Challenge: Get Jobs Numbers in Real Time

E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post can be a bit Keith Olbermann in his rants, so read with a step back:
The Last Labor Day?

But he makes a great point: People too often view the stock market as the real measure of the economy. He notices that the President addresses it, that many news shows hold him and Congress accountable to it, and that many news stories treat a major turn in the stock market as though it were indicative of the entire economy.

He goes on to make the obvious point that this is not the case - the fact that less than 10% of the US population capable of seriously investing in the stock market are doing better or worse on average isn't very relevant to the economy as a whole. And if you take bubbles into account, the stock market can jump up and down with no relevance to the economy - it can even say things are going well when they're really falling apart.

What matters is employment as a whole - are people working, and what are they doing?

He points out that the stock market is used instead because it's available in real-time.

It seems ridiculous but I think he may have found a simple truth. Why DO we use the stock market, and not jobs numbers, as indicators of how the economy is doing? When we get stock numbers we can all check them in real-time, whether you're a citizen, reporter or the president: finance.google.com. But getting jobs numbers is a lot murkier, never real-time, and your access to those numbers varies based on where you work.

So it's time to pose a challenge to the American public. Who among us can build a real-time indicator for employment in the US?

Giving it some thought, the first step is reporting. The most obvious approach is to ask people to report they took or lost a job, but it's not likely to succeed. On the other hand, employers already do report in with several governmental agencies when they hire a worker. There's a significant amount of paperwork that generally has to be filed within a tight timeline of when the worker is hired. So there's your source of data.

The remaining steps are accessing it in aggregate, and offering it in real-time. What's the best way? Do we ask the Obama Administration to offer their existing numbers up over an API? Is there an existing database we can ask for read access to? What's the best way to do this?

Update:
Monthly isn't real-time, but Google has monthly US Employment in millions, and with a lag time of 2 years, the US population.

If you assume the US population is now 314 million, some math for August:
140 million employed / 314 million = 44.6% employed, or put another way, 55.4% of the population of the US does not work.

There's a pointless number provided by the US Dept of Labor on the size of the Labor Force, but they don't count those not actively looking for work/those who have given up, which is ridiculous. Not a useful statistic. If you did use that number you'd get what you occasionally hear on the news: 9% unemployment, or put another way, of the <50% of the US that seeks work, 9% of those aren't finding jobs.

Overlearning the Game

A good article on politics and corruption:

http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem

Short on proposed solutions. Here are two:

1. The Severe/Ben Franklin approach: The founding fathers were in a time of revolution, and many were quoted as expecting more revolutions to occur that would throw out our Constitution in favor of an even better one in 50 years or so. With this you also throw out all the corruption of those who have not only "overlearned the game," but also those who have invested massive amounts of wealth to change society's rules so its wealth is diverted back to them. This seemed likely to those in the midst of a revolution, but not very likely to us, and, well... what would happen to all my stuff?

2. The Gradual/Videogame Cheater approach: Game authors attempting to fight cheating fight on a naive technical front first, and later a complex behavioral front second. The technical front is like many of the basics of campaign finance laws, like "You can't pay people to vote for you." The obvious hacks. But you eventually realize you're not really trying to stop obvious hacks, you're trying to stop creative, insidious ones too. So you model good behavior, and basically treat everything outside of it as cheating. The challenge is to include modeling very strong performance in that model so you don't risk punishing it if it arises legitimately.

Google is arguably working against SEO entities who "overlearn the game" and either google bomb or push their company's result to the top. The big difference between Google/Videogame companies and law is how nimble they are. The companies acknowledge there will be cheaters and have teams to quickly respond to new workarounds for the system. The law sits idle and a big messy Congress that can be corrupted by cheaters themselves is in charge of fixing it, in a really ugly process. Arguably Congress should continue to set the broad strokes like "Prevent campaign finance abuse," but a nimble more company-like organization within the government ought to be responsible for implementing that and quickly responding to new abuses.

Wall Street actually has a limited version of this model - the SEC is not an elected body - but it's somewhat limited in scope, and impotent when for example its powers are delegated to the OMB when it comes to Collateral Debt Obligations, and down comes the world economy.

I think Congress might be suited to setting the powers more broadly and the metrics for success on these nimble organizations, but they definitely aren't suited to creating the laws that actually trap the cheaters. They're just too slow, by design.

No Student Loans for Low-Pay Degrees

In 2015, if a private college can't show that at least 35% of graduates with a given degree can pay back their loans, students entering that major won't be eligible for student loans. Pretty smart program.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/02/136897408/for-profit-colleges-face-new-rules

Not surprisingly, private colleges are upset about it - they want that free money to keep people entering majors they know don't lead many kids to successful careers.

It would be nice if a law went farther, and required students entering a major or considering majors to be informed of:

• Average employment rate
• Average employment rate within the chosen field
• Average salary in 1 year and 5 years
• Average time to repay
• Average delinquency rate

of past graduates as a whole. It's fine if people want to say they went to college for intangible hard-to-measure reasons, but when it's putting you in a tangible $100,000+ in debt, it's time to be serious.

Dying soon?

Dying soon? Put your life story into your grave, so people can listen to it with their cellphones when they visit:
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/30/136676964/technology-brings-digital-memories-to-grave-sites

MIT actually predicted this 40 years ago with Project Oxygen: http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html

We would someday use "handheld devices" to get "location-aware data" about our environment, like whether there's a meeting going on on the other side of a closed door. In their version though, the data about the dead person was stored in the grave itself, rather than just having that position, RFID tag, or QR code associated with a website about the corpse.

One reason I dislike Daylight Savings Time

Suppose you're adding features to a site that stores times in local time. You're trying to calculate how many hours it's been since Nov 4, 2007, at 1:30am Eastern. You have to ask the question, Which 1:30am is it? The 1:30am before the clocks rolled back, or the one after?

Suppose a user enters a date and time of Mar 11, 2012, 2:14am. You'd have to return:

ERROR: Time does not exist.

Daylight Savings Time is stupid.

How My Dad Thinks Modern Civilization Will End

My dad's crazy but he's also a pretty smart guy. Not surprisingly his take on this isn't rapture (even though he's Catholic) or anything I had ever heard before.

My dad thinks that one unlucky day a little chunk of the sun will fly off and hit the Earth at a time when the magnetic field that usually protects it is unusually weak. Then everything electronic on the side of the Earth that happens to be facing the sun that day will burst into flame. Considering that includes the spark plugs in engines - including those in fire engines - it's going to be hard to put those fires out.

It's a pretty strange thing to think about but I can't really say it's impossible or even unlikely.

The sun is a big continuous explosion. Occasionally some of it flies off in a chunk, and not surprisingly sun bits are really dangerous. Sometimes they just miss us, but sometimes they strike Earth. Or rather, they strike near us - because our magnetic field protects us.

For the past several thousand years, our magnetic field has been shaped like an apple. The indents on the top and the bottom lie at the North and South poles. That means that when sun bits try to hit us they mostly get pushed out and around the Earth, but they have the most impact on the poles where the field is weakest.

Lately the Earth has been doing something weird, a weird thing it does every hundred thousand years or so - it's swapping the North and South pole. That's right - eventually a compass that points North today will point South instead, and vice versa. If this happened uniformly we would in fact lose our magnetic field entirely for several years and humans would probably be wiped out by mild events in space. Fortunately reality is more complicated, and the pole is actually shifting in parts, so that over time there will be pockets on earth where compasses have flipped, and pockets where it hasn't, and along the boundaries compasses will just point nowhere useful at all - someplace in between.

So for several years along the way our magnetic field will look less like an apple and more like cloud tops - lots of random bumps all over of normal or reversed field. Eventually "reversed" will become the new normal and everything will stabilize.

So the problem is what if a bit of the sun flies at us during that time where the boundaries between these fields aren't isolated to just 2 points at the top and bottom of the earth, but rather when they trace trails all over the earth, and expose large sections of it that directly face the sun?

Probably a big disaster for anyone who likes electronics. Or not being on fire (I'm a Fan).

Limb Regeneration - We Can Have It If Evolution Goes Backwards

P21 Knockout Mice - mice with a gene named p21 removed from their DNA - can have a leg cut off and it will regrow in a matter of months.

http://www.physorg.com/news187879295.html

Gene p21 has 3 seeming evolutionary benefits. First, it causes you to heal sooner - you end up with a big scar instead of a limb, meaning a less vulnerable area for a smaller amount of time. Second, it causes you to heal more cheaply - regrowing limbs costs a lot in terms of food, right when you're probably pretty crappy at obtaining food. And third, regrowing anything is probably going to make you more susceptible to cancer.

So the first 2 are all about food. In our overfed environment, I wonder if some humans will just happen to devolve and end up with a damaged p21 that unlocks the limb regeneration already in our DNA. We already have many segments of the population that arguably have degraded genes - people who can't digest certain foods or are unusually susceptible to certain diseases. It's not that strange to think that this gene could also degrade. Who knows - maybe we already have humans with this degradation - they just haven't had any limbs cut off.