Miscellany: 8/14/12

Quote of the Day
In Heaven, an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw

Economists for Romney

Over 400 economists ­– including five Nobel laureates (Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes) signed a statement in support of Mitt Romney’s bold economic plan for America, Economists for Romney announced today.

And here is what I refer to as the multiple count indictment on Obama's crimes against the economy:

• Relied on short-term “stimulus” programs, which provided little sustainable lift to the economy, and enacted and proposed significant tax increases for all Americans.
• Offered no plan to reduce federal spending and stop the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio.
• Failed to propose Social Security reform and offered a Medicare proposal that relies on a panel of bureaucrats to set prices, quantities, and qualities of healthcare services.
• Favored a large expansion of economic regulation across many sectors, with little regard for proper cost-benefit analysis and with a disturbing degree of favoritism toward special interests.
• Enacted health care legislation that centralizes health care decisions and increases the power of the federal bureaucracy to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on patients and doctors, and creates greater incentives for waste.
• Favored expansion of one-size-fits-all federal rulemaking, with an erosion of the ability of state and local governments to make decisions appropriate for their particular circumstances.

I encourage readers to review the positive affirmations of Romney's economic policies, but I want to sharpen focus on a few points of my own:

• Obama's mercantilist policies (made in America stimulus policies, manipulating business taxes to favor domestic companies, inciting trade wars (e.g., bragging about nearly doubling trade complaints against Chinese products))
• government ownership, domination, or takeover of market segments (mortgage and college loans, health care, auto company, AIG or GSE holdings)
• government meddling in the economy (subsidies, loan/deposit/other guarantees, managed crony bankruptcies, "too big to fail", tax credits, tax expenditures, etc.)
• government cost-shifting (price setting for goods or services (e.g., health care), regulations, mandates, etc.)
• morally hazardous policies (generosity and tenure of high transfer payments, disincentives to work (e.g., loss of generous federal benefits), inadequate vesting of consumers in spending decisions (e.g., little if any out-of-pocket costs))

Romney Needs to Fix His Campaign NOW

I have no idea how a smart person like Romney who has probably been planning for a Presidential run over the past 6 years, once he is the presumptive nominee, seems so utterly unprepared to go up against one of the weakest Presidents in US history! Romney should be up by 15 points in the polls. I keep on giving free advice (not that the Romney campaign has ever read a word or does any good...). If Romney looks like he's blowing his election, I'll shift my support in this blog to Gary Johnson. 

• WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, ROMNEY?  This is getting to be utterly absurd. Romney doesn't seem to have a "quick response" team; he's letting the Obama campaign define him, he gets into one unforced gaffe or faux pas (e.g., the jet ski thing) after another, he keeps whining about negative stuff. GIVE ME A BREAK! His unfavorable rating is going up because of the Obama ads--this is like he's trying to copy the McCain's 2008 losing campaign strategy! I mean, did the people running the Romney campaign notice what the unpopular Blago did to win reelection in 2006 against Topinka? I can only hope that he's biding his time to launch some devastating attack that puts the Obama campaign on the defensive. It better be something more than reminding people of what a lousy President Obama has been. It has to be something new or unexpected. The problem for Romney is that Obama is likable and all he has to do is play for a tie: he has the advantage of incumbency. He can exploit political uncertainty about Romney. Romney has been put on the defensive all summer, and he seems totally unprepared for it, although it's been the closest thing to a certainty there is in politics--Obama knows that he can't win on the economy--which leaves the obvious negative campaign. Romney is doing the one thing he can't afford to do--act defensively. If the Romney campaign has something negative on Obama that we don't already know, now's the time to bring it up. In the meanwhile, it's time to come forward with a positive agenda and let Paul Ryan battle the negative stuff. What's important is that Mitt Romney appears Presidential and unfazed by the Obama gutter campaign. It should be like water off a duck's back. If I was Romney, I would come out every day and repeat: "Obama is losing: I know it, he knows it, everyone knows it. He is running a campaign unworthy of an American President; it's desperate, and it's not going to work. He can't win election on the merits of his record. He has blamed George Bush; he has blamed Paul Ryan, and now he's coming after me. Obama isn't man enough to stand on his own record, on his own two feet; he can feel the Presidency slipping from his fingers, and he knows that there's not a damn thing he can do about it. His only solution is to spend money that he doesn't have; he's been doing that for 4 years now, and it hasn't worked. Does he really believe that the American people are going to continue to fall for the same old song?"
• Romney, Explain the Paul Ryan Pick. When I wrote my quick take on Romney-Ryan over the weekend, I did express some reservations and explicitly noted that Paul Ryan comes with baggage. How much, I didn't know. And then USA Today/Gallup came up with a poll that show Ryan to be a net negative (fair/poor: 42%) over excellent/good (39%)  Ryan is very popular with the base--but it seems that Ryan is still carrying heavy negatives from the Mediscare campaign against him ("Grandma over the cliff"). I've got two questions for Romney: first, I understand how Ryan rallies the base, but how does Ryan help Romney with moderate/independents, especially in the battleground states (beyond Wisconsin)? Wasn't that a consideration? Did he know about the 42% fair/poor? If so, why did he pick Ryan anyway? Second, why would Romney want to introduce a long-term entitlement problem like Medicare into the campaign, especially since the Democrats won a House seat or two over Ryan's plan? I worry that the Democrats think Romney has given them the one target they hoped for: fighting over what happens in 2023 over Medicare versus 2013 in the White House. Did Romney give away the economy question like McCain's selection of Palin gave away the experience argument?
• Do Something About Taxes. I personally don't care about Romney's income or taxes; it doesn't mean squat to me. Romney had to know the question was coming. What I would do is release an abridged form of tax returns including adjusted income and tax payment since Romney's resignation from Bain Capital. Explain what portion is attributed to any blind trust. I think it's stupid--I know it wouldn't be an issue except Obama's only chance in this election is to make Romney the issue. But you have to change the topic. We should not be spending weeks talking about tax returns. 
• Start Showing the Softer, Positive Side of Romney. I've mentioned before: Romney needs to connect with voters; you do this by talking about yourself sharing experiences with voters. This is a no-brainer: for example, Romney could talk about the first time he found out that he was going to be a dad: what he felt like holding his own son for the first time, what he thought about his son's future, the son's first ballgame, graduation, holding his first grandchild. A favorite Father's Day gift. Lessons he learned about being a Dad. What drew him back to politics when he could have gone on making millions of dollars in the private sector. If he was elected President, what would he like historians to say about his Presidency? What music does he listen to? What do his grandkids call him?

I would also have some spots that acknowledge tough times and how bad policies have prolonged them. I would then go on express confidence in a stronger future, one where government has a more limited role and gives the free market an opportunity to grow and flourish. In fact, and I hope Romney's campaign is smart enough to have thought of this, given Clint Eastwood's famous Super Bowl ad and his recent endorsement of Romney, I would hope they could have Clint do a similar spot talking about a future where people are free of government meddling, where businesses thrive and hire new workers.

The Day After Left-Handers' Day

The percentage of left-handedness in the population varies by the studies; I think I've seen a Scientific American figure at the upper end of 15% of the population; most of the numbers I've seen peg it at roughly 8-10% of the population; males are more likely to be left-handed. Asian countries with their conformist cultures report significantly lower percentages.

As the oldest of 7, I was the only one in my immediate family, although ironically and coincidentally my two younger goddaughters/nieces are/were left-handed. I don't recall any pressure from parents, teachers, etc., to switch hands. I usually hand-write in a classic hook (see below). Inevitably after my exams in high school and college, I would come aware with the left edge (pinky-side) of my hand deeply stained by ink (and/or pencil lead). By the end of my second full day of written comprehensive exams and dozens of pages at UH, I also had severe hand cramps.

There are a few advantages to being left-handed; at least for left-handed drivers, it's easier to deal with manual tollbooths. I've mentioned on numerous occasions some of the handedness issues in sports. I can throw a baseball with each hand (which came in handy when I would play a pickup game without my glove); curiously I've always thrown a football with my right hand and batted right in baseball.

From a standpoint of cognitive differences, my first IT job involved teaching myself APL, a mathematically-notated interpretive computer language that executes from right to left (versus other languages, like COBOL)--well enough to attract an offer from the Houston branch office of the leading APL timesharing vendor within a year. (The insurance company I worked for had failed training internal resources.) While working on my first Master's (in math), I found that I was competitively more adept at backwards solutions. I've made out-of-the-box diagnoses and solutions.

I'll reprise a few examples possibly mentioned in earlier posts:

• On a Wisconsin county upgrade project, I got some very unusual Oracle errors on the test server I had never seen before. I called the county Unix administrator and insisted that there was a hardware problem. At first he was in a state of denial, but  he showed up a few hours later and rebooted the server; the RAID storage unit storing the database "lost" all stored data. 
• I was at a client site and a key Oracle EBS (ERP software) driver patch failed with an unprecedented compile error. The environmental database character set variable was set correctly, but I intuitively didn't believe it; I checked the database and verified that the database was using an unsupported (for EBS) default character set. It turned out that the client had earlier hired a contractor (without Oracle EBS experience) to migrate the database between servers; he recreated the database in the process without explicitly specifying the correct character set. (He had left a trail of his scripts, and I verified the database creation script.)
• A colleague, without thinking about what he was saying, suggested to the backup Unix administrator in the middle of a business day that a Unix error the administrator was seeing would go away on system reboot. The junior administrator, without knowing about necessary internal approval processes, rebooted the server which crashed the SAP (ERP) system. The database had problems coming up giving error messages of the nature "now I see it...now I don't". I knew that the company used (third-party) Veritas mirroring software in laying out the database, but I had not gotten training; I suspected that the crash somehow corrupted the mirrors which had to be rebuilt. I had my trained colleague go into the software and asked if he could give me a graphical overview. I could see effectively a bank of lights, slowly coming on one at a time. I extrapolated and concluded (spot on) that the database would be ready to come up in 3.5 hours.
• I applied an Oracle patch and got a glaring error. I called Oracle Tech Support and told the support analyst that he would find a one-off patch for exactly the problem I experienced. The analyst freaked out when he found the patch exactly as I predicted: how did I know? The earlier patch was not new, and the error was serious: prior clients must have reported the issue.
• The accounting manager found that categories of assets came up under "old" (green screen) Oracle Apps (EBS), but not under "new" (GUI) Oracle Apps (which she falsely attributed to my having implemented "rogue" Oracle patches). I discovered that  the problem was due to some developers whom implemented Fixed Assets 5 years earlier cutting corners: instead of using standard application processes to set up asset subcategories (maybe a few minutes of busy work), they directly loaded subcategory records to product tables (with subcategory names in mixed case, i.e., 'None' instead of 'NONE'), violating Oracle's software support agreement. [I knew that the developers did this because Oracle tags records through internally generated records, and the subcategory records showed up as untagged.  Oracle's standard processes behind the scenes converted subcategory names to upper case. Functionality worked as expected with the developers' workaround under the old interface.]  Under the new interface, Oracle code searched for standard upper-case subcategories and came up empty. I devised, tested and implemented a fix for the developers' short-sighted blunder, which saved the company $10K in consulting fees and loss of the ERP database for 2 weeks.
• In my last gig for a university software ERP company in 2008, I flew to a Catholic university north of LAX. [My normal job responsibilities included installing and training an operational data store infrastructure (an interim solution to a data warehouse). ODS was a more user-friendly version of the university's ERP database that was updated nightly with accumulated daily changes. This process normally took an hour, but the university reported that it was really taking 30 hours.] This was an unusual gig, because my supervisor had done the installation and training at the university several months earlier. The university had been working with my employer's tech support unit for 6 months, unable to resolve the issue. For some reason, the company sent me to the client. At some point I was in contact with the developer whom mentioned that they had had a performance problem sometime earlier but they published a patch. The client insisted they had applied the performance patch. At some point, I'm looking at dll's and suddenly realize that an archived (renamed) dll file was the same size as the dll in the performance patch. I renamed the dll files and verified the fix.

These example fixes were out-of-the-box because I would never take an unauthorized shortcut with a million-dollar integrated piece of software; I would not back out a performance patch in a production environment; I would never write a database creation/migration script (with one-time clauses) on the fly and/or operating off defaults; I would never effectively pull the plug on a database server in the middle of a business day. So I've had to deal with the consequences of clients or co-workers making unusual mistakes; as a left-hander, I think I'm better able to perceive a gestalt of a scenario and approach problem solution in a more nonlinear manner.

I could cite several other examples of nonlinear thinking processes as well. I have a knack for reading other people's programs; in my last APL position, a colleague couldn't remember what he did to fix a program two weeks earlier and asked me for help. I knew Jeff's coding style, located and read the fix and could infer what must have motivated the fix. I've mentioned in an earlier post (this really happened) how one of my UWM students had been spooked when he showed up at my office for the first time, and I simply said something like "4:30 PM tomorrow".  He said something like, "How did you know what I was going to ask?" I said, "You came to ask me when the test data for the current assignment would  be available, right?" No, I don't have telepathic powers; I just knew. (Now imagine being in a group situation, where you know what must be done...)



Some interesting facts/studies about left-handers:

• "According to research published in the American Journal of Psychology, there is some evidence that left-handed people have the upper hand in at least one creative facet — they’re better at divergent thinking, a method of idea generation that explores many possible solutions."
• "Despite their minority status, lefties are more likely to excel in music, mathematics and athletics, according to studies." ;   "Lefties tended to find advantages and be drawn to careers in the arts, music, sports, and information technology fields."; 1 of every 4 Apollo astronauts; up to 40% of top tennis players; "Left-handers are also overrepresented among chess experts, architects, artists, applied mathematicians, and the extremely bright end of the intelligence spectrum."
• "20% of Mensa (high IQ) members are left-handed; 4 of 5 original Mac designers were lefties; left-handed college graduates are up to 26% wealthier.";  "Better at 3D perception and thinking"
• "Left-handers are often discriminated against by social, educational, and religious institutions. At various times in history, left-handedness has been seen as many things: a nasty habit, a mark of the devil, a sign of neurosis, rebellion, criminality, and homosexuality. The right hand is mentioned positively 100 times in the Bible, while the left hand is mentioned only 25 times, all negatively. The Oxford English Dictionary defines left-handed as meaning crippled, defective, awkward, clumsy, inapt, characterized by underhanded dealings, ambiguous, doubtful, questionable, ill-omened, inauspicious, and illegitimate."
• "Thanks to the unique structure of the brain for left-handed people, certain skills like language processing and sensory-data processing might actually be working in both halves, as opposed to just one -- making leftys better at multitasking than rightys."
• "Research reveals that people who are left-handed do not use the sequential processing style to disseminate information, like their right-handed colleagues. Instead, they are good at applying themselves to multiple tasks with the help of the synthesis method of breaking down information and finding a solution."
• "A 2006 study in the journal Neuropsychology proposed that those with left-hand dominance might process multiple stimuli more quickly than right-handed people."
• William Hopkins, a psychologist at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center, suggests that left-handed people make up the extremes of the population. He explained to ABC News, "The anomaly is left-handed people make up the extremely gifted and the extremely compromise. The rest of us make up the middle ground."

NB: This isn't to say that everything about being left-handed is rosy. Left-handers on average have a shorter lifetime and experience disproportionate mental illnesses, alcoholism, etc. 

List of U.S. presidents by handedness since 1929 (Sources:^[1][2][3])

President	Term	Handedness
Herbert Hoover	1929–1933	Left-handed
Franklin D. Roosevelt	1933–1945	Right-handed
Harry S. Truman	1945–1953	Left-handed[4]
Dwight D. Eisenhower	1953–1961	Right-handed
John F. Kennedy	1961–1963	Right-handed
Lyndon B. Johnson	1963–1969	Right-handed
Richard Nixon	1969–1974	Right-handed
Gerald Ford	1974–1977	Left-handed
Jimmy Carter	1977–1981	Right-handed
Ronald Reagan	1981–1989	Ambidextrous
George H. W. Bush	1989–1993	Left-handed
Bill Clinton	1993–2001	Left-handed
George W. Bush	2001–2009	Right-handed
Barack Obama	2009–present	Left-handed

Other prominent left-handed Presidential candidates: Ross Perot, John McCain, Bob Dole, Steve Forbes. Note the elections of 1992, 1996, and 2008 involved battles of the lefties. Ronald Reagan was born left-handed but changed primary hands in primary school. Dole switched hands because of a war injury.

Celebrity left-handers include: Lady Gaga, Cary Grant,  Beethoven, Aristotle, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Babe Ruth, Tom Cruise, Michelangelo,  British royal family (Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and Prince William), Jay Leno, David Letterman, Henry Ford, Thomas Jefferson, Julius Caesar,  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, publisher Steve Forbes, Tina Fey, Mark Twain, Céline Dion, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Ty Cobb, Raphael, Julia Roberts, Gandhi, Bob Dylan, Charlie Chaplin, Whoopie Goldberg, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, OJ prosecutor Marcia Clark, Justin Bieber, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, rapper Eminem, Nicole Kidman, Tim Allen, Caroline Kennedy, Scarlett Johansson, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Frankie Valli, "Our Day Will Come"