Category: Science & technology

Categories
Books, essays and others Economics History & heritage Science & technology Society

[2477] Diamond, consumer choice theory, marginal revolution, Marxian economics and the paradox of value

From those precursors of food production already practiced by hunter-gatherers, it developed stepwise. Not all the necessary techniques were developed within a short time, and not all the wild plants and animals that were eventually domesticated in a given area were domesticated simultaneously. Even in the cases of most rapid independent development of food production from a hunting-gathering lifestyle, it took thousands of years to shift from complete dependence on wild foods to a diet with very few wild foods. In early stages of food production, people simultaneously collected wild foods and raised cultivated ones, and diverse types of collecting activities diminished in importance at different times as reliance on crops increased.

The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocation time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today)? or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. The concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods. [Guns, Germs, and Steel. Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm. Page 107. Jared Diamond. 1999]

A lot of words.

Luckily, any economics student who has his or her bases covered will understand this as [latex]\frac{dy}{dx} = \frac{P_x}{P_y}[/latex] in one way or the other. Simple! We can thank the marginal revolution that began in the late 19th century for that. Marginal revolution also solved the paradox of value. Indeed, marginalism is the foundation of modern microeconomics, regardless of your cup of tea.

And oh, did you know that the marginal revolution also made Marxian economics in its original interpretation completely obsolete?

Categories
Science & technology Society

[2437] Thanks Steve

I am not an Apple fanboy. I was anti-Apple even.

I remember the first Apple computer I used long ago. Wikipedia tells me that it was Macintosh Classic. Its screen had only two colors: green and black. I was happy of playing Karate-Ka on it, and other games that for the life of me, I cannot remember. It was my first vivid recollection of a computer. This was the time when large diskettes were used, not a flash drive, not even a CD.

My next encounter with Apple would come 8 or 9 years later when the University of Michigan had iMacs littering its computer labs. I spotted the largest collection of iMacs in Angell Hall’s Fishbowl. I had thought Apple was dead, but no. I was wrong.

These Macs were not these modern days slick-looking Macs. It was an odd one piece machine with the CPU and the monitor wedded together. The G3, Wikipedia says. The weirdest of all was the one-button mouse. Who would use that?
 
I was decidedly anti-Apple then.

But Apple progressed tremendously after the odd-looking bright-colored Macs. Its notebooks were becoming extremely slick and I remember spotting a 23” Powerbook, probably the first of its kind, in an Apple Store in Novi, Michigan, somewhere outside of Ann Arbor. Despite being impressed, I remember blogging my somewhat negative sentiment against Apple.

From there on, it was all up for Apple.
 
First, it was the iPod.
 
I had always wanted an mp3 player as an undergraduate but I decided against buying an iPod back in 2004. I bought a Creative Zen instead, all because I believed the iPod was overpriced, and all hype. Five years later, I am the owner of a fifth-generation iPod Nano. I did not buy it. I got it as a gift.
 
And I love it.
 
I remember bragging about having a Nano to my ex-girlfriend through Skype. She was unimpressed, showing to me that she had a Nano too. Purple. Mine was blue. There she was, a cute French girl smiling with her purple iPod.

There are of course the revolutionary iPhone and the even more revolutionary iPad. To say these gadgets were revolutionary on its own rights is an understatement. Apple not only revolutionized consumer goods. It revolutionized the global culture.

That was because of one human legend, Steve Jobs. At least, as far as I am concerned.

So, when he died today, the world has just lost one of its biggest culture icons. We are living in an exciting time, partly thanks to Steve Jobs. I do not think anybody can deny that.

You do not have to be a tech-writer to know that. You do not have to be part of the tech or creative industry to know that. You just need to live to know that.

Apple wrote on its website, it “has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being.” Aye to that.

Categories
Liberty Science & technology Society

[2377] Technology, central planning and the fate of organic organization of society

There are several reasons why organic decision-making is better than central planning. The complexity of the world is one. By complexity, it means nobody has the ability to absorb all relevant information in a timely manner to react effectively. In some ways, this is the economic calculation problem. It is an argument against the communist economic system in favor of the free market, the free price system specifically.

While this particular reasoning has stood well against the test of time to defend the libertarian case, I do not think it will stand forever. It has stood well against the case for central planning because there is a limit to calculation processing.

An individual can solve his or her own problems but a central planner must solve all problems that exist in the world. The central planner has no capacity to solve for the general equilibrium. There are billions, trillions or even more variables and data points to consider. The problem of central planning has always been an optimization problem however complex it is. How many can we calculate? How fast can we calculate? Can we calculate it at all?

None in the past and at the present time has done that in a grand scale or for a long time successfully.

The date when technology overcomes the restriction will arrive. When that happens, the libertarian case may approach an expiry date.

The seeds are already here. Thomas Friedman writes in The World is Flat of a global supply chain. Detailed record of inventory is kept. The workflow is traceable. Orders, stock and production all around the world of a particular company can be tweaked easily. All relevant information crucial to production is available on the spot all the time.

It is not hard to imagine how that capability can be expanded beyond the boundary of a firm. As technology progresses to make that possible, the prospect of effective central planning is enhanced.

With technological progress, eventually, whatever superiority the organic method has can be replicated by a central planner. Perhaps, the central planner can produce superior outcome in some cases where asymmetric information is present. After all, with the relevant sufficiently advanced technology, there can be no asymmetric information problem.

This is a scary notion for libertarians. It should be a scary notion for all who believes in individual liberty. It will give birth a full and perfect information aggregator that is an omniscience state or anything that may function as a state. It will create a god none can disobey. Everything the god says is for the best. This will be the real god.

My question is, when the time comes, will the case for organic organization of society be obsolete?

After considering that, I think any case in support of libertarianism cannot be dependent on technology. Else, it puts an expiry date on the philosophy.

Whenever the expiry will be, I am inclined to believe that it is will be far off into the future, possibly making the technology-dependent argument useful still.

Categories
Science & technology Society

[2140] Of dude, where’s my diskette drive?

The dawn of the 21st century disappoints the part of me growing up reading works of science fiction. Here we are living in a much too glorified new century and there are still no flying cars crisscrossing the sky, no aliens from outer space walking our streets and no human bases across the solar system. We did send a roti canai to space but many things remain out of this world. Underneath this childish disappointment is another part of me who is impressed at humanity’s pace of technological progress.

The thought came to me last October when I was frantically downloading every single file I had stored on Geocities. Yahoo! shut Geocities down later that month after more than ten years of existence.

There was a time when the internet was effectively Geocities. Almost everything imaginable was available on Geocities alone. Cheats for Diablo? Latest news on Star Wars? History of the Malay Peninsula?

If the internet was the successor of the Great Library of Alexandria, then Geocities was its precious scrolls. This was back in the mid to the late 1990s. It was a time when surfing speed was incredibly slow that made today’s speed as served by TMNet god sent. It was a time when modems make noise much to the delight of a geeky kid.

It was on Geocities where I learned the hypertext markup language in effort to prove to my friends that I could do it too. With my mastery of HTML, I created my first website.

Updating it was a tough act. If I wanted to change certain details of the website, I had to go back to my text editor application and change it there. It was a big hassle but it was fun. The introduction of WYSIWYG kept me sane for some time.

The emergence of content management system as well as wide access to cheaper storage and greater bandwidth probably ended Geocities. Frustrated as the amount of time I needed to spend to update my website on Geocities, I became an early adopter of Blogger.

The generosity of my alma mater in Ann Arbor with respect to storage further reduced my need of Geocities. Since migrating to Blogger and ultimately WordPress several years later, never once I returned to Geocities, until last October. It was time to say the final goodbye. This is my requiem for it, and for everything that is beautifully obsolete.

My experience with Geocities and the internet by no mean affected me alone. Back in the late 1990s, the latest unsanctioned information was directly available only to the political fringe.

A decade later, the introduction of content management system that makes the proliferation of blogs possible democratised the internet. It is probably not too demanding to assert that this evolution brought political evolution — some would say revolution — in Malaysia. It took years, but it happened.

The return to Geocities was a walk down memory lane for me. Old photos stashed there brought me back to a more innocent age. A folder contained photos taken in Chicago. Another in New York. Another still contained countless of other places. These pictures were scanned from actual hardcopy photographs. Yes, there was a time when film was a crucial component of a camera. The film needed to be processed first before one could enjoy one’s effort. That typically took a week. Not anymore. All those processing are done with a snap of a finger. At a far, better a resolution too. Never mind all those snazzy features a digital SLR has.

I saved all of my life’s work, including my scanned photographs, in 3½-inch diskettes around the same period. One day after spending a summer away from classes, I found my spirit renewed. I was yet again prepared to take up relentless challenges thrown by a cruel Michigan. Before that however, I just needed to transfer some of my files on that 3½-inch diskette to a computer in a laboratory on campus. Amid 50-odd computers, not one of them had a diskette driver on them.

The same situation was true over all computer laboratories on campus. In its place was a weird thing called USB drive. Life was just too hard.

Just less than four months earlier, I would happily hop from computer to computer with my diskettes. On that particular day when I found out about the end of diskette drive, a child of the information revolution felt obsolete.

The world suddenly leapt by me, catching me off-guard. I adapted — I had too — but that taste of obsoleteness still lingers with me, forever a reminder that nothing lasts forever. The only thing one can do is to prepare oneself for the eventuality.

These continuous creative destructions ensure that. It also says that it is likely that tomorrow is going to be a better day. I am willing to bet on that because all these small changes, and more, have more than compensates my childish disappointment. Under its belt is a reputation enough to earn confidence from a mere mortal.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 17 2009.

Categories
Science & technology Society

[2071] Of masquerading: H1N1, facemasks and soap

Last week in Kuala Lumpur, I was at the Plaza Rakyat LRT station when a family lugging wheelie suitcases asked me whether they were at the right platform to get to KL Sentral. Being from out of town myself, I said I did not know, but continued to watch them because the two teenage daughters were wearing surgical masks. I have had a rather ghoulish fascination with infectious diseases since childhood, and when the pandemic started back in April, my lab-mates and I followed it like Malaysians watching the English Premier League.

The family eventually got affirmation from someone else that we were indeed on the correct platform. As we waited for the train, one of the girls’ shoulders shuddered, and she pulled down her mask to cough vigorously without covering her mouth. Relieved, she replaced the mask and continued staring into space.

Despite advisories from the Ministry of Health and other experts, most people still have the wrong end of the stick regarding surgical masks: their primary purpose is to protect other people from your germs, not the converse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advice on facemask use is that sick persons, not well, should wear them. They do protect the wearer from large splatters, but they do not filter out aerosol-sized droplets and have big gaps around the nose and sides, unlike a real respirator. When I had to wear an N95 respirator for working with viruses in graduate school, the fitting involved trying on several different models and jumping up and down while being sprayed in the face with a saccharine solution to check if any droplets got through.

(On the other hand, the use of facemasks in healthcare settings such as clinics and hospitals can help to slow the spread of flu, since many people may be infected and shedding virus in those locations. This still does not mean that an uninfected individual wearer is protected, and neither WHO nor the CDC recommend mask use in community settings.)

If facemasks do not work, why are people so enthusiastic about them?

First, it gives people a sense of control over the situation. We can watch out for robbers, but an invisible virus is a terrifying, insidious idea for most (especially those who cannot do math and think the world is ending). Unlike the advice to stay healthy, wash your hands, and go home if sick — which a sensible person should practice all the time anyway — buying a mask gives the consumer a sense of having done something concrete. The same goes for heading to the doctor to demand Tamiflu, which to me is really terrifying because antiviral abuse inevitably leads to viruses becoming drug-proof.

Secondly, I think Malaysians are exceptionally susceptible to silly claims about health because we are muddled between our Asian cultures with their various traditional remedies, modern biomedical science, and Western pop-culture pseudoscience. All you have to do is look at the number of ads in the newspapers and on banners selling health products (Tongkat Ali vs. Quantum Pendants). The exorbitant prices that masks were going for, before the introduction of price controls last week, further encouraged the perception that masks were a valuable prophylaxis against the dreaded flu. The terrible quality of science and math education does not help either, since it creates the mentality that those are things you memorize for exams, not tools for real-world application.

The final irony is that influenza virions (virus particles) are notoriously fragile and break down quickly at room temperature — this is in comparison to viruses like polio, which can hang around in water supplies for quite a long time. In particular, the stability of the virus in aerosols at tropical heat and humidity is significantly less than in the cold, dry winter in so-called ”temperate” countries, which is why we usually have low levels of flu year-round rather than seasonal outbreaks like Europe, Australia, and North America.

Some researchers think that flu is more likely to spread by contact or fomites (contaminated objects) in tropical regions. That means that your best friend is not a facemask, but a soap bottle. As an enveloped virus, flu is particularly susceptible to detergents. Why this has not been more strongly emphasized by the MOH, and why you can see toilet attendants wearing facemasks while guarding public toilets with no soap, boggles the mind.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

HWA SHI-HSIA recently finished her MS in comparative biomedical sciences at the University of Wisconsin. She maintains http://xenobiologista.com/blog/.