Published by
Zane Selvans on
June 24th, 2010 in
journal, personal and public.
Tags: boulder, caltech, colorado, education, gradschool, phd, research, society, work.
I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Wolfgang Pauli apparently once said of a student’s work: “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.”, to deride it for being unfalsifiable. Grad school isn’t quite that bad. We’re all running the experiment together every day. We can tell whether or not it’s working, at least in theory. But only if we’re willing to look. I’m looking; I say it’s not working, at least not for graduate students, not on average (mean or median, pick your poison).
Continue reading ‘What’s (socially) wrong with graduate school?’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
June 18th, 2010 in
journal, professional and public.
Tags: boycott, copyright, elsevier, icarus, open access, peer review, plos, publishing, science, transparency.
I was recently asked to do peer review of a paper in the Elsevier journal Icarus. Here’s what I said. I encourage you to say something in the same vein:
Thank you for your invitation to participate in the peer review process which is so vital to the progress of scientific knowledge. However, I unwilling to contribute any review or editorial work to publications which do not satisfy very liberal Open Access criteria as set out by, for example, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing from 2003, or the Creative Commons Attribution license used by the Public Library of Science Journals. I look forward to a day hopefully not too far off when Elsevier decides to support free access to scientific knowledge (PDF) for all, and especially for scientific knowledge which was gained in part through publicly funded research.
Peer review is only one necessary ingredient for science to work. Open access and systemic transparency are others. All of them need work.
I’m an emphatically utilitarian cyclist. My bike is my only ride. It is my way of going. It is point A to point B with a pile of stuff. But that’s not all it is, and sometimes I forget.
I started biking 20 years ago when I was 14 and living in Japan as an exchange student. It was how everyone got to school. Every morning was a flood of blue wool uniforms on classic bikes going clickety-click and ding-ding. Baskets, fenders, and not much in the way of gears. So it was utilitarian there too, but I also used my bike as an anti-depressant. I didn’t speak Japanese when I got there. My family didn’t speak English. All the other students were always busy with homework. I was lonely to the point of tears. Sometimes I’d ride around after school until dark. Sometimes beyond dark, in the rain and the wind. I discovered fireflies in a peace park one night. I let a typhoon blow me across the plain. I climbed hills and had crashes. It was a kind of love affair, it was something I could feel unabashedly good about, even if my host family thought I was crazy for staying out and getting drenched. It was deep rhythmic breathing and endorphins. It was still lonely, but at least I was focused. I felt free. When I came back to the US, I traded the circuitous hour and a half long school bus ride for an additional seventy nine minutes of sleep and an eleven minute bike ride each morning.
Continue reading ‘We need more bicycles, less Zoloft™’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
May 15th, 2010 in
journal, public, reviews and talks.
Tags: corporations, economics, finance, globalization, market, money, politics, stuff, terrorism.
We watched a Long Now talk last night by Nils Gilman, entitled Deviant Globalization. I first ran across Gilman in a shorter talk from a couple of years ago about the global illicit economy — black markets. He describes deviant globalization somewhat differently. Trade can be perfectly legal, and still deviant. He used the example of US men arranging trysts with 14 year old girls in Canada… which amazingly could still be considered legal until 2008, since 14 was the nationwide age of consent. Sure, it was legal, but who really thought it was okay? So deviant globalization represents a kind of moral arbitrage. Demand exists for goods and services which are proscribed in different ways, to different degrees, in different places. Sometimes they’re socially taboo, and sometimes they’re outlawed, but in all cases there exists a kind of moral disequilibrium gradient that can be exploited.
What united all these extralegal commodity flows [...] was the unsanctioned circulation of goods and services that either because of the way they are produced or because of the way they are consumed violate someone’s ethical sensibilities.
One of his main points is that the steepness of that moral or regulatory gradient translates pretty directly into profit margins. Cocaine increases in value by 1400% when you bring it across the US border. This creates incredible incentives to get around the rules, even at great risk. This is why Prohibition rarely works as a policy. Any attempt at eradication financially empowers those who are willing to continue taking the risks you’re able to impose.
Continue reading ‘Nils Gilman and Deviant Globalization: The Graying of the Markets’
I spent three-ish weeks riding around Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental on roads worse than the fire roads in the San Gabriel Mountains with Bryan. Las Barrancas del Cobre. Para conocer el otro lado. It was incredible. It was also I think, somewhat beyond the original design specifications of our rigid frame bikes (a Surly LHT for me, and a Traveler’s Check for him). The bikes performed heroically though, and we got through the whole trip with nothing more serious than a flat tire, a lost bolt (for which a replacement was had), a broken chain, and some worn out brake pads. With some bone rattling descents taking half a day, and spanning 1400m vertically (not unlike the Mt. Wilson Toll Road, except steeper, and in much worse condition) I got very familiar with the different sizes of rocks and ruts and hills and other topographic obstacles, and what they would mean as far as the ride. I also had a lot of time to think about why the hell Bryan was already up on top of the hill ventilating his nether regions by prancing around in flip-flops and a turquoise sarong, while I was still hurling obscenities at the inch thick layer of obstacle obscuring volcanic ash dust covering the road and often obligating me to push the bike up a 10% or steeper grade.
Ultimately, I figure it comes down to the absorption spectrum of the bicycle and rider in question.
Continue reading ‘The Spatial Absorption Spectra of Bicycles’
In my previous post I described the stock and bond markets by analogy with a casino, but you might reasonably question the validity of that analogy. Are market returns really as unpredictable as coin flips? The real payoff probability distributions obviously aren’t binary; what do they actually look like?
Continue reading ‘Empirical Investing’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
February 11th, 2010 in
journal, personal and public.
Tags: consumerism, economics, investing, money, probability, retirement, statistics, stuff, vanguard.
After spending a number of afternoons and evenings with friends and family over the last few months reviewing their retirement planning and investments, I’ve gone and done something a little bit crazy: I suggested to the GSC at Caltech that maybe I could give a talk on retirement investing to the grad student/postdoc population. Incredibly, they thought this sounded like a good idea, and so now I’m scheduled to give a talk in a couple of weeks. I’m going to try and write it up here in prose form first, to get it organized. It’s gotten to be a bit long… so I’m going to break it up.
Main Points:
- Taking responsibility for funding your own retirement is arguably more important now than it has been for a couple of generations. 100 years ago we had much more in the way of traditional (family, community) support in old age, and the systems that we put in place after the Depression (corporate pensions demanded by organized labor, social security) show few signs of being fixed any time soon. Generally today you do not even have the option of signing up for a “defined benefit” plan. It’s a 401(k) or the highway.
- Investment returns are for all practical purposes random, unpredictable events, and because of this there’s really no such thing as an “expert investor” in the sense that most people selling their investment management services try and imply. Nobody can reliably beat the broad markets, but you can do a perfectly good job of managing your own retirement funds if you’re willing to spend about 4 hours per year on it, say the other half of the day you spend doing your taxes.
- To maximize your chances of success, you must habituate yourself to spending less than you earn, making investing as automatic as possible, starting early and aggressively, and continuing throughout your entire career, regardless of what life and the markets throw at you. Because returns are exponential and not linear, the difference between starting to save at age 23 and age 32, assuming roughly an 8% rate of return, can be on the order of a factor of two in the final value of your retirement funds. Being comfortable living well below your apparent means makes it possible not only to save money now, but also reduces the amount of money you need in order to have “enough” in retirement, where “enough” means about 25 times your expected annual withdrawals, as you can take about 4% of your money out each year indefinitely.
- Maximizing the returns on your investments largely comes down to managing investment costs: how much you pay the people doing the actual investing (i.e. the mutual fund companies), and how much you pay in taxes. The difference between paying 0.2% and 2% in fees and taxes each year might not seem huge, but over the course of 35 years of investing, it makes roughly a factor of two difference in the amount of money you end up with.
- The two most important tools you have in managing investment risk are diversification and asset allocation. Diversification reduces the overall impact of many kinds of unpredictable events (high oil prices, the demise of the newspaper industry, war between India and Pakistan, collapse of the Icelandic currency… etc.) reducing the overall volatility of your portfolio. Asset allocation (mainly the split between stocks and bonds) allows you to choose what kind of financial risk you are exposed to, and to shift it over time as you get closer to actually needing to live off your investments. With stocks, you get the potential for future growth, at the expense of having to put up with wild fluctuations in their value. With bonds, you get less price fluctuation and less potential for growth, but the ability to draw a reliable income stream. With cash you get little to no price fluctuation, but essentially zero potential for real (inflation adjusted) growth.
Continue reading ‘An Introduction to Retirement Investing for Scientists’
Message from the City below, linkage courtesy of yours truly. Unfortunately I’ll be out of town, so hopefully others will be able to attend and take notes and post them on the web, as I have done here, and here, and here (okay, actually that third link goes to a rant…). I’m posting the info here because strangely, it does not seem to be posted anywhere on the City’s website. Funny that.
Ryan Snyder Associates, consultant, will provide a progress report on the development of the City’s new Bicycle Master Plan. An open forum will be held to gain public comment on the proposed improvements to the current bikeway system.
When:
Thursday, October 1, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Where:
Jackie Robinson Center
1020 N. Fair Oaks Ave.
Pasadena, CA
Hosted by Department of Transportation and
the Bicycle Master Plan Advisory Committee
More Info:
Contact Rich Dilluvio at (626) 744-7254 or rdilluvio@cityofpasadena.net.
An updated plan will look at the full range of actions (PDF) Pasadena could take to improve conditions and encourage bicycle riding
I’ve made this parody before:
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat until the fish are extinct.
All indications are that our grandkids won’t be big fans of sashimi, as it will either be too expensive for them, or virtually non-existent, because we have driven the large fish species to (or near) extinction. We’ve been making fish smaller, and less plentiful for millennia. This is no huge surprise. We ate all the tasty North American megafauna when we got here too. We were hungry, and we didn’t know any better. The world and its resources seemed vast beyond our comprehension.
The situation today is tragic partly because we know exactly what we’re doing, and partly because we could be sustainably harvesting vastly more fish today than we are currently mining at an unsustainable rate, if only we could somehow contrive to let fish stocks rebound to their Pleistocene levels. At those very high (pre-human) stocking rates, the sustainable take would be enormous, but we would have to manage the harvest carefully with quotas (which we didn’t do the first time around, and which we are much better equipped to do now). Such quotas are sometimes discussed as if they were purely economic or political quantities, but in some important ways they are neither.
Continue reading ‘The Tragedy of the Marine Commons’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
August 8th, 2009 in
journal, personal and public.
Tags: capitalism, dumpster diving, economics, food, freegan, garbage, information, landfill, material, money, society, sustainability, trash, waste.
Why are labels so attractive? One word shortcuts for frugal thinkers. Am I a freegan? What would that mean exactly? Who curates the definitions of our cultural -isms?
Reading through the Wikipedia article on Freeganism (which is as close to a cultural consensus on anything as I think we get these days), it seems like I’m close. Except that I’m not fundamentally opposed to eating meat (it’s the environmental degradation, antibiotics resistance, health detriments, and massive resource consumption involved in meat production that get to me… but a little free meat from the dumpster? Tasty!). I also have a soft spot for shiny new laptops and other information technologies, and I believe in the greed based toolkit of money, markets, and open competition as a way to foster innovation. But I also love composting, and creative re-use, and free non-materialist forms of entertainment and recreation like reading, and writing, and cooking from scratch, and I believe that unmitigated greed, and thus so-called laissez-faire (or perhaps in many cases more accurately crony) capitalism, left unchecked, are in the end destructive forces. Greed and self-interest are kind of like dynamite: the right amount in the right place is a wonderful tool. Too much, or even small amounts in bad places, and you’ve got a mess. So how do I respond to an e-mail like this:
Continue reading ‘Does this look Freegan to you?’
