Brilliance! Citigroup's very bad, no-good day in court

This is good.  Here's Daily Kos' Adam B doing a wonderful job summarizing and highlighting a federal judge taking his job seriously and showing up with his competent dial turned up to 11.

So Rakoff calls out the corruption of our SEC trying to get a multiple offender - to the same crimes - off with a slap on the wrist.  He says: "this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency's contrivances."  Awesome.

Both the SEC and Citigroup clearly want this to just go away, but Rakoff devastates their "contrivance" by pointing out that their ruse isn't just wrong, it also prevents the court from doing its job:  "[The Consent Judgment] is not reasonable, because how can it ever be reasonable to impose substantial relief on the basis of mere allegations? It is not fair, because, despite Citigroup's nominal consent, the potential for abuse in imposing penalties on the basis of facts that are neither proven nor acknowledged is patent."  Nice.

More discussion on this ruling from Taibbi.

Support wikipedia

I feel like this about my science and political action.  Wikipedia has established itself as a worldwide resource of equal accuracy to the encyclopedia we grew up with, but without the entry cost that limits access to knowledge.  If you're able, please support them with a donation of whatever size is appropriate to your budget.  I try to keep in mind how often I visit the site for answers and how often I visit coffee shops :-)

Why isn't the UC embracing Occupy instead of resisting it?

I think this statement is correct and encourage those who agree to add their names to it (particularly if affiliated with the UC).  It also provides a reason to ask something I've been wondering about Occupy UC and the administration's reaction to it.

If I were the Chancellor of a UC, or any high-level administrator of a university, it would be thrilling to watch students engage in any high-level organizational activity resembling what the UC students have done.  In what classroom exercise can one inculcate and encourage the skills represented by the these gatherings?  Think of what's required: organize a large group of people; engage in passionate political speech; coordinate messaging; mediate conflict; design General Assemblies that address important concerns without becoming muddied with personal issues.  And all this has been accomplished with the kind of discipline and commitment that leads to nonviolent yet creative responses to overreach by state and university forces.  You cannot teach this amazing constellation of abilities in a classroom, yet it's popping up in student bodies across the university system.

Why would any Chancellor try to inhibit this?  Given that basic concerns about public safety and daily operations are addressed - as for instance was done at the Davis protest - I'm actually surprised that the UC isn't embracing Occupy UC as a point of pride in its students.  That it initially went the opposite way makes me wonder why.  Are these administrators continuing to react to 60's protests?  Is there some form of elite peer pressure at work, where for instance other similarly wealthy professionals are advocating that Occupy UC be dismantled on principle?  The stated motivations of Chancellor Katehi's order don't match what Occupy was actually doing in the Quad, so far as I can tell, which makes me ask if the administration was responding to what they see subjectively rather than what's actually happening.

Music: A Winged Victory for the Sullen

quick note while I'm thinking about it. My previous colleague and dear friend Martin Hoyt introduced me first to Stars of the Lid and more recently to a spinoff project called A Winged Victory for the Sullen.  we recently attended their SF concert at the Independent.  It's billed as "chamber music" but in addition to three string instruments also incorporates keyboards and electronically-processed bass guitar.   Both "bands" are exceptional, particularly if like me you're a big fan of the classic, spare ambient sounds pioneered by Brian Eno.

Some examples:

Stars of the Lid (the last being a particular favorite of mine)


A Winged Victory for the Sullen (with again the last link being my favorite)

What else would you like Interpro scan to do?

From our bioinformatics wizard here in the Sil lab, a quick note:

"InterProScan is running a survey to get feedback on their tools/website.  If you use InterProScan, this is a great opportunity to tell them how you use it and how they can make it even better for you."

I asked them to pre-construct phylogenetic trees of protein domains, possibly even adding a tool that will place a query domain within said tree to facilitate making initial guesses about evolutionary relationships.  I construct my own for domains of interest, but if Interpro has the capacity and there's sufficient demand, then it might be a helpful service for others with less access to the requisite software and expertise.

Google now lets you search verbatim

If you're like me, you'll have noticed lately that Google has gotten really good at returning results for what it thinks you want.  And its ability to guess that is also really good - except where you're looking for something specific and rare.  That's where their various algorithms seem to break down, and I frequently find myself muttering curses while nestling everything I've typed in the search bar between quotation marks.  This seems particularly to happen in the more highly technical searches I conduct when looking for scientific findings.

Good news!  Google responded to this issue by allowing users to search verbatim, rather than filtering by whatever brilliant algorithms work so well during all the other times!  See here.

Thanks, Goog.  Or as we call you in my home, "El Google"  (the "e" is not silent).

The creativity of Occupy

I'm pretty impressed with Occupy so far.  They've made some intelligent choices about how to get their message out, what that message should be and how to draw in the most (or alienate the fewest) people.   Early on, they chose to adopt a General Assembly model that I suspect yields similar benefits - and costs - as open source software development.  Whatever drives the decision-making, it's working in a lot of cases.  Occupy has deftly avoided getting pigeonholed by so far refusing to issue a specific list of demands.  (I think that story gets it wrong by playing up the discord)  There's been remarkable discipline in the commitment to non-violent action, despite brutal and wrong state responses to the protests. 

It's also worth appreciating and commending the movement's creativity in the use of technology and art to generate strong emotional appeals to people's humanity.  Both my wife and I see a lot of Burning Man culture in the movement.  There's a powerful sense of play and world-as-art-project that's strongly reminiscent of what we as burners create on the Playa every year.  The creativity hasn't been limited to playfulness, either.  After the now-infamous episode at UC Davis, where Chancellor Katehi ordered the eviction of student tents and initially responded to the pepper-spray violence her order yielded using the passive voice, Occupy protesters responded in a simple, brilliant, nonviolent and profoundly disturbing way: they said nothing.  Occupy uses creativity and street theater to generate attention, call out bad behavior and evade classical suppression to get their message out.  It's inspiring, and I wonder what comes next.

Talk Talk

Talk Talk, a band that sadly faded into obscurity. Which is surprising given how many followers Radiohead has. One of the only other bands I can recall whose every effort surpassed their last. Although, sadly unlike Radiohead, Talk Talk called it off after 5 albums. The last, "Laughing Stock," was a true masterpiece.

Here are some starters:

The Rainbow

I Believe in You

New Grass

Carrier's constant

In order to better understand what to look for in fungal-mammalian co-evolutionary patterns, I've been looking to educate myself about how and where mammals evolved. During the course of that, I ran across this wiki article. Am I missing something, or does the following sentence abrogate any need for us to consider this constraint? "Contrary to the above model, breathing is maintained in lizards during movement, even above their aerobic scope, and arterial blood remains well oxygenated."

Eisen discusses how to fix peer review

A prescription for streamlining the scientific publication process. via the author's brother on google + . I like that his approach tries to implement what scientists already do: assess an article on its technical merits, its agreement with other well-supported hypotheses, personal experiences and those of trusted peers. And I agree that completed research need to get communicated much faster, or else progress is globally slowed.

Issues:

1) Why in the proposed schema are we still relying on a handful of subjective and biased individuals as primary and final gatekeepers? Why not parse submissions to a crowd of interested reviewers, whose arguments are synthesized by a dedicated professional who then makes a more informed call? The main concern is that each reviewing brain represents not just one perspective but likely an impaired and rushed one. Open-source this step.

2) It doesn't follow that because bad papers got through the classical review filter, the filter is screwed. All filters have a fail rate, and it's the rate we need to evaluate - not the fact of failure.

The "Bonus Army"

Veterans marched on Washington DC, occupying it in the tens of thousands. This happened in the 1930's. However the basic dynamics of power and influence are startlingly similar to what we're again seeing today.

btw, the image of General MacArthur gassing his own previous soldiers is powerful and sickening.

Are we warm-blooded to fend off pathogens?

The idea is that mammals evolved higher core body temperatures to restrict the growth of fungal pathogens, which I think is neat. See also. That said, there are many species - particularly among the Ascomycetes - that are quite well-adapted to life at elevated temperatures. So while elevated body temperature probably does reduce the number of fungal species we must fend off (compared to insects, fish and plants for example), is it sufficient to explain the metabolic investment that mammals make?  I just don't see how that could be the case.

Flying snakes! Flying lizards!

Well, not fly exactly.

That is all.

Debt strikes

This is an interesting idea . Classically these kinds of policy changes are implemented through voting and the government. But when the govt. becomes unresponsive, more creative solutions arise. This happened for example with the union, suffrage and civil rights movements.

The counter to this will of course be: "hey, you agreed to the loan so pay it back." This will be cast as a moral issue. That is, how can people become fully developed human beings when they are free to abandon their obligations? This kind of action breaks our social, agreement-based fabric. That's compelling, but it ignores what's happening at the system level of our economy.
Corporations and banks drive our policy and laws, yet are amoral - they are profit-driven. Whatever creates profit is fair game. When profit suffers, the rules of the game are changed regardless of the consequences.

What's more relevant is that agreements can be changed, and should be changed when intrinsically unfair, but that only happens when attending parties have something to offer. During the financial collapse, the American people had something to offer: we will bail you out with tax dollars if you also take a haircut on the bad loans you issued and adjust Americans' personal debt downward. Under Bush and then Obama, our government gave away that negotiating card on our behalf without asking us. The kind of collective action represented by a debtors' strike seeks to recapture negotiating power and tilt the balance away from giant financial institutions and back toward the individual. Arguing that this kind of action is immoral would be more relevant if the system were fair. It is not fair.