids are and what they’re doing.

This post generated a certain amount of hate mail, as well as some comments agreeing (usually for different reasons) that Chuck E Cheese was evil. So I was heartened to see Bob Cook post this in True/Slant:

If you have children in sports, or children of any sort, you probably already know about the hell that can be Chuck E. Cheese, where the ad tagline says it’s a place where a kid can be a kid, but leaves out that a parent can be a fucking maniac. Watching their kid at a ballgame can bring out the worst in some parents, but even close access to weaponry such as hockey sticks or baseball bats does not bring out the level of mayhem as close access to animatronic rodents and lousy pizza.

Turns out that, according to a Wall Street Journal article Cook cites, "Law-enforcement officials say alcohol, loud noise, thick crowds and the high emotions of children’s birthday parties make the restaurants more prone to disputes than other family entertainment venues."

Ah, the memories....

[To the tune of Charlie Parker, "Max Is Making Wax," from the album The Charlie Parker Story [Disc 3] (a 2-star song, imo).]

Rules for writing fiction

The Guardian has advice from 14 authors about how to write. My favorite is Roddy Doyle's:

Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Helen Dunmore's "A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk" is also sound.

But Richard Ford's "Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea" takes the cake.

Futures 2.0 is out!

So my article on the future of futures (the serious version, not the parody) has actually been published. Ironically, because of the limitations of the Stanford library's subscription, I can't see it.

However, I'm sure I'll get the reprints soon. For those who have access to the journal, the official version is here.

I also notice that my former IFTF colleague Jody Ranck co-authored an article in the same issue on health foresight.

"it's the worst time for fashion, because of its fashionablity"

Louise Wilson, the feared and beloved head of the fashion program at Central Saint Martins, on the paradox of fashion:

This month's graduates perhaps have it harder than most. There's the recession, for one thing, but also the sense that fashion's never been more fashionable. Innovation is gobbled up by the high street and internet with rude efficiency. "In fact, it's the worst time for fashion, because of its fashionablity," groans Wilson.

I wonder if the same could be said for futures. Organizations are, ironically, both more interested in the future (in the sense that they recognize that lots of things are changing really quickly, and they need to keep up); yet they're also more concerned about the near term (because of precisely the same sets of pressures).

I think what Wilson is pointing to is the problem that as too-fast or too-public an innovation cycle can dampen real innovation and creativity, in favor of turning out stuff that's novel but crappy. So maybe there's no comparison there....

[To the tune of Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider," from the album Astral Weeks (a 3-star song, imo).]

"Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way."

From the latest by Thomas Benton:

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Of course, I'm predisposed to appreciate the piece.

[To the tune of Kate Bush, "Big Stripey Lie," from the album The Red Shoes (a 3-star song, imo).]

"Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?"

From Michael Lewis:

I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book [Liar's Poker], spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual....

The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

The whole piece, of course, is fabulous and fierce-- the financial journalism equivalent of a really stunning winning design on a good season of Project Runway (which my daughter is now obsessed with), delivered with the panache of Adam and Jamie demolishing an urban legend (my son is obsessed with Mythbusters).

[To the tune of Kate Bush, "Experiment IV," from the album The Whole Story (a 3-star song, imo).]

This is exactly the kind of scientific research you can build a bogus management theory around

From Not Exactly Rocket Science:

In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw.

Now, Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham has found that there's something to Bohr's explanation. People do indeed have a "reactive advantage", where they execute a movement about 10% more quickly if they're reacting to an opponent.

[To the tune of Tony Bennett, "Let's Face The Music And Dance," from the album Bennett/Berlin (a 2-star song, imo).]

California deploys its own greenhouse gas monitoring network

I wish Signtific were still around, so I could say about this there, but... The California Report has a piece today (here's the audio) about the state's deployment of a network of greenhouse gas monitoring instruments that will provide high-resolution maps of GHG sources.

Similar equipment has been in place for years as part of a continental network established by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But officials at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) say this new system will be the first of its kind.

"The unique thing about this is that we're actually looking at the local emissions, rather than the global average, says Jorn Herner, who heads the Greenhouse Gas Technology & Field Testing Section of CARB's research arm. "Nobody has done that before."

As the New York Times explains, while this is mainly a science project at the present, the virtually same technologies and networks would be useful in "the kind of system that may be needed in many places as countries develop plans to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases." Right now, such markets rely largely on either proxy data (i.e., measurements of things that indirectly indicate a rise or fall in GHG emissions) or self-reported data, which depend entirely on the accuracy and honesty of the reporter.

Indeed, Picarro, the Silicon Valley company making the instruments that CARB is putting in the field, says that a national GHG sensing network with 10 km resolution would cost about $300 million-- not a huge amount of money given the potential size of the cap and trade market, and the potential for fraud in the absence of a robust data-gathering system. (Picarro itself is an interesting example of a Silicon Valley company that's reinventing itself as cleantech: according to Green Beat, "a spinout from a Stanford University lab, Picarro initially developed lasers for the telecom industry," but recently "has redefined itself to ride the climate change momentum.")

[To the tune of They Might Be Giants, "Meet The Elements," from the album Here Comes Science (a 2-star song, imo).]

Has truthiness come to French philosophy?

The Times reports that

When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.

There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank....

Mr Lévy admitted last night that he had been fooled by Botul, the creation of a literary journalist, Frédéric Pages, but he was not exactly contrite.

Appearing on Canal+ television, he said he had always admired The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant and that its arguments were solid, whether written by Botul or Pages. “I salute the artist [Pages],” he said, adding with a philosophical flourish: “Hats off for this invented-but-more-real-than-real Kant, whose portrait, whether signed Botul, Pages or John Smith, seems to be in harmony with my idea of a Kant who was tormented by demons that were less theoretical than it seemed.”

Granted I haven't had any coffee this morning, but it sounds like Lévy's argument is, "Yes the work I cite is fiction, but it says what I think, so I'll continue to reference it." Which sounds rather like an appeal to truthiness: it's not true, but it kind of looks true, and confirms my own beliefs, so I'm going to find it convincing.

[To the tune of They Might Be Giants, "Lazyhead and Sleepybones," from the album No! (a 3-star song, imo).]

Computer History Museum

This morning I spent a couple hours at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, doing an interview for a documentary on the history of Apple.

Oddly, I managed to dress to match the Cray supercomputer in the exhibit area.

via flickr

[To the tune of Tori Amos, "That Guy," from the album Abnormally Attracted To Sin (a 4-star song, imo).]

Greetings from Baker Beach

Here in the early morning after dropping Heather off at the Kaiser Permanente half marathon.

Alex
(sent via iPhone)