Sunday Reads

Good Morning!!!

I’ve always been fascinated with robots.  I’m not sure how it got started.  It may have been the first time may grandparents took me to Disneyland to see the Lincoln speech.  I found this article on robots and shinwakan at The Economist and it’s fascinating!!  There’s evidently a threshold we have for animation and robots for how real they should look.  It’s called “the uncanny valley” and evidently the best example of animation that’s over board and creepy is “The Polar Express“. Robot scientists are trying to learn how to avoid “the uncanny valley” when working on their creations.

The idea of the uncanny valley was originally proposed by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, in 1970. Though he had no hard data, his intuition was that increasing humanness in a robot was positive only up to a certain point. Dr Mori drew a graph (see chart) with “human-likeness” on the horizontal axis and a quality he called shinwakan (variously translated as “familiarity” and “comfort level”) on the vertical one. As an object or image looks and behaves more like a human, the viewer’s level of shinwakan increases. Beyond a certain point, however, the not-quite-human object strikes people as creepy, and shinwakan drops. This is the uncanny valley. Only when the object becomes almost indistinguishable from a human does shinwakan increase again.

The horror stories from TSA pat-downs continue. This one is awful as it involves a bladder cancer survivor whose pat down left him soaked in urine after the pat-down punctured his urostomy bag.  Sixty-one year old Thomas Sawyer is a retired special education teacher that recounted his tale to msnbc.

“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”

The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”

Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.

“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.

The Florida Sun Sentinel reports that you can possibly be fined $11,000 or arrested if you refuse a nudie scan or grope session.  Evidently, you give your consent to both should you decide to fly.  At least that’s what the TSA is saying.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also will not be permitted to simply leave the airport.

That person will have to remain on the premises to be questioned by the TSA and possibly by local law enforcement. Anyone refusing faces fines up to $11,000 and possible arrest.
“Once a person submits to the screening process, they can not just decide to leave that process,” says Sari Koshetz, regional TSA spokesperson, based in Miami.

Koshetz said such passengers would be questioned “until it is determined that they don’t pose a threat” to the public.

Well, that is unless your are John Boehner, Speaker-Elect. Then, you can wave them off and tell every one else to eat cake.  His Oranginess is evidently above the rest of us.  Feeling better about your status in the Banana Republic now?

As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Ronald Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. There was no waiting for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the identification-checking agents, the metal detectors and the body scanners, and whisked directly to the gate.

The Republican leader, who will become the second person in line to assume the presidency after the new Congress convenes in January, took great pride after the midterm elections in declaring his man-of-the-people plans to travel home as other Americans do. In a time of economic difficulty, it was a not-so-subtle dig at Ms. Pelosi, who has access to a military jet large enough to avoid refueling for her flights home to San Francisco.

But he is not giving up all the perquisites of power.

Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bag and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal on Friday. Among the travelers not invited to bypass the security line was Representative Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida, who lost his re-election bid two weeks ago.

Only Congressional leaders or members of Congress with armed security details are allowed to go around security. The same privilege is afforded to governors and cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers.

Prime U.S. Mortgage Foreclosures have hit a record high amid increased reports of irregularities in mortgage processing by originator Country Wide.  What a horrible growth industry!  The reason?  High, prolonged unemployment.  Good thing we’re focused on the right priorities! Let’s see, I did mention the obsession with extending tax cuts for the very rich, right?  Oh, right, I do that right after this.

Foreclosures on prime fixed-rate mortgages in the U.S. jumped to a record in the third quarter as unemployment strained household budgets of the most creditworthy borrowers.

The inventory of homes in foreclosure financed by prime fixed-rate loans rose to 2.45 percent from 2.36 percent in the previous three months, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report today. New foreclosures rose to 0.93 percent from 0.71 percent. Both numbers were the highest in the 12 years since the Washington-based trade group started tracking the categories.

Homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments as job cuts make it difficult for them to cover their bills, said Michael Fratantoni, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s vice president of research and economics. The unemployment rate has stayed above 9 percent for 18 consecutive months, the longest stretch since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The increase in these plain-vanilla type of loans to the highest numbers ever show us it really is being driven by the economic environment,” Fratantoni said in a telephone interview. “It’s not going to turn around until we get more significant job growth.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has gone on record calling for President Obama to stand up to Republican demands to extend the tax cuts to wealthiest Americans. Will Democrats finally show some spine now that they’ve lost their supermajority?

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Friday, Brown said Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker-elect John Boehner (R-Ohio) have shown they have no interest in anything but the failure of the Obama administration, which is why he shouldn’t make major concessions to them on the tax cuts.

Brown argued GOP leaders have done nothing but say no to President Obama since the day after his inauguration despite his much larger electoral victory, which is why the Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to respond in kind.

“I’m not saying no to the Republicans, but I’m also not — I’m also saying we’re not going to do more tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation of Wall Street, more job-killing outsourcing free trade agreements,” Brown said. “Those things don’t work for the American public. They don’t work in Cleveland or Toledo or Mansfield or Dayton, and they don’t work for the whole country.”

You’ve probably heard that the Celtic Tiger is in trouble.  Thought I’d share the front page of the Irish Star with you to put a smile one your face.  No smiling Irish eyes for Irish banksters–sorry, wanker banker buddies–or gouger-pols these days.  And you thought we were disgusted with our lot?  The Star is known for being a lot like New Orleans Levees.  They don’t hold anything back !!

Brad DeLong is taking aim at the Republican detractors of Ben Bernanke. He does so by explaining some of the rationale behind the QE2.  Oh, and he doesn’t have to use cute little talking cartoon characters to bedazzle you either.  This is also an extension to the Paul Krugman op-ed and the Collender article I wrote about last night in a thread on economic sabotage by republicans. DeLong appears to be considering a similar vein of thought.  That is, Republicans are objecting to everything that will improve the economy.

Indeed, it is now clear that the right-wing objection to the policies of the Obama administration was not an objection to fiscal policy as an inappropriate policy modality for stabilizing nominal spending. It was, instead, an objection to the very idea that the government should try to serve as a stabilizing macroeconomic balance wheel.

The flow of economy-wide spending is low. Thus Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is moving to boost the flow. It is doing so by changing the mix of privately-held assets as it buys government bonds that pay interest in exchange for for cash that does not.

That is totally standard.

There is only slightly nonstandard thing. The bonds that pay interest the Fed is buying are not the usual three-month Treasury bills but seven-year Treasury notes instead. The Federal Reserve has to do this, because those are the shortest-duration Treasury bonds that now pay interest. It cannot reduce short-term interest rates below zero, and so it is attempting via this policy of “quantitative easing” to reduce longer-term interest rates.

And the right wing objects to this.

I really cannot figure out why the Republicans are making such an issue out of this. They either don’t understand it or they are purposefully trying to create  subterfuge so they can stop any attempt to heal the economic woes of the country.  This makes no sense to me.

One of the most striking covers of The National Geographic was the one with  a young Afghani girl with piercing green eyes.  The National Geographic has a feature on Afghan Women with lots of pictures in a piece they’ve called “Veiled Rebellion”.  It’s worth a look and a read.

The Afghan Parliament recently drafted a law intended to eliminate violence against women, who are beginning to reject old cultural practices and assert themselves in public and in private. I went to the Kabul home of Sahera Sharif, a Pashtun and the first female member of parliament from Khost. “No one knew a woman could put up campaign photos and posters on the walls in Khost—men didn’t allow women to even have jobs in Khost,” she said.

As a girl, Sharif stood up to her father, a conservative mullah, locking herself in a closet until he allowed her to go to school. She lived through the civil war between competing mujahideen groups, who ravaged Kabul before the Taliban conquest in 1996. She witnessed unimaginable cruelty and many deaths. “Much of the violence and cruelty you see now,” Sharif said, “is because people are crazy from all these wars.”

After the Taliban fell in December 2001, Sharif started a radio station to educate women about hygiene and basic health. More radically, she volunteered to teach at the university in Khost (a first there). She took off her burka (another first) and stood before the male students teaching them psychology. They blushed. And so she began to reeducate them.

And so the process of knowledge and change begins… with an exchange between one person and another.

[MABlue’s Sunday picks]
This is getting personal: Terrorists seem to “hate me for my freedoms” everywhere I happen to be.
Terrorists Believed to Be Planning Attack in Berlin

It would be an attack on the very heart of democracy. SPIEGEL has learned that terrorists may have been planning an attack on the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Berlin. Two suspected culprits are already believed to be in Berlin.

That is really where I live. The Bundeskanzleramt(German Chancellery) and the Amt des Bundespräsidenten(German President Offices) are also in the same area. I still believe this is the safest spot in the city, along with the area in the vicinity of the US Embassy.
So far, Germans have remained calm, which is good to see.

Even with all the progress we have made, there is still so much we don’t understand about the human body.
Doctors Mystified by Case of World’s Thinnest Woman

Texas native Lizzie Velasquez, 21, is thinner than anyone thought possible. She spends her days wolfing down burgers, fries and cake, consuming more than three times the normal calorie requirements. Doctors can’t explain how she can be so underweight and still alive.

Here are some people Obama is certainly not going to listen to:
Millionaires to Obama: Tax us

More than 40 of the nation’s millionaires have joined Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength to ask President Obama to discontinue the tax breaks established for them during the Bush administration, as Salon reports.

“For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled,” their website states. “We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more.”

For Heaven’s sake! What is it with Obama constantly adopting right-wing myths and revisionism and then propagating them? Many observers deplored this inclination during the campaign of  2008, but were quickly dismissed. However, that attitude hasn’t changed. Maybe there’s a something more to the madness. Krugman has the latest:
FDR, Reagan, and Obama

Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling — because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation — but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying

We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear.

I’m sure BostonBoomer will spend the entire day playing this game.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?