W-Shaped Recession and Urban Development

Megan McArdle at The Atlantic is calling attention to the possibility that Greece is the trigger to drag us all into the second wave of the "W-Shaped Recession", the way there's often a second dip before a full-on recovery. It's definitely something you need to hedge against, if you haven't already.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/greece-deja-vu-all-over-again/39686/

In other news, Tim Logan at The Big Money says that Prof Richard Florida, the guy who invented the "Creative Class Thesis", is undermining his own thesis in his new book, The Great Reset. Florida's new idea in this book is that, we need to help kick people out of under-performing cities such as Rust Belt, so that they can go to where the jobs are. Which is counter to his "Build it and they will come" thesis of revitalizing the downtown club scene.
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/hey-wait-minute/2010/04/27/creative-class-dismissed?page=full

It's great to see Florida acknowledging his own mistake. I've always thought that he was mistaking the symptom for the cause. Art is a luxury good, as Prof Carroll Quigley would say. You have to have rich people around to consume luxury goods, including art. Artists thrive because the city has plenty of jobs and rich people, not that artists bring jobs into a city. For a city to grow, you need jobs, a reason for people to go there. That seems to be a foreign idea to Florida and his supporters, who don't have to work for a living.

Plus, there are several variations on the "creative class" idea, some of which include engineers, others purely art. Despite the artistic element of architecture and industrial design, applied science has little to do with art. In the first place, engineering can create jobs, whereas art is kind of a service industry. It's dangerous when the urban developer confuse the two.

The US Army cancelled Non-Line-Of-Sight-Launch-Station, their new smart missile system. Unfortunately, that has not erased the precision short-range strike/recon requirement from the books. I've always thought that NLOS-LS was kind of a waste, where you have this big box that you toss out afterwards. Plus how are you going to manhandle it into position?

The strike requirement, you can substitute with precision mortars. It's long past due that the Army acquire a precision mortar munition, when the Brits and Scandinavians already do. A laser-guided mortar will be great.

For the recon requirement, perhaps we will resurrect the fiber-optic guidance technology. You can even string the fiber behind mortar bombs as they fly off.

E, Marriage, & Stock Markets

Meghan McArdle wrote her own book review on Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him". McArdle brought up the inherent game theory aspect of the dating jungle. Indeed, the current dating system is quite inefficient at connecting people together in a long lasting way.
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/04/reader-marry-him/39342/

As I've been reading Caroll Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations, I have to wonder perhaps that the Western dating scene has institutionalized. That the combination of fairy tale endings and the sexual liberation has transformed the instrument of dating, as a way to interview suitors, into an institution more concerned with dating for its own sake.

As a side note, the book is fantastic, and it has definitely transformed the way I look at history and current events.

Anyway, when I went to a math camp, I saw a population problem that has some bearing on this dating business. Readers perhaps will find this of use in their own lives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College_Summer_Studies_in_Mathematics

Assume that the dating population is stochastic, meaning that you will, at random, meet dating prospects who are of random quality. The problem is that you have no pre-existing basis to judge your boy/girlfriends: Is s/he sufficiently good enough to settle with? How do you know if s/he is the best you can do?

It turns out that, given a time range when you plan to date, by time 1/e, you will have met enough of the population to know the upper and lower bounds of the population. By time 1/e, you have a good enough idea to know what "great" looks like, and to settle with the next best guy/girl that comes along. At age 22.4 [for range 18 to 30], you will have enough data history to know what is the best you can get.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)

So at age 21 to 23 [23 is using another age range], you need to sit down and seriously compare your internal romantic ideal versus the past boy/girlfriends you've had, just so you don't keep pining for that Disney prince/princess to come along.

This particular solution assumes that dating and pickup skills do not improve, which is not necessarily the case. But it is a good metric.

The number 1/e is applicable for other random walk problems as well. For example, assume that the stock market is a random walk, and that you need to invest $5,000 into the stock market every year [aka, your IRA contribution]. If you want to time the market, you want to know when is a great low-point to plunk your money into the market. Well, the 1/e works here, too. Assume 12 months, by April 12th, you will know what's the likely lower bound of the market. The next time the market crosses that lower bound, you know that the opportunity has arrived.

Team Sports Are Bad (Kind of)

This morning, I saw Bill Sweetman's response to the "Mission Readiness"'s report that obesity is endangering national secuirty. Sweetman lambasted school intramural sports program as one prime factor in spawning the national obesity trend, among others.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a361068fd-c607-400c-a561-df7f8d6221e8&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest

This is an interesting take, especially since I've been reading Caroll Quigley's The Evolution of Civilizations. Prof Quigley had a similar observation on the evolution of American football as an institution. Quigley described football originating as an impromptu intramural program to keep students exercising. Over time, football naturally became an organized club sport and spectator-funded as people focused on winning the game against other groups of people (clubs, colleges, cities, etc.) The natural institutionalization of American football led to the NFL and NCAA today, where the athletes are getting more exercise than they need, while the rest of us who need the exercise are, instead, watching from the stands, sitting down and converting beer into calories. The institutionalization of football has made football an abject failure at achieving its original purpose: Instilling habits of exercise among the youths of this country. Prof Quigley arrived at this conclusion back in 1961. He saw all the other college sports programs in the same light, but football and basketball were the most prominent offenders.
http://www.amazon.com/EVOLUTION-CIVILIZATIONS-Carroll-Quigley/dp/0913966576/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271871177&sr=1-3

Organized team sports definitely are not helpful in promoting general athleticism among the general population, speaking as an uncoordinated nerd myself :) By its very nature, team sports seek to exclude. The very structure of a tournament competition incentivizes the teams to seek the best players, and exclude the general peons.

It is a problem found in most organized competitions. Math teams and Academic Decathlon, for example, both seek to promote scholastic skills among the student population. However, the team competition format discourages the less practiced students from participating. The tournament format of Academic Decathlon additionally leaves most participating school teams with little to do for much of the year. [Academic Decathlon has a regional meet in Nov, a state meet in Jan/Feb, and a national meet in Apr/May. One to two teams per state go on to national.]
http://www.usad.org/

At this point, though, organized team sports are here to stay. With the entrenched institutions and interests of football, basketball, et al, in the US and around the world, reform is near impossible. As Prof Quigley would say, we'll have to try circumvention. The Japanese morning calisthenics program, or the Chinese morning Taichi, both look pretty good from here.

"Business Education": Advice to Aspiring Undergraduates

Newsweek is noting the declining enrollment in liberal arts program at the mid- and lower-tier colleges around the US, in the midst of this recession. Students are majoring in more "marketable" fields to prepare for a job afterwards.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/235894?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29

Well, that sounds like a nice story, but it makes you wonder about all of those alumnis: How did they get their own jobs back in the day? Were companies just not paying attention?

Anyway, the author notes that the students were switching from traditional BA fields into Bachelor of Science fields or business. This seems like a bogus trend, as Jack Shaeffer of Slate would say. Students have been flocking to the business majors for years. Most people at these colleges know that the arts are not business. That schools are cutting the arts programs are more the result of a declining endowment, rather than a new found trend. Schools are confronting the reality that they have to cut costs, such as the relatively expensive arts programs.

As I previously wrote about the service academies, the Bachelor of Science program, for non-science/engineering fields, are inadequately rigorous for the scientific theories we employ. The BS, with its shallow calculus and science requirements, give the students the illusion that the world is deterministic and Newtonian, whereas science and engineering have moved past deterministic calculus and into differential equations. The real world is full of equations that we cannot solve explicitly, but only approximate with computers.

So in general the BS program does not give its students a good appreciation of the complex world we live in. Unless we step up the requirements of the BS program with at least 2 more classes inlcuding differential equations.

That gets to another problem in the American college education, the inadequate math skills of the American students. The calculator is not a substitute for arithematic skills, which builds the foundation for higher level math skills. But I probably should save that for another day.

We also have this expanding corps of business undergraduates. Personally, I think business undergraduates are not getting their money's worth, except for the accounting majors. Business programs attempt to treat all businesses the same, that there are universal expertise you can apply to all industries. That theory of universal expertise is not universally accepted; just witness all those consultants who specialize in particular industries. If a generalist consultant could serve all industries, there would not be a market for all these specialist consultants.

This is partially related to the Generalist vs Specialist debate, whether generalists' universal truths are more useful than the nuanced knowledge of the specialists. For the business students, their problem is that they have no grounding for this amorphous universal principles they are learning. For a program that's supposed to be real-world skills, the students are ironically learning theories without real-world experience or skills to ground the application. Students end up practicing the skill of salesmanship: most business plans end up focusing on retail, selling a product mano-a-mano.

I guess that's kind of fair, as Americans are supposed to be the best salesmen, that their business students end up practicing sales skills.

A revolution in the business undergraduate program would make the business program a double-major, that the student has to major in a field outside of the business school. For example, marketing students should double major in visual art or psychology. Management could major in history or economics. They could even major in the sciences or engineering, if they feel up to it. That second major will give students some in-depth insight to back up the broad overview they are learning.

The business students might complain that is too much work. [As in they shouldn't work hard?] My answer is, if they are going to work in the retail world, as many Americans do, do they really need that business degree right now? Why is it that a high school education has not prepared them to manage that first level of business operations? It is not like business math teaches a subject beyond Algebra 2. Writing a business plan is a college class, but does it require a college graduate to write the plan?

That segues into the next subject: jobs and college education. College is an inefficient way to figure out what you should be doing. It is expensive. A full-time student is incapable of working above subsistence level, and he is piling on debt on top of that. In America, it is easy to work part-time to be self-sustaining [at least before the recession.] Once you take care of food and shelter, you can spend the rest of your day figuring out what you want to do. At least you're not being a burden on society by frittering away financial aid dollars.

The subject of future jobs can take up a whole book, so I will elaborate later. However, there are three key trends you need to pay attention to. First, the US Dollar will depreciate quickly in the near future, relative to other currencies. As the world becomes more multi-polar, other currencies will replace the US Dollar as the reserve currency. Not to mention the fiscal health of the US, although the rest of the world is not much better. Secondly, distributed manufacturing will be more wide-spread, pushed downstream to the retail level. Like food preparation, the other physical retail sectors will take on more manufacturing at the store level to be more responsive to consumer needs. It is also a requirement to compete against internet retail, by allowing the customers to receive products faster. Thirdly, oil will become more expensive in the US, as the Dollar debase. Transportation cost will rise, making domestic manufacturing, and local manufacturing, more attractive. How much production finishing should be done at the retail level will be the reigning business question for the next 50 years.

As an example, clothes fitting is one manufacturing activity still done at the physical store. The electronic installation and software configuration at the user level is another "manufacturing" activity that's keeping electricians and computer geeks working today. Sysco and the restaurant industry is all about production finishing. Ebay is full of vendors selling electronic parts that the users, or the enterprising local merchant, can assemble into finished products. That is a job opportunity that you can get into, whether you're recently unemployed or thinking about college.

Iraqi Elections and Political Puppetry

The Iraqi election results are coming out soon. The fact that almost no one is happy with the results means that it is probably legitimate. It's funny that Maliki is crying foul about "manipulations of voter results", considering that he is the sitting prime minister and is government personified.

One notable subject from Iraq is the meme of political puppetry in a democracy. America and some Iraqis consider several politicians to be Iranian puppets: Maliki, Sadr, Chalabi, most of SCIRI and Dawa. Similarly, the Iranians and some Iraqi Shiites consider Allawi to be an American puppet. Given the popular perception, how well do puppets perform in a democracy? In Iraq we find a great case study on this subject.

In a democracy, puppets have constraints on their behavior, because they have to get re-elected. They cannot run too far ahead of the popular will in favoring their patrons. Plus there is the natural checks and balances in a democratic system [hopefully]. [Of course we have the recent spectacle in the US where the Democrats are committing political near-suicides to pass healthcare reform. If a politician does not mind a political suicide, then most constraints disappear.]

So to get into a powerful position in a democracy, puppets have to first appeal to their domestic constituents. Having a foreign patron may help you get started on the political scene, but is of little help afterwards.

In a sense, Sadr is a failed Iranian investment in puppetry. Sadr's political party is a natural outgrowth of the network built by his father and family friends. As Nir Rosen documented in "In the Belly of the Green Bird", the party seems to be fully Iraqi. Sadr himself may be sympathetic to Iran, but he has little influence over the party his father built. The district chairmen and commanders are fully in charge of their local chapters.

The Iranian investment in puppetry also got bogged down in the Shiite political scene. The Iraqi insurgency is multi-faceted. In Baghdad and Anbar it almost completely followed the script of an ethnic cleansing. In the Shiite south, however, it was a class struggle: between the Najaf religious establishment/money class, and the underclass of Sadr city. We saw this played out again and again, in the battle of Najaf and the battle of Basra. Sadr's party represented the people of its namesake, while SCIRI and Dawa allied themselves with the Shiite upper class. SCIRI and Dawa seem to be more Iranian-influenced because their cadre trained in Iran before coming home. The Najaf upper class was also more favorable toward Iran because of Iranian tourists visiting Najaf. So SCIRI and Dawa were freer to execute Iranian commands.

So in this case, it is interesting to note that, while Sadr and SCIRI are in the same political coalition, Sadr candidates received far more votes than SCIRI ones. So in parliamentary politics Sadr party will be more dominant. SCIRI will probably split from Sadr in future elections to improve their fortune. Maliki is courting the Sadr bloc to form a coalition government, but readers need to remember that Maliki personally led the Iraqi Army to root out the Mahdi Militia in the 2008 battle of Basra. The bad blood is still there between the two. We'll see if Sadrists hate Maliki more than Allawi in the coming weeks.

The Tanker Drama Back To Square One

Northrop has decided not to bid for the tanker RFP, and EADS will not go it alone. So Boeing is now the de facto winner of the KC-X competition, as was the case nearly 10 years ago. France and Germany are crying foul and may punish the US for a narrow RFP, we'll see how that turns out. Some of the observers seem to have forgotten that this is merely the first stage of the USAF tanker replacement program. There are the KC-Y and KC-Z to come.

So France and Germany need to pace themselves on that protesting part. The KC-330 has never been a good replacement for the KC-135s; its performance more approximates the KC-10(KC-Y/Z?). The USAF is clearly interested in a wide-body tanker, they just screwed up their own acquisition program in pursuing the KC-330.

Still, I'm glad that we will start saving on the O&M money of maintaining the outdated KC-135s.

ETA: Formatting and links

Take Back Your Kilometer!

MAJ Ehrhart's paper, "Taking Back the Last Half Kilometer", has been making the rounds these past few days. It is an interesting paper on the tactical and technical deficiencies of the American and allied infantry in Afghanistan, using a 5.56mm carbine against enemy mortar attacks up to 2km away.

However, this is not a new problem. Mountain warfare experiences from WW2 and Indo-Pakistan wars have shown the necessity to engage enemy infantry beyond 500m. Some writers had warned, for example, that the US Marines reinforcing the Scandinavian flank during a Soviet invasion should bring the 7.62mm M-14 rifles with them to handle the mountainous terrain of Norway. For infantry warfare, there are two extremes: the close range (within 100m) of most infantry combat, and the long range (500m-1000m) requirements of mountain warfare.

To meet this combat requirement, the 6.8mm booster club would like to push the 6.8mm intermediate-intermediate cartridge onto the military. [Intermediate-intermediate because 5.56mm was originally sold as the intermediate cartridge.] They've been looking to get rid of the 5.56mm since its inception, and this is about as good a chance as they're going to get. The 6.5mm club is getting some airtime, too, but they're really too small compared to the 6.8mm club. However, due to the Army's historical foot-dragging on topics like this, this is not likely to happen. [Iraq was too close-quartered for their arguments to be effective, whereas our long war in Afghanistan will bring them many more instances of 5.56mm ineffectivenss.]

On the other hand, there are a couple of fixes we can implement fairly quickly, to meet this combat requirement of engaging enemies 500m to 1000m, with infantry squad weapons. The answers are the 40mm grenade and, surprise, the 5.56mm M-4 carbine.

Currently the 40x46mm unguided, low velocity grenade has a maximum range of 400m with an elevated trajectory. By putting a pair of pop-out fins and a laser seeker on the grenade, we can easily double the range of the grenade out to 800m. It's good timing, too, because the US Army just transitioned from the sliding breech M203 launcher to the swiveling breech M320 launcher. The M320 launcher can accommodate the increased length of the guidance package. Due to the low muzzle velocity of the grenade (76m/s), which is well-below that of common missiles, guidance integration should not be an issue. This development effort would take some time, but will be relatively fast due to the low technical risks involved. A smart grenade would be a "leap-ahead" technology the brass will love, so there will be few bureaucratic obstacles to its adoption. Long-term this grenade is the ideal solution to the mortar ambush scenario. The area effect of the grenade will easily suppress the insurgent mortar crews.

While we are waiting on the smart grenade, the infantry in the field can use their 5.56mm M-4 carbine to suppress the far-away enemy. But wait, you say, isn't the whole problem we're facing that 5.56x45mm cannot reach beyond 500m? Actually, the 5.56mm can go all the way out to 2,000m. The only problem is that you cannot aim it accurately beyond 500m, because the bullet is too light and will drift off course. Back in World War I, the bolt-action rifles all had sights that ranged out to 1,000m, even though few people can aim that far without scopes. [Even today, AK-47 sights can adjust out to 1,000m.] Back then, infantry often had to provide its own fire support, sometimes without help from artillery. The whole regiment would line up, adjust the sights out to 1km, then fire at that target together. The massed rifle fire would blanket that far away target with a rain of lead bullets. The mass fire compensates for the inaccuracy of the individual rifle and man at that distance. Similarly, the machine guns of the era had long range sight markings for indirect-fire, area suppressions. Machine guns were organized in batteries then, and they would mass arcing fire on targets kilometers away.

We can do the same thing today. A squad or two can mass their fire against the suspected insurgent position. A squad of M-4s can generate the fire volume of a WW1 battalion by aiming together. With a bit of range experimentation, you can easily figure out how to shoot out to 1km. I did a bit of calculation and I found that you probably need to elevate your muzzle by 0.28 degrees to shoot 1km. According to online ballistic calculators, you will need about a 1 degree elevation. So work with that and try it out. A bit of Kentucky windage in the field will get you close enough to the target to suppress them. A rain of steel and lead will make the insurgents think twice of mortaring you.

Of course, you still need to close with and assault the enemy. A squad can suppress the position while other squads maneuver to close the distance. You will need at least a squad to generate the fire volume to suppress out to 1km.

Some people will say that the 5.56mm cartridge does not have enough energy to kill a man at 1km. However, try standing out there, without a helmet, while bullets rain down around you. The 5.56mm still has enough energy to lodge inside your braincase at that distance.

So, write your Congresscritters to start this smart grenade program. In the meantime, start experimenting with the sights of your M-4 carbine. Your squad can still suppress that insurgent mortar team, despite what your training told you.

ETA: links and paragraph breaks