The Boston Globe has published the OpEd piece Unverified science: Studies that can’t be replicated create a problem with trust — and funds.  The fortuitous publication of this piece this morning gives me a place to comment with the letter to the editor that I composed in my mind last night while trying to go to sleep.

If the editors of The Boston Globe read this piece, they would immediately stop publishing the series “Uncommon Knowledge”.

I imagine the quandary of the people putting together such a column.  They must search for results that are unexpected, counter-intuitive, and surprising.  After an item meets these criteria, I wonder if anybody asks whether this is good science, repeatable, the conclusions fit the data, and are the most probable explanation of the data. In other words, could the experiment they describe possibly measure the effect they were trying to study?

I’d rather see a series with a headline that concentrated on items that were significant, backed by well run studies, with repeatable results that were an accurate measure of the effect being  studied.

The “Uncommon Knowledge” series cannot be a good way to support science which is one of the most important enterprises of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Atlantic has a very interesting if inappropriately titled article, Big Money vs. Bernanke: Who’s Right About the Economy? The value of the article is not in addressing who is right and who is wrong, which it does not address. The value is in the following explanation:

For a few months now, quite a few hedge fund managers have complained loudly about the Fed. Their protests reflect the difficulties of investing in manipulated markets which, at times, can be quite “irrational” – at least according to their analytical, historical and mental models. They hate interacting in markets where central banks act both as competitors (with better visibility and information) and referees (seemingly happy to change the rules at a whim).

So this is why the hedge funds reacted so strongly about Bernanke’s mild announcement that the Fed may gently moderate its current policies some time in the unforeseeable future.

I don’t think we want large hedge funds that are too large to fail to be playing games with markets that are supposed to be used as aids to the real economy. Perhaps the U.S. government needs to be in some international discussions on how to regulate the hedge funds just as it did recently with international treaties on banks.

I think it is commendable that the Fed can step in and slap these hedge funds around until they are so punch drunk that they cannot function.

PBS has the story and video Should We Fear “the End of Work”?

The best parts of this story (or perhaps unique parts) come when they ask the fundamental question of how the wealth will be distributed. The part that is not unique is that many of the people who specifically think they are addressing this part of the problem spout nostrums that have little to do with solving the problem.

Educating every one to a very high level, does not automatically solve the problem. One person mentions that there are now half a million people writing apps for smart phones. This is supposed to be an example of the new jobs that will keep people employed. Yet, even this job can be automated. There will still be more people in the world than we need to create all the apps that everyone will want. We still need to figure out how people are going to be able to buy all the wonders that technology can produce.

There is a little more meat in the written article than there is in the video. Perhaps the following is the best we can expect at this stage of exploring the issue.

By now, if you’re feeling like the views expressed are all over the map, bewilderingly so, and wondering “okay, now what?,” I’m with you. The challenge for the American economy in the 21st century — how to compete successfully in an ever aggressive global economy and yet ensure that a wide swath of Americans benefit from that success — is dauntingly complex. We’re only just starting to grapple with what’s coming and what’s needed.

If there was a conclusion, it centered on the responsibility of leadership in society and its institutions — in not surrendering to a paralyzing sense of inevitability about the march of technology and the jobs it is trampling in the process. From his seat on Wall Street, Steven Berkenfeld targeted the business community:

“There is a real need for corporate leadership, and there is a need for accountability. When companies engage in productivity layoffs with record profitability, unprecedented levels of cash and all-time-high stock prices, no one in the media says, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ No political leader speaks up to protest. We don’t hear anything from the labor unions. The companies are applauded for it because they’re cutting costs and improving profitability, and that’s supposedly what a company exists for. But it’s not that simple. They do have other responsibilities.”

Let me finish with Thomas Kochan’s plea for a renewed sense of national activism to forcefully change the course of an economy that just doesn’t seem to be working for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans. In Kochan’s words, it just doesn’t have to be this way:

“In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.

“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.

“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.

“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.

“If we don’t start to take the leadership,” Kochan concluded, “it isn’t going to come from anywhere else.”

The other change from the past that we need to account for is the declining dominance of the United States in the world economy. When the United States dominated and India and China were tiny economic powers, it was easier to solve problems on only a national level. Now with corporations able to move across international borders if they do not like the policies of a particular country, increasingly the solutions must be international.

You may not like the idea of international government, but the global economy is not asking whether or not you like it. It is just something we will have to deal with whether we like it or not. We cannot stop the trend.

Moneynews.com has the article Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why.

I’ll pick out a few quotes so that you get the idea of what this story is about.

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?

It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.

One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.

So how do your know this article is a come-on?  This article is full of teasers for Wiedener, but the one thing that is totally absent from the article is any hint of where these billionaires are putting the money they reaped from dumping their shares.

Of course the following quotes are probably even more damning to the credibility of the article.

Wiedemer’s video interview also contains a comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.

Now viewed over 40 million times, it was initially screened for a relatively small, private audience. But the overwhelming amount of feedback from viewers who felt the interview should be widely publicized came with consequences, as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.

Quick, get in on the secret that only 40,000,000 people know.  This secret has a conspiracy that is trying to suppress it.  Act on this secret news while you can still be the 40,000,001 person who gets in on the ground floor of this secret.

This information is commanding global attention that only you can be privy too.  Sounds like the maxim attributed to Yogi Berra about a restaurant in New York, “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded.”  This information can’t be getting global attention and still be much of a secret.

What is this world coming to? I don’t think I ever had to do this on my job.

The web site mentioned in the video is fixmyjob.com

You spend a big part of your life at work.

Don’t you deserve a fair treatment and the chance to work up to your full potential?

Here is the TED talk that introduces what this is all about.

Rootstrikers is the organization being set up by Lawrence Lessig.

The Los Angeles Times has the article Federal Reserve adopts tougher rules on bank reserves.

The Federal Reserve adopted tougher requirements for bank balance sheets, sending a message to the financial industry that it will cost much more to remain an institution that’s considered too big to fail.

The rules, approved Tuesday as part of an international agreement designed to prevent another financial crisis, make it more expensive to be a very big bank while going easier than originally proposed on small and medium-size institutions.

It is worth noting that this comes from an international agreement, so the banks in one country won’t have the excuse that they cannot compete in the international market if they are subject to new restrictions.

The second thing to note is that though this agreement must have been in the works for some time,  no mention of such an effort hit the press that I commonly follow.  This lack of widespread notice gives demagogues the opportunity to try to win elections by claiming the government isn’t doing anything to solve the problem.  For instance, Gabriel Gomez was going to go to Washington in part to fix the problems of banks that are too big to fail.  Maybe he was such a good politician after all, that he didn’t even have to win the election to get the problem solved.

Zeenews has the article Processed carbohydrates tempt people to overeat.

Washington: A new study has found that eating highly- processed carbohydrates like cakes, cookies and chips could affect pleasure centers in the brain, leading to serious cravings that might cause people to overeat.
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High-glycemic carbohydrates get digested rapidly, and include white bread, pasta, rice and baked goods, WebMD notes. Low-glycemic carbs are digested much slower, and include fruits, vegetables, unprocessed whole grains and legumes.

This might help to explain what foods to avoid and what foods are OK if you want to keep your weight and your blood sugar under control.

The real News Network is featuring a video Paula Deen Caught Being Incredibly Racist.

When I first read about the Paula Deen issue, the article was about Paula Dean admitting in a deposition to using racist terms.  The article gave no clue as  to why she would be giving a deposition, especially one on this topic.  It gave no clue about when the deposition was given, nor when the acts that she admitted to had occurred.  I know nothing about Paula Dean, and don’t think I have ever watched her show.   I decided I could not judge her without more facts.  I thought it was possible that people were over-reacting.

I ran across the video below, which finally put their explanation of the facts before me.

How can a “white” person explain why the N-word is not offensive? Offensive to whom? It may not be offensive to the person using the term, but that is no basis for judging. The test is whether or not it is offensive to the people at which the term is aimed. If those people say it is offensive, then that is the only opinion that matters, and by definition the word is deemed offensive by any rational measure. You can argue, unsuccessfully, as to whether people should be offended, but you cannot argue about whether people have the feelings they say they do.

I don’t know if anyone is thinking they can skip tomorrow’s election because there is only one office being contested. Think if it this way, with only one office being contested you can be in and out of the polling place in just a few minutes. Are a few minutes worth spending to decide the fate of the nation? Giving even more power to the Republicans to use to filibuster everything will only delay the solving of this country’s and the world’s problems. Electing another Progressive fighter for the middle class to work with Elizabeth Warren could be the beginning of a turn-around for this country.  Ed Markey is that progressive fighter.

We only send a message of approval to Congress that giving all power and wealth to the wealthy is what the middle class needs if we elect or allow to be elected another Republican like Gabriel Gomez.

Ed Markey understands that the role of government in society is complementary to the role of private enterprise.  Gabriel Gomez thinks that with his business experience, he knows what government should do.  We do not need two powerful entities playing the same role, profit over all else, in this society.  If we are stuck having powerful entities in society, we at least ought to have them playing a role of checks and balances with each other.  That is the only way the individual player without huge backing of great wealth can expect to get a fair shot.