Dex v. Seattle

Dex, a distributor of phone books is challenging a Seattle ordinance allowing people to put themselves on a "no phone book" list, as a violation of its First Amendment rights in a suit filed November 15.

I have about eight phone books in a cabinet in my house that almost never get used for anything. My children show no interest in learning how to use one, my wife doesn't like the small print. I use one half a dozen times a year, and don't use three-quarters of the phone books I receive at all. I'm a phone book advertiser myself, but increasingly even they are pitching the Internet component of their business, rather than the paper copy element.

Opt-out laws, in general, have been upheld against constitutional challenge in multiple cases cited in the link above to a post by Venkat Balasubramani at Eric Goldman's blog including Rowan v. United States Post Office, 39 U.S. 728 (1970)(indecent junk mail); State of Mo. v. American Blast Fax, Inc., 323 F.3d 649 (8th Cir. 2003)(junk faxes); FTC v. Mainstream Marketing Services, 345 F. 3d 850 (10th Cir. 2003) (no call list).

The main constitutional objections raised by the Yellow Book companies to the statute are that:

- the statute singles out yellow pages from all other types of unsolicited pamphlets, without reference to the harms sought to be remedied;
- the City made exceptions to satisfy local business interests, such as business associations;
- the ordinance also contains a licensing scheme which is at best highly suspect;
- the statute compels the yellow pages publishers to publish an unwanted message (in the form of opt-out notices and messaging on the cover)
- the statute charges the yellow pages companies to dispose of the books even though the unwanted or discarded books are recycled or disposed of by the recipients;
- yellow pages companies already employ opt-out mechanisms and have no interest in delivering yellow pages to recipients who do not want them (there's no indication that the opt-out system set up by the City will be more effective).

The objection to a statute that involves yellow pages being a content based restriction that favors local interests isn't particularly strong, because the content basis ties into the resident choice to be on the opt-out list, and any flaws in it could probably be easily remedied with an improved definition (e.g. printed material of 150 pages or more with commercial content not expressly requested by the resident, not distributed by an organization of which the resident is a member, and not delivered by the U.S.P.S.).

Any problem with the requirement of a $100 license fee, the reporting requirement (to list the number of yellow pages distributed), or the unwanted message also seems doubtful, particularly to the extent that any defect in the definition of yellow pages is cured. All sorts of businesses are required to make disclosures about laws that have an impact on them, the reporting requirement is no more onerous than constitutional requirements applied to every periodical distributor, and the license fee is not out of line with business privilege licenses that apply to all businesses (and could be made a part of a general business privilege license by requiring the fee and disclosure of yellow book distributions to all business license holders). Allowing licenses of regulated businesses that don't comply to have their licenses yanked also seems constitutional.

No of the prior law on opt out has ever suggested that a private opt-out option makes it constitutionally impermissible to have a legally required opt-out option, and there is good reason to think that a government administered one would work beter.

The most interesting challenged provision is that one that provides for "a 'recovery fee' designed to recoup recycling costs ($0.14 per book and $148.00 per ton of yellow pages)." Similar costs are imposed on tire companies and oil change companies, and it is hard to see how this fee is materially different from a constitutional perspective. Arguably, this makes the content discrimination claim stronger, but one alternative would be to apply the fee of $148.00 per ton to all unsolicited paper (something on the order of 40,000 to 200,000 pages) distributed (for profit or in excess of a certain number of pages or both) outside the U.S. Postal System (where federal pre-emption probably applies). While this fee would be a notable burden on yellow page companies, it would still be a modest part of their total production costs, would be very modest when applied to other door to door flier distributors.

On the whole, the Seattle law seems either constitutional or easily remedied, sensible, and worth considering duplicated in Denver once constitutional concerns are resolved in Seattle's case.

Bing As Malware

Bing is Microsoft's search engine answer to Google. Like all things Microsoft touches these days, it is inferior in quality. It just isn't a good search engine. Its results are less often what you want and are hard to use.

In addition to being an inferior search engine to Google, Bing is aggressive to an almost malware degree. When you start up a new system and use Internet Explorer, the Bing software is very insistant on taking a prominent place in your system until you root it out and remove it, even if you have no interest is using it. It shows up on your screen when you don't ask it to, it installs itself, it makes itself hard to ignore when it appears on the screen. When I bought my wife a new computer recently, one of my first acts was to devote the roughly 45 minutes that was required to remove Bing from her system.

I have yet to meet a satisfied Bing customer.

Apparently, Bing also systematically uses information gathered from users who make Google searches while it is installed, effectively acting as spyware, to reverse engineer Google's search engine tricks.

While I have no problem, in general, with reverse engineering other people's technology that doesn't have formal legal intellectual property protection, and there are far more harmful ends to which information gathered with spyware can be put, I still am not happy about any software that secretly enlists millions of users into a program of mass information sharing for undisclosed reasons. I don't think that Google has any legitimate legal grievance against Microsoft for this conduct, but I also don't think that it is appropriate for Microsoft as a legitimate software company to be inserting software so close to malware and spyware into people's computers while passing off what they are doing as offering the same kind of far less intrusive service as Google and Yahoo.

Indeed, perhaps the most appropriate response would be for major Internet Security firms like Norton, AVG and McAfee to decide to classify it as a security threat and automatically prompt users to remove it from their systems with a description of Bing's defects similar to that made available to explain the threat caused by other security threats it flags from tracking cookies ot phishing websites to trojans. These companies aren't required to determine that software is illegal. They are simply in the business of identifying stuff on your computer or the Internet that you don't want. Malware status is a matter of opinion, so long as the basis of that classification is disclosed, and these companies would be well within their rights to classify Bing as malware based on what it does.

Historic Moments

Conventional political science exams questions like regime change and legislative change primarily as domestic events with domestic causes. But, this model doesn't do a good job of capturing what is going on in either process.

Historic Moments

One of the defining features of regime change, and of most notable (and many not so notable) legislative policy changes, is that neither happens in a vacuum. While political science likes to neatly divide itself into foreign affairs and domestic politics, the reality is that domestic politics is generally strongly influenced by regional context. These kinds of changes happen in waves at historic moments.

Moments of Regime Change and International Domestic Policy Change

We did not see an isolated dictator case of a dictator being replaced in Tunisia. We saw one man's suicide in Tunisia over bureaucratic hassles in a dictatorship that denied him a livelihood set of a public uprising region wide that has produced a change of regime in Tunisia after decades of dictatorship, a change of cabinet in Egypt accompanied by a promise of the existing dictator to depart in the fall and a promise that his son will not seek to replace him, a promise in Yemen to hold elections soon in which the current leaders will not seek re-election, the sacking of Jordan's cabinet, a promise of prompt local elections in the Palestinian Authority, and the possibility of further tumult in Syria and Sudan.

We did not see an isolated change in government in the Soviet Union. We the non-Russian Republics in the Soviet Union granted independence, the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and the abandonment of a Soviet Communist political and economic system to a greater or lesser degree by every Warsaw Pact country, and every successor nation of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The Colonial powers of Europe did not one by one decide to grant independence to their colonies. They did so en masse in the years around 1960, granting independence to dozens of newly independent nations all at once.

In Post-War Western Europe, each nation did not decide in a vacuum what kind of regime they would create. Essentially every regime that had been interrupted by World War II in Western Europe created a multi-party parliamentary system, reinstated a civil law judicial system, renounced the death penalty, developed political parties dominated by a Social Democratic party on the left and a Christian Democratic party on the right, and put in place a comprehensive social welfare system supported by fairly high taxes with payroll taxes and value added taxes constituting a fairly large share of the total tax burden.

In World War I, a single assassination in Serbia sparked a bloody world war. The Russian revolution in its wake rapidly spread Soviet Communist to the whole of Eastern Europe.

The process by which Latin American nations secured their independence and put in place republics was so similar from nation to nation and involved a wave of change so clearly linked in time that one studies of the "Latin American Wars For Independence" when one studies the region historically, rather than trying to understand any one of them independently.

Italy and Germany came into being as democratic states, and democracy took hold for good in France in the 1870s.

Democratic revolutions hit almost every monarchy in Europe in 1848.

Moments of Subnational Political Innovation

State constitutions change in much the same way. One year, no state has a prohibition on dueling in its state constitution. Half a decade later, they are widespread. One year, no state has merit appointment of judges. A decade later, the Missouri plan for merit based judicial appointments subject to retention elections is widespread. One year, no state grants women the right to vote. A decade later, women's suffrage is the norm.

* Legislative Innovation

You see the same thing in legislation in state legislatures in the United States, even on matters where federal government policy doesn't apply. California passed no fault divorce and it swept the nation in a few years. Pre-trial release programs that allowed recognizance release of carefully screened defendants awaiting trial went from an experiment to the national norm in less than a decade. Dozens of states passed smoker's rights bills in a few years. The original Uniform Commercial Code was adopted by a large share of all states in a short time period and that area of law has continued to be guided by Uniform Law Commissioners ever since, as have the areas of partnership law and a number of other "uncontroversial" areas of private law. All but a handful of states adopted court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure in short order, and likewise codified state ethics rules for lawyers based on a bar association model in one big sweep. Most states adopted laws providing for condominiums in about half a decade. Gay marriage and civil union laws have rapidly swept the nation, when less than a decade ago there wasn't even one. States put in place public school systems and structured the financing of state institutions of higher education all at about the same times in about the same ways, and followed suit by consolidating public school systems at the same time decades later. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was done at the state level but happened mostly within the span of a few years without any national guidance. The replacement of orphanages with foster care happened in a similarly sweeping movement in a short period of time.

Worker's compensation laws, minimum wage and hour laws, child labor laws, local "dry laws," married women with property acts, heart balm acts, and laws regulating union-management relations swept state legislatures in very similar forms in the Progressive era. Local zoning laws that were very similar in structure and content were enacted in almost every major (and minor) city in the nation in a small number of years.

A contagion model of innovation dispersal better explains most legislative policy change and regime changes than a conventional account of purely domestic struggles between political factions in individual states or even in individual countries in a region.

* Judicial Innovation

Courts are every bit as prone to waves of innovation as legislatures and indeed, are sensitive to both legislative and judicial trends. A court decision in one state that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage or civil unions produces legislative action in another, and visa versa. The shift to court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure was adopted legislatively in some places, and by judicial rule in others.

These waves are not confined to areas of the law where there is an arguable common federal constitutional basis for the requirement, and this is justified by the doctrine of persuasive common law authority. Thus, for example, strict product liability in tort, once adopted in California by the California Supreme Court, rapidly became the law of the land in almost every state. A cause of action for unjust enrichment, which was an obscure, mostly European legal concept until the critical moment, rapidly became a standard part of every commercial lawyer's arsenal of causes of action.

Moments Of Economic Change

Economists tend to be more conscious of this than political scientists, although the economists who recognize that economic change is follows a path dependent, evolutionary contagion model of change than acting like a thermodynamic system that is perturbed around an immutable natural equilibrium are still in the minority.

An innovation like franchising or "big box stores" comes along, and, in a decade of two, they are the dominant means by which retail sales are conducted. An innovation like subprime mortgage financing goes from being a trivial part of the mortgage finance industry to an immensely rapidly growing significant part of the whole over a decade and the vanishes almost entirely from the economic landscape in a year or two. A deregulated telephone industry engages in an intense marketing effort for long distance plans and phone service features like caller ID for less than a decade then suddenly starts almost giving long distance services and phone features away and launches into a competition to cell broadband access and mobile phone packages.

Economic collapses tend to spread even more rapidly than the spread of new economic models. The steel industry in the United States went under in the blink of an eye. The textile industry collapsed almost as fast. Airline bankruptcies have happened in waves. Travel agencies were culled in a couple of fell sweeps. Free standing investment banks organized as such disappeared from the economy in a matter of months, despite the fact that many of these firms had been around for more than a century. It took about sixteen years for the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis to reach its peak and only about three years for housing prices to collapse, with most of that devaluation happening in the first year.

There have been gradual, long term shifts in the economy, like the slow decline of the private sector labor union over about four decades, or the shrinking share of agriculture as a percentage of the labor force. But, if anything, these incremental charges are the exception, rather than the norm, and even these gradual changes conceal more dramatic shifts in particular industries and subindustries, and in particular regions.

Outlines of the Contagion Model Of Legal Innovation

What does a contagion model of political, economic and social change look like?

Political, Economic and Social Change Generally Happens In Sweeping Moments

Most of history, by which I mean political, economic and social change, happens not in gradual, uncoupled rational change by individual governments or businesses, but in sweeping historic moments that change the whole landscape in a flash like a disease outbreak, in a way that is path dependent and evolutionary in character.

Waves Of Legal Innovation Are Not Driven Primarily By Formal Legal Mandates

This happens even if there are no political or legal institutions with any formal authority to compel this to happen, and even if the changes adopted in one place have little spill over effects. The United States Constitution was very carefully drafted to make it possible for different states to have different suffrage rules without changing the federal balance of power. Yet, women's suffrage spread rapidly none the less and was the law in almost every state by the time that the 19th Amendment made it mandatory in federal elections, and while the U.S. Constitution does not expressly guarantee women the right to vote in state elections, few people doubt that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause (which clearly did not compel women's suffrage in practice at the time that it was adopted) would be held to compel states to give women the right to vote today.

It is the power of the idea that seems like a good one in its context, once it is cast in the spotlight communicated to the right outsiders, and not outside compulsion, that drives waves of innovation.

Sometimes there are coordinating forces. Federal legislation, or international treaties, or U.S. Supreme Court rulings may force state or national governments to follow a larger trend. But, as often as not, these compulsions are addressed to recalcitrant holdouts from trends that have already taken hold as they are influential in bringing about the bulk of the trend. By the time that Jim Crow laws were dismantled in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, apartheid laws had vanished from most of the world already -- and South Africa was for decades, the only country in the world that had to be compelled by international pressure to dismantle its apartheid system until it eventually submitted. Federal laws governing union-management relations were enacted only after they had become widespread at the state level. The European human rights treaty that banned the death penalty in member nations was adopted only after almost every nation in Europe had already done so.

Waves Of Change Have A Trigger

A wave of political, legal or cultural change generally has a clear identifiable trigger that starts it, focusing the attention of people with the power to act upon it on an idea or possiblity or reality.

The current uprisings in the Arab world were triggered by the Jasmine Revolution which in turn was triggered by the self-immolation of a particular young man in Tunisia. The fall of the Soviet system began when Mikhail Gorbachev started to implement Perestroika in late 1988.

The "no fault" divorce wave of legal innovation was triggered by California's enactment of its "no fault" divorce law. Women's suffrage didn't take off until Wyoming, which had adopted women's suffrage as a territory in 1869, became a state in 1890 (and was followed by Colorado in 1893 and many other states soon afterwards).

The Great Recession was triggered by a short sequence of economic events in the fall of 2007. The Great Deprssion was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929.

A First Innovator Is Often Not The Trigger For A Wave Of Change

Clearly, it does not mean that the first place to innovate will set off a wave of change. Indeed, much of the time, the first innovator or two will stand alone for decades or more before the wave of change takes hold. California clearly set off the "no fault" divorce legislative wave, but other states had no fault divorce for decades before it adopted it. India was granted independence from colonial rule more than a decade before decolonialization became the norm and a decade and a half before it reached its 1960 peak. Wyoming had had an obscure limited liability company law on the books for many years before changing tax regulations caused this kind of company to become one of the primary means of organization for closely held businesses in the United States. The United States, France, Switzerland and Iceland were the only nations to have had republican forms of government for almost a century before democracy became the norm in Europe.

Indeed, a well proven test case may be important in making widespread adoption of an innovation happen more smoothly when a wave of change takes hold. Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution would not have spread had demonstrators there been swiftly gunned down and failed to secure any change. The revolutions of 1848 in Europe would probably not have begun had France and the United States not established that Republican government might be a viable possibility decades earlier.

Waves Of Change Can Only Be Triggered When the Time Is Right

Most of the time, the status quo prevails. Yesterday's dicatorship will almost always be tomorrow's dicatorship. Yesterday's fault based divorce law will remain on the books until the moment comes when no fault divorce sweeps the nation. Last year's housing prices will be a good predictor of this year's housing prices.

An single young man's suicide would not have triggered the Jasmine Revolution in 1985, when the latest dictator had been in office for only a few years, and the Soviet Union appeared to provide evidence that one party states could be powerful and economically successful. No fault divorce wasn't ripe to sweep the legislative landscape until lawyers and members of the same social class as legislators had become familiar with just how ugly and hypocritical the increasingly common incidence of fault based divorce had become, and would not have happened without the ferment caused by the sexual revolution at a cultural level. Limited liability companies weren't very attractive until they received a desirable tax treatment. The Financial Crisis that gave rise to the Great Recession wasn't possible until a housing price bubble had reached an unsustainable level, and the entire financial industsry was exposed to more housing default risk than it could easily bear.

Waves of Change Follow Long Periods of Inaction.

Awareness of the problem that will be addressed by the spread of innovation doesn't have to be front and center in the public discussion. Indeed, it may be that a wave of innovation is possible only in circumstances when a problem or imbalance is widely known to exist by everyone involved but is considered an off limits issue or an issue of secondary importance that is not publicly acknowledge by all but a fairly small group of activists.

When a problem is the subject to active public discussion as an important public issue that receives wide attention and is not "off the table," the status quo is less likely to fall so far out of balance that a new wave of innovation, other than any wave of innovation that is already being ridden and worked through at that very moment, can be triggered.

A seven year old regime isn't going to trigger an uprising unless it is very bad. A regional political climate in which most of the region has been governed by local strongmen for three decades of more will.

Political innovations like term limits may be important in securing political stability because they prevent incumbency from allowing the political leadership to grow stale and prevent incumbency from being used with full force to suppress other political views (perhaps even intraparty, rather than partisan opposition, views).

Waves Of Legal Change Are Often Incomplete

A wave of innovation also often does not completely run its course. While the vast majority of the world's colonies secured independence by the 1970s, a handful remained colonies into the last decade of the 20th century and a few colonies remain today. The United States was a hold out against international norms on slavery and apartheid and remains a hold out among developed nations on the question of the death penalty, which is uses more widely than any other developed nation. Cuba held onto a Soviet style communist regime despite the fact that all such regimes in Europe were replaced. Spain had a dictator long after the other nations of Western Europe had genuine multi-party democracies.

This is true at the subnational political level as well. Almost every major city in the United States adopted a zoning code, but Houston was a hold out. The move to replace the grand jury with a preliminary hearing as the main way of determining if probable cause existed to bring criminal charges swept the Western United States, but did not upset the constitutional entrenched rules of almost any of the Eastern states. New York State and California resisted the national trend to adopt state civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Nebraska uses a unicameral legislature notwithstanding the fact that every other state in the country has a bicameral one. Lousiana and Oregon permit non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials contrary to the rule of every other state.

Waves Of Legal Change Do Not Require Genuinely Superior Proposals

The hold outs from waves of innovation tend to disprove the theory that waves of innovation happen because the change that has swept across many jurisdictions actually has overwhelming superiority on the merits.

The differences in the criminal justice process between Oregon, which permits non-unanimous felony jury verdicts and Washington, which does not, is subtle. New York State's refusal to adopt civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has not caused an exodus of business litigation from the state, despite the ability of businesses to agree to other forums. New York State's failure to adopt no fault divorce laws until a year ago did not prevent people from moving there or attract people to the state. Houston's land use patterns are not much different from those of other large Texas cities that have zoning codes (it has more multi-family housing in single family neighborhoods and a few more neighborhood convenience stores, but otherwise isn't much different). North Carolina has suffered few obvious ill effects from continuing to permit alienation of affection lawsuits that have been banned in almost every other state. Cuba's communist economic and political policies have not made it the poorest or more oppressed nation of Latin America. The places that remained colonies long after most of the world had decolonized, like Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, are not obviously any worse off than those countries that gained their independence, indeed, on the whole, they are better off than their peers that gains independence sooner.

It is enough that a proposed legal change is widely believed to be superior. Indeed, even proposed legal changes that empirically proved after the fact to be clearly dysfunctional, like the adoption of Western style democratic systems and legal regimes in newly independent nations that were former European colonies, which led to long periods of one party states, dictatorships, or military regimes in short order in almost every place they were attempted the first time (and often the second and third time) that they were attempted, did not prevent legal changes from being rapidly adopted on a widespread basis.

Wave Of Legal Change Have "Natural Boundaries"

Legal and political innovations (and no doubt economic and cultural ones, as well) do not automatically sweep the entire world. They have an impact only on jurisdictions where changes elsewhere are viewed as relevant.

The impact of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia has spread to almost every other Arab state in region with a generally similar history. But, it shows no signs of extending to dictatorships in former Soviet Central Asia, and doesn't even seem to be spreading to dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia.

Chinese style communism had enough of a distinct identity of its own that it did not collapse when Soviet Style communism did.

Political innovations in Europe in the 19th century had little impact on most of Asia and Africa that were seen as different in kind than European nation-states, but did have an impact on North American and Latin American colonial states whose significantly European populations did see their situations as more parallel to those of Europe.

Western European nations in the post-World War II era have generally seen political and legal innovations in other Western European nations as relevant to them, but have generally been oblivious to political innovations in Eastern Europe, the Third World or the United States. Latin America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have paid more heed to innovations in Europe than in the rest of the world, with Latin America being particularly strongly influenced by Iberian political and legal development, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand being particularly strongly influenced by English political and legal innovation.

The United States, by and large, has borrowed relatively little from the rest of the world politically, legally or culturally considering the amount of information available to it from the rest of the world. For example, even innovations adopted everywhere else in the world, like the metric system, have only made modest inroads in the United States. Indeed, the general disregard that American policy makers have had for the rest of the world, and their tendency to focus heavily on federal rather than state and local politics for reasons explained by the national level of organization of academic scholarship, may explain the relatively insensitivity of American legal scholars and political scientists to the profound role of waves of legal and political innovation that is so obvious elsewhere.

Lousiana has resisted many legal innovations that are widespread in the rest of the United States because it sees itself as a civil law jurisdiction unlike the other 49 states in the Union, although this sense of exceptionality appears to be waning. Utah, similarly, is a place where political and legal innovations may arise despite not being found elsewhere, and may not spread very readily when Utah alone innovates, as its identity as a predominantly Mormon state limits the tendency of other states to follow its lead.

Political innovations like the realignment of Christian conservatives from the Democratic to Republican party have been profound in the Southern states where there was previously a dominant party system in which the Democratic party controlled everything and was the only viable political party, but have played out very differently in places that had a viable two party system before the Republicans adopted the Southern strategy.

To the extent to which jurisdictions are within the same "natural boundaries" and receive information from each other, they will strongly tend to follow the same course of political and legal innovation. But, places outside those natural boundaries will tend to follow courses of political and legal evolution independent of those within those boundaries.

"Natural boundaries" of Legal Innovation Aren't the Same In Both Directions.

The strength of the natural boundaries aren't necessarily the same in each direction and flow from historical ties and relatively scale. Japan, for example, to a much greater extent than any other nation in Asia, due to the lingering impacts of U.S. involvement in the post-World War II reconstruction of the nation, is influenced by the U.S. much more than other nations of Asia that tend to receive the U.S. influences that do impact them second hand through Japan.

For example, after U.S. occupation, the Japanese began to celebrate Valentine's Day, although in a different way than in the United States. In Japan, women express their romantic feelings for men on February 14 (generally with gifts of chocolate), but men reciprocate towards women romantically not on Valentine's Day but on "White Day" on March 14, and this modified Valentine's Day-White Day tradition has spread from Japan to South Korea, urbanized China and Taiwan (South Korea, in turn, had further innovated with "Black Day" on April 14, when singles who lacked Valentine's Day and White Day suitors commisserate together.) The Japanese have also adopted a version of the American criminal jury trial, baseball, a form of the American Thanksgiving celebration (in Japan they have KFC Chicken instead of the grand Turkey feast), Western clothing styles, American style toilets, and their own versions of the American comic book tradition.

But, Japanese political, legal and social innovations have had considerably less penetration into the American scene, and Japan, because it is considerably different from the U.S. has adapted rather than directly copied many of the innovations it has brought from the United States and Western nations generally. In the same time period, in contrast, South Korea, which sees Japan as within its national scope of relevance as a model, has heavily borrowed from the Japanese model in its laws, form of economic organization and culture.

Dominant Players More Strongly Resist Innovation From Others

It also seems to be the case that the more dominant a political and cultural unit is, the less prone it is to be influenced from contagions of innovation from elsewhere. New York, California and Texas are more comfortable being outliers that ignore legal and political innovations from outside their states than Connecticut, Washington State and Oklahoma. The United States was more comfortable ignoring innovations in the rest of the world than the nations like Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy.

The fact that Egypt could be so strongly influenced politically by developments in much smaller, but otherwise very similar Tunisia is a testiment to Egypt's lack of dominance in the region and its lack of a strongly distinct self-identity from its neighbors as a culture of its own as opposed to as a large generically Arab state, at this moment in history. Its unique identity has been swallowed in its understanding of itself by its regional identity, something that was not true in the ancient world, were it was a dominant player on the international scene that largely went its own way.

Illegal immigrant population shrinking (updated)

The Great Recession has greatly reduced employment in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented workers (e.g. construction). The result has been a decline in the undocumented population of the United States and in particular Colorado, where the number of undocumented individuals has fallen about 25% (from 240,000 to 180,000) in the three years since 2007.

About 28% of foreign nationals in the United States are undocumented, and about half of undocumented foreign nationals in the United States are Mexican nationals.

Updated February 3, 2011:

In Colorado, the undocumented immigrant population is about 3.6% of the total population.

Nationally, about two-thirds of undocumented immigrants are in the labor force, which would imply about 120,000 people in Colorado. There are 2,665,200 people in Colorado's civilian labor force. So, undocumented immigrants make up about 4.5% of Colorado's labor force.

A crude estimate that assumes that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force percentage by one percentage point would reduce Colorado's unemployment rate of 8.8% is almost surely wrong, however. In part, this is because undocumented workers generate jobs, both by creating firms and by consuming goods and services and paying taxes that generate jobs, as well as filling jobs. In part, this is because undocumented workers have skill and abilities that aren't present in the general labor force to the same degree, and because employers won't necessarily be able to connect their jobs to unemployed people in Colorado generally. In part, this is because some undocumented workers are themselves unemployed. In part, this is because some jobs done by undocumented immigrants are done at below market rates that are a result of their undocumented status (e.g. getting paid "under the table"), and some of those jobs wouldn't be economically viable at legal labor market rates.

It is quite probable that reducing the undocumented immigrant labor force would reduce unemployment somewhat for other workers in the labor force, but it is hard to estimate what magnitude that effect would have on the unemployment rate.

Probably the best way to estimate that effect would be to do a regression analysis that compared unemployment rates to the percentage of the labor force in each state or region that was comprised of undocumented immigrants. Given the high rate of unemployment across the nation in states with very different rates of undocumented immigrant participation in the labor force, the impact must be fairly modest.

A more sophisticated and more accurate analysis might look instead at undocumented immigrant participatioon in the labor force by both industry and region and do a regression that way (since the mix of industries in a region strongly influences its unemploymenmt rate and the involvement of undocumented immigrants in the labor force varies greatly by industry).

I suspect that this kind of analysis would reveal that undocumented immigration makes a pretty modest contribution to unemployment in the Rust Belt, where manufacturing is dominant, or in the farming states, but makes an appreciable difference in states where the construction industry and hospitality industries are a larger share of the economy, like Nevada.

Egypt Is Population Dominant In the Region

I'd planned on doing this myself, but Yglesias has already done the work.

Algeria and Iraq have experienced regime change relatively recently, making those regimes probably less prone to being displaced than elsewhere. I would also add North Sudan (a bit under 30 million), Libya (6.4 million), Morocco (about 32 million), and Western Sahara (about 400,000) to his list.

I also note that the term "Arab" as used by Yglesias is basically a political self-identifier (as in the "Arab League") and as a proxy for a significantly Arabic language speaking population, rather than ethnically Arab populations.

The populations of North Africa and Egypt respectively are mostly not members of the same ethnic group as the once nomadic people of the Arabian Peninsula, despite their strong cultural affinities to each other relative to the rest of the world. While all of these populations historically spoke Afro-Asiatic langauges, prior to the expansion of the Islamic empire (ca. 700 CE plus or minus a few decades) the North Africans spoke mostly Berber languages, the Egyptians spoke mostly Coptic languages, and the Arabs spoke Semitic languages. The Islamic empire's expansion was not a population replacing one; mostly it grew by rapidly assimilating existing populations into new languages, religions and cultures.

Gurkhas Still Bad Ass

The Gurkhas are soldiers from the Nepal, some of whom provide units in the militaries of India and Britain. They have a reputation was being elite. It appears to be deserved.

Retiring Gurkha Soldier Saves Woman from Being Raped, Uses Large Knife to Fend off Gang of 40 Knife– and Sword-Wielding Robbers (Killing 3 and Injuring 8)

From here citing this story.

Some accounts but the number of attackers as low as fifteen, but some accounts say they had guns.

The Martial Race concept attached to Gurkha and other ethnicities by the British also provides some insight into the workings of 19th century European imperalist racism outside the more familiar contexts of either slavery or the Third Reich.

Condos v. Co-ops

A condominium unit is a separate piece of property that can generally be bought or sold without association approval, with its own property tax bill, its own mortgage, and so on, with some common maintenance and covenant enforcement vested in a home owner's association in most cases.

A co-operative, mostly found in New York was a pre-condominium way for people to live in units of multi-family buildings while having an ownership interest. But, in the most pertinent difference from a condominium they don't, or at least, historically didn't, have separate mortgages for each unit. The whole building had a common mortgage, so the co-operative had an intense interest in screening would be members for long term creditworthiness and general personal reputation, which is an insidious affair, especially when conducted by your neighbors. Also, once granted control over whom one's neighbors are, there is a natural tendency of co-operatives to regulate who can buy into a co-op, not simply to insure creditworthiness, but also to manipulate the prestige of the co-op and with it, the value of the properties in it. It is a club in which membership is more valuable when it is more strictly limited.

A recent discrimination lawsuit at one of the most high end co-ops in New York City, the Dakota, illustrates just how much of a mess this approach, which invites wide ranging meddling into the character and personalities of one's neighbors, can produce, although the New York Times article does a poor job of explaining how the differences in history and legal organization of co-operatives from condominiums is pivotal in creating the kind of situation described.

One irony is that in this and in a wide array of private law areas, New York's very late adoption of "no fault divorce" being another, the center of lassiez-faire capitalism and private enterprise is among the most backward and byzantine in the United States.

Native American Genetic Clusters

An open access PLOS article directing a computer to cluster Native Americans into seven clusters, further informed by language and geographical information produced the map above.

Previous analyses comparing genetic to linguistic differentiation in the Americas yielded equivocal results. Cavalli-Sforza et al. reported that, prior to the publication of their book, three of seven studies supported congruence between genes and languages. At that time, Ward et al. found that rates of linguistic diversification are faster that rates of genetic differentiation in mtDNA, and concluded that there is little congruence between linguistic and genetic relationships in the Americas. In more recent studies also using mtDNA, the hypothesis that language classifications reflect the genetic structure of Native American populations was also rejected. Lastly, an analysis of autosomal microsatellite markers in 28 Native American populations from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP) provided a qualitative correspondence between linguistic and genetic groupings. However, tests of correlation were not significant for these data.

In this study, linguistic data did corollate with autosomal genetics, something that the authors attribute to the fact that the latent cluster methodology that they used does not require any particular tree-like model to be generated. The linguistic data input in variants of the models used were as follows: "Model B used Greenberg's classification at the stock level (8 levels), Model C used Greenberg's classification at the group level (14 levels), and Model D used The Ethnologue classification at the family level (16 levels)."

Unsurprisingly, Ethnologue's more details account provided a better match to the genetic clusters. "Among the 16 families of The Ethnologue classification, only the Tupi, Choco and Chibchan families were not associated to a unique genetic cluster." The Choco (Waunana and Embera) and Chibchan (Cabacar, Guayme, Kogi and Arhuaco)correspond to the populations in the brownish-orange colored area that includes most of Central America and the northern coast of South America. The Tupi languages (Guarani, Karbana, Ache and Surui) include the three groups on the map in the general vicinity of Uruguay, and Surui in the vicinity of Bolivia.

Put another way, the yellow (Oto-Manguean Mixtec and Zapotec, Mixe-Zoque Mixe, Mayan Maya and Kaqchikel, Quechuan Inga and Quechua, Amaryan Amarya, Auraucanian Hulliche, Marco-Ge Kaingang, Arawakan Wayuu and Piapoco), green (Na-Dene Chipawyan, and Algic Cree and Ojibwa) and purple (Uto-Aztecan Pima) clusters were cases where every language cluster in the group fit entirely into a single genetic cluster, while the language groups outside those areas did not fit a single genetic cluster. The number of clusters chosen was arbitrary.

Analysis

While the authors don't articulate their conclusions in these terms, the implication of a situation where there are overlapping genetic and linguistic clusters that lack a tree-like structure seems to be that Native American languages may have been part of various Sprachbunds, rather than having a tree-like relationship to each other. This would be consistent with a scenario in which Native Americans speaking a very small number of common languages (perhaps just one or two) disperse rapidly across the Americas, and then remain more or less geographically fixed in place as their languages begin to random drift apart from each other influenced by neighbors.

An alternate interpretation, for the yellow regions at least, each of which were parts of Pre-Columbian Neolithic civilizations (the Incas on the Pacific Coast of South America, and successions of Olmecs, Mayans and Atzecs in the general vicinity of Mexico), is that the two Neolithic populations were fairly close genetically and that their Neolithic expansions created the genetic cluster, but did not extend to the rest of Central America and South America, which was unsuitable for their crops, and hence allowed the greater pre-Neolithic genetic diversity of Latin America to persist. The purple Uto-Aztecan cluster could have a similar source.

Perhaps also, the Central American and South American regions that do not cluster so neatly have a mix of settlers who came from the Andes and went East, and settlers who made their way along the Atlantic coast and forged inland.

In contrast, the green areas in North America may have had only a single wave of initial settlement that was relatively distinct from the Latin American regions; other evidence puts the Eastern and Western branches of Native Americans as the deepest genetic divide in a generally genetically unified population derived from a small founding population.

An earlier post at this blog on the same topic is found here.

King of Jordan Dismisses Cabinet

The King of Jordan has dismissed his appointed cabinet in response to popular uprisings triggered by similar uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen.

The royal palace announced that the king had dismissed Prime Minister Samir Rifai and replaced him with Marouf al-Bakhit, who has served before in the post and is a former general and a onetime ambassador to Israel and Turkey widely viewed as clean of corruption. . . . [the palace said that he] would have the task of “taking practical, swift and tangible steps to launch a real political reform process, in line with the king’s version of comprehensive reform, modernization and development.”

In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Bakhit added that his main objective would be to “take tangible steps to social, political and economic reform and give priority to dialogue with all segments of society.”

His predecessor was criticized as dealing primarily with technocrats and business leaders, while failing to consult with trade unions and the Muslim Brotherhood and to address the concerns of citizens.

The leader of Tunisia fled the country and a new regime is being worked out there. Egypt's President has made concessions including a promise not to run for re-election. Yemen's government has offered concessions to the opposition. The Palestinian Authority, in response to parallel protests has promised to speed up local elections that had been postponed.

Unrest in Syria and Sudan has not yet brought fruit, but a major protest in Syria is planned for this Friday.

In short, Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution has spread far and wide across much of North Africa and the Middle East and has generally produced positive results so far. Most of the countries in this region are ruled by long time dictators or non-symbolic monarches.

House GOP Priorities

They say that budgets are values documents where you disclose your priorities.

The non-partisan Legislative Council, upon whom the Colorado General Assembly has relied for budget estimates for as long as anyone can remember, says that the legislature needs to close a $1.1 billion shortfall to balance the state's roughly $7 billion general fund budget (much of which it is constitutionally required to devote to K-12 education). Republicans, who control the state house, have decided contrary to the economists, that the state will be $195 million worse off than state economists have estimated.

What did House Republicans then do to address this $1.3 billion revenue shortfall?

They voted to give a $3.7 million sales tax break to farmers for goods including bull semen. Agriculture, by the way, is having one of its most profitable years in recent memory, while the rest of the state economy is in the doldrums.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler, whose predecessor Bernie Buescher had decided to turn over $3.5 million of excess revenues to the general fund, meanwhile, decided last week that he'll keep the funds for new projects. (Although Gessler has backed down from a controversial plan to moonlight for his old election law firm after receiving advice from Republican Attorney General Suthers on the issue.)

Now Sudanese Rise Up

Mirroring similar efforts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, there have now been uprisings in [North] Sudan.

Gluons Lose Mass With Momentum

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) has been something of the crazy aunt in the closet of quatum mechanics. Quantum electrodynamics produces all sorts of practical and precisely calculable results and illustrates nicely the quirky elements of quantum mechanics that don't apply in "classical" physics. The physics of the weak force is fascinating because it produces such weird events - transmuting one kind of thing into something entirely different.

There is wide consensus that quantum chromodynamics is governed by Yang-Mills Theory, a set of equations that explain how quarks and gluons interact with each other, but these equations produce much more intractable math than other parts of quantum mechanics and has one main prediction that is all you need to know for many practical purposes: quarks are confined into color neutral particles by the strong force as mediated by gluons, but are asymptotically free within those composite particles.

But, Marco Frasca, the author the The Gauge Connection toils away in QCD nonetheless and keeps the world appraised of what is going on in that world.

Despite its obscurity, QCD is vital to distinguishing noise from background in particle accelerator experiments, and in nuclear physics. Until you can solve these equations to get practical results, you can't derive what happens in real life from the math from first principles.

But, after decades of slow going, improved computing power (these calculations push supercomputers to their limits) and some important theoretical insights are shedding light on QCD, particular in low energy systems, which are hard to measure because you can probe them in high energy particle accelerators by smashing them together.

One core observation Frasca makes is that QCD is not a simple matter of quarks exchanging massless, spin one gluons:

At higher energy QCD tends to become a free theory, that is the coupling becomes increasingly small and the gluon propagator one uses at the tree level is that of a free particle. This in turn means that the non-linear contributions from Yang-Mills theory are small and small perturbation theory applies. In this limit we can identify as the excitations of Yang-Mills theory with ordinary gluons carrying spin one.

In the infrared limit, the case of low energies, the behavior of Yang-Mills theory changes radically. The reason is that in this case the non-linear terms in the equations become so strong that ordinary gluons are no more the fundamental excitations of the theory. In this case one has glueballs and the lower end of the spectrum of the glueballs carries spin zero.

Gluons, at least in some circumstances, appear, contrary to the popularized layman's explanation of the theory, to have considerable mass and spin zero (rather like the proposed Higgs boson) rather than being massless and having spin one (rather like photons in QED). It remains a boson in both states, but is a very different animal, really a completely different fundamental particle, at low momentum than at high momentum. A paper by one of his colleagues last year spells out a formula for determining a gluon's mass:

The interpretation of the Landau gauge lattice gluon propagator as a massive type bosonic propagator is investigated for i) an infrared constant gluon mass; ii) an ultraviolet constant gluon mass; iii) a momentum dependent mass. We find that the infrared data can be associated with a massive propagator with a constant gluon mass of 651(12) MeV, but the ultraviolet lattice data is not compatible this type of propagator. The scenario of a momentum dependent gluon mass gives a decreasing mass with the momentum, starting from a value of 630 MeV in the infrared region and suggesting a q^2\ln q^2 dependence for momenta above 1 GeV.

Physics is familiar with the notion of objections whose mass change based upon their motion. An object's rest mass in special relativity, is its minimal mass, but the mass of an object increases with its velocity relative to the observer. In constrast, no other particle in physics has a mass that decreases with momentum with its rest mass being its maximal mass, as appears to be the case for gluons. I am also not aware of any other particle in physics changes its intinsic spin in different circumstances. Yet, this is not "beyond the Standard Model" physics. This is physics being done with the equations of the Standard Model itself!

More generally, new developments in QCD explain a lot about how mass arises. For example, it was used in 1999 to calculate the mass of the proton and neutron to within 2% accuracy from first principles:

More than 99% of the mass of the visible universe is made up of protons and neutrons. Both particles are much heavier than their quark and gluon constituents, and the Standard Model of particle physics should explain this difference. We present a full ab-initio calculation of the masses of protons, neutrons and other light hadrons, using lattice quantum chromodynamics. . . . Our results completely agree with experimental observations and represent a quantitative confirmation of this aspect of the Standard Model with fully controlled uncertainties.

While we have long known that matter and energy are manifestations of the same thing and equivalent for many purposes in physics, QCD appears to be one of the important places where transitions from mass to energy are particularly fluid.

Experimental Tests For String Theory

How do you show that there are, or are not, physics beyond the Standard Model, such a string theory?

A number of experiments are reaching a point where we can determine if the Standard Model is right, or if there are physics beyond it. In particular, some of these could falsify many popular versions of Supersymmetry, which is a necessary component of Sting Theory (a.k.a. M-Theroy). What are those experiments?

1. Measure the electric dipole moment of an electron.

The standard model predicts that the electron's electric dipole moment is less than 10^–38 in units of electron charge times centimeters. That's equivalent to separating an electron and a similar charged particle by a distance of 10^–38 centimeters. . . But extensions of the standard model predict the electric dipole moment to be bigger, between 10^–25 and 10^–30. In 2002, [scientists] published the most stringent limit yet: 1.6 × 10–27.

Experiments in progress costing about $10 million, a bargain in the fundamental physics world, should determine if the electron's electric dipole moment is more than 10^-29 by one of a few possible methods in the next few years.

The minimal supersymmetric standard model, or MSSM, is a standard model extension that holds that every elementary particle has a “superpartner.” One of the simplest versions has been ruled out by the current limit.

An electric dipole moment for an electron of less than 10^-30 would rule out most versions of supersymmetry, and hence, most versions of string theory.

2. Fail to find the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is predicted by the Standard Model to be the particle that gives other particles mass. Tireless searching with particle accellerators has determined that if it exists it must weigh 114 GeV to 158 Gev (or must be much, much heavier), with the most promising hints that it might exist around 140 GeV or perhaps a bit less. Other not quite statistically significant tests suggest that it might be a little lighter than that. The Large Hadron Collide should be able to determine if there is a previously undiscovered particle of that mass within the next couple of years.

If the Higgs boson isn't there, then the Standard Model and most versions of Supersymmetry (which predicts at least one, but often more than one Higgs boson, and in most cases predicts at least one "light" Higgs boson) are falsified and scientists have to figure out some other way for particles to acquire mass.

A Higgsless Standard Model has been proposed, but supersymmetry could probably not manage without a Higgs.

3. Break the CKM Matrix.

The CKM matrix sets forth the probabilities that quarks will turn into different kinds of quarks in weak force interactions and predicts how often charge parity (CP) violations take place. Experiments with B mesons (two quark particles that include a bottom quark), have shown that CP violations take place in these experiments to an extent that seems to conflict with the Standard Model at its current consensus CKM matrix parameters, and the discrepency may be greater than it is possible to resolve by tweaking the parameters of the CKM within the boundaries of the Standard Model.

Other anomolous CP violations have also turned up, even in neutrinos.

4. Find a new generation of quarks.

There are four main kinds of fermions (particles that are not force carriers). Up and down quarks, electrons, and neutrinos. But, there are three generations of each kind. The second and third generations (for the electron and neutrino they are called the muon and tau, for quarks the second generation consists of the charm and strange and the third generation consists of the top and bottom).

Supersymmetry requires that there be precisely three generations of particles. But, if the CKM matrix lacks entries whos possibilities sum to 100% in all circumstances has entries that fail to sum up to 100% in all circumstances, then the weak interaction can produce particles that aren't in the matrixes in the form of 4th and our higher generation fermions. The heavier a fourth generation particle is the less of an impact it would make on the CKM matrix, because heavier particles are less likely to be produced in weak force interactions.

Alternately, a fourth generation fermion could be observed in an experiment at the Large Hardon Collider if it wasn't too massive. Current experiments strongly disafavor the existence of any new quark of less than 355 GeV.

5. Find a new generation of leptons.

The lepton (electron and neutrino) verision of the CKM matrix is the PMNS matrix, which isn't know nearly as well. A fourth generation could be inferred from neutrino flavor oscillation, since neutrinos constantly cycle from one generation to another, and a fourth generation could be infered from that cycling pattern.

6. Fail to find supersymmetric particles.

Supersymmetry, and by association, string theory, predicts that there will be a "lightest supersymmetric particle" among many undiscovered particles, that has not yet been discovered. Most versions put its mass within the range of what could be discovered by the Large Hardon Collider. If the LHC doesn't find one, this would disfavor supersymmetry and string theory, although it would not rule out either, as "string vacua" with heavier lighest supersymmetric particles can be imagined.

7. Discover something that doesn't fit.

The Standard Model predicts almost nothing other than the Higgs boson that hasn't been observed yet. It is minimal. Supersymmetry and string theory, generally, while more inventive, only include new elements that provide greater theoretical consistency to what has already been observed.

For example, neither predicts CPT symmetry violations, which have never been observed. If it was observed, some significant new physics would have to be devised to explain it.

The new forces and particles that string theory predicts are very well defined. For example, the superpartners of fermions in supersymmetry "have the same color charge, weak isospin charge, and hypercharge (and consequently electric charge)" as their orinary fermion partners and are bosons (i.e. integer spin particles). The discovery, for example, of a particle like looks in all other respects like a superpartner of an up quark, with an electric charge of +3/4 would send string theory to the dust bin and leave physicists scatching their heads.

There are lots of proposals for supersymmetry particles that could account for dark matter. There are also many experiments that are trying to determine directly the properties of dark matter particles that aren't ordinary matter. If the dark matter particles we find have properties that aren't a good fit for anything that supersymmmetry proposes exists, this would present a "beyond String Theory" problem.

One of the strongest possibilities for this kind of discovery is an apparent inconsistency between measurements of hydrogen atoms with ordinary electrons and measurements of hydrogen atoms in which muons are present instead of electrons. The Standard Model and all common extensions of it expected these measurements to be consistent. But, the measured results were five standard deviations apart, and if the discrepency can't be explained by experimental error there is no ready explanation for why the measurements should differ.

Unlikely Sources Of Evidence

1. Rule out extra dimensions.

Experimental efforts to detect extra dimensions rule out dimensions greater than three micrometers (about 10,000 times the size of an atom), but the expected scale of extra dimensions in string theory are many orders of magnitude smaller than that, so the experiments are unlikely to provide much experimental proof or disproof of string theory.

2. Find evidence to support a non-stringy quantum gravity.

One of the reasons that String Theory requires so many extra dimensions and particles is to allow it to incorporate a quatum field theory of gravity similar to that for the other three fundamental forces of physics, mediated by a spin two graviton. If evidence could be found to experimentally verify that this is not how gravity works, and that some other model of quantum gravity, like loop quantum gravity, was actually the correct model, then a far less complex theory would be needed to integrate the other three forces and know particles.

But, there have been no experiments indicating any deviation from general relativity, and despite general relativity's inconsistency with quatum mechanics, the circumstances where that discrepency exists involve situations like the big bang and black holes that lead to singularities in general relativity, that are difficult to measure in the pertinent ways from our solar system, the gravitational fields of individual particles that are hopelessly drowned by their surroundings, and issues related to how time works.

Experimentally, evidence regarding the nature of quantum gravity could come from the search for gravity waves, from more precise cosmic background radiation maps, from astronomy observations of black holes, or from the discovery of discrepencies between general relativity and experiment in very strong or very weak gravitational fields.

3. Show that the fundamental forces don't unify.

One of the main theoretical of supersymmetry is to unify, at least, the three fundamental forces in such a way that at a certain energy scale, their coupling constants merge them into a single force. If it was possible to determine empirically that these constants do not in fact merge at that energy scale (about 1000 GeV), as the Standard Model implies, then supersymmetry would be invalidated. But, as with quantum gravity, no one has devised practicable ways to measure the physics in question at that energy scale.

4. Find proton decay or magnetic monopoles.

Many early efforts to go beyond the Standard Model in physics predicted proton decay and magnetic monopoles. But, neither has ever been observed. The shortest possible proton decay half-life that cannot be ruled out be experiment 1.01×10^34 years. By comparison, the estimated age of the universe is a little less than 14 billion years (i.e. 10^11 years), and the half life of a neutron is about 614 seconds.

The lack of such events places a limit on the number of monopoles of about one monopole per 10^29 nucleons. . . experiments suggest that monopoles with masses below 600 GeV/c2 do not exist, while upper limits on their mass due to the very existence of the universe - which would have collapsed by now if they were too heavy - are about 10^17 GeV/c2.

Models that predict them at any detectable level have fallen into disfavor. The discovery of either would reinvigorate those models which have been largely discarded in favor of more mainstream versions of supersymmetry and string theory.

String theory predicts magnetic monopoles ought to be around the Plank mass, which is far beyond the range of experiments to detect.

5. Find evidence for some other theory that naturally explains the Strong CP problem.

While CP violations are greater than expected in a number of weak force interactions, "there are natural terms in the [quantum chromodynamics] QCD Lagrangian [that governs the strong nuclear force] that are able to break the CP symmetry. . . For a nonzero choice of the θ angle and the chiral quark mass phase θ′ one expects the CP symmetry to be violated." Yet, in what is called the Strong CP problem, "Experiments do not indicate any CP violation in the QCD sector. For example, a generic CP violation in the strongly interacting sector would create the electric dipole moment of the neutron which would be comparable to 10−18 e·m while the experimental upper bound is roughly a trillion times smaller."

Discovering some very low level of strong CP violation is probably beyond the realm of possibility. But, coming up with a sound theoretical reason why the terms of the QCD Langrangian that a zero theta angle and zero chiral quark mass phase remove from the QCD Lagrangian is within the realm of possiblity, and there might be some other experimentally testable implication of that theory that can be tested.

Alternative Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Considered

Usually, one deals with Type 1 diabetes (early onset) with insulin treatments. But, controlling another hormone can also solve the problem in mice, without regular monitoring of blood sugar levels.

[I]nsulin becomes completely superfluous and its absence does not cause diabetes or any other abnormality when the actions of glucagon are suppressed. . . . Glucagon, a hormone produced by the pancreas, prevents low blood sugar levels in healthy individuals. It causes high blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. . . . elimination of glucagon action restores glucose tolerance to normal. . . .

The researchers found that the mice with normal insulin production but without functioning glucagon receptors responded normally to the test. The mice also responded normally when their insulin-producing beta cells were destroyed. The mice had no insulin or glucagon action, but they did not develop diabetes.

"These findings suggest that if there is no glucagon, it doesn't matter if you don't have insulin. . . . This does not mean insulin is unimportant. It is essential for normal growth and development from neonatal to adulthood. But in adulthood, at least with respect to glucose metabolism, the role of insulin is to control glucagon.

Of course, before this can be used medicinally, one needs a good way to disable glucagon receptors - perhaps with drugs, perhaps with surgery, or perhaps with gene therapy, a type of treatment that is has been used only a handful of time theraputically and never in humans for this condition.

Still the possibility that there may be an entirely different way of treating type 1 diabetes than the one that has been the norm since 1922 is an exciting development.

Cold

Today's high temperature in Denver will be -2 degrees F. The low is forecast to be -17 degrees F. With windchill the low is anticipated to be -35 degrees F. Schools have been shut down, mostly because they don't want children freezing at bus stops.

One in seven marriages is mixed race.

One in seven (14.6%) of new marriages in 2008 and 2009 is mixed race (in a method that counts a Hispanic-Anglo marriage as mixed race), according to a recent New York Times article reporting on a Pew Research Center study from June of last year. In 1960, the figure was 2.4%.

Among all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married someone whose race or ethnicity was different from their own.

Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. Some 22% of all black male newlyweds in 2008 married outside their race [in 1960 the percentage was 1.3%], compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds [in 1960 the percentage was 0.9%]. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. Some 40% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2008, compared with just 20% of Asian male newlyweds. Among whites and Hispanics, by contrast, there are no gender differences in intermarriage rates.

Rates of intermarriages among newlyweds in the U.S. more than doubled between 1980 (6.7%) and 2008 (14.6%). However, different groups experienced different trends. Rates more than doubled among whites and nearly tripled among blacks. But for both Hispanics and Asians, rates were nearly identical in 2008 and 1980. . . . ["High levels of Hispanic and Asian immigration over the past several decades helped drive both seemingly contradictory trends."] . . .

Native-born Hispanics are more than three times as likely as the foreign born to marry a non-Hispanic. . . native-born Asian-Americans are nearly twice as likely as those who are foreign born to marry a non-Asian. . . Among Asian men, the native born are nearly four times as likely as the foreign born to marry out. Among Asian women, the native born are only about 50% more likely than the foreign born to marry a non-Asian.

For U.S. born people, outmarriage rates were 41.7% for Asian men, 41.3% for Hispanic men, 37.4% for Hispanic women, and 50.3% for Asian women. For foreign born people, outmarriage rates were 11.7% for Asian men, 11.3% for Hispanic men, 12.2% for Hispanic women, and 36.8% for Asian women.

Mixed race marriage is much more common among the young than the old.

There are strong regional trends. The outmarriage rate for African-Americans in the West is 38% compared to 15.5% nationally and 11.9% in the South. Whites are most likely to outmarry in the West at 15.5%, compared to 8.9% nationally and 5.5% in the Midwest. Hispanics are most likely to outmarry in the Midwest (41.0% v. 25.7% nationally), although Colorado at 35% has a higher outmarriage rate among states with statistically significant numbers of Hispanic outmarriages than any other single state. Asians are most likely to outmarry in the South (36.8% v. 30.8% nationally). Outmarriage for whites is 20% or more in Nevada, New Mexico and California. Black outmarriage rates are 36% in California, the higher percentage in single states with a statistically significant number of black outmarriages, in contrast the lowest percentage of black outmarriages where numbers are statistically significant is found in North Carolina where the percentage is 9%.

These regional trends seem to be driven by a combination of outmarriage being more common when there are more other race and fewer same race options available, and by Hispanics and Asians being more likely to be U.S. born in areas with higher outmarriage rates. Differences in regional attitudes surely do have an effect, but a less intense one than one might expect.

The more education you have, the more likely you are to outmarry.

About 41% of mixed race marriages are Hispanic-white, about 16% are both non-white, about 15% are Asian-white, about 11% of Black-white, and 17% are "other" (which includes Native American, mixed race and "some other race").

In terms of expressed views, far more religious people are uncomfortable with having a child marry an atheist than are uncomfortable with having a child marry something of another race. Whites in 2009 were considerably less likely to have a problem with a child marrying someone of another race than they were in 2001, while blacks were more concerned in 2009 than in 2001 (although still more accepting of mixed race marriages in all time periods with all other races).

Caveats

This observation comes with caveats:

[S]ome sociologists say that grouping all multiracial people together glosses over differences in circumstances between someone who is, say, black and Latino, and someone who is Asian and white. (Among interracial couples, white-Asian pairings tend to be better educated and have higher incomes, according to Reynolds Farley, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.)

Along those lines, it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.

Any study of marriage rates also has to be conscious of the increasing number of parents and intimate couples were are not married. For African-American women, for example, most mothers are not married. The higher rate of interracial marriage for African-American men than for African-American women, for example, could reflect non-African-American women in serious relationships with African-American women placing a greater importance on recognizing that relationship through marriage than African-American women in serious relationships with non-African-American men do.

Analysis

This is a little less than half of what one would see if marriage were entirely random relative to race and ethnicity, although a significant share of the divide between truly random and what is seen is due to neighbor effects (i.e. mixed race marriages tend only happen to the extent that there is someone of another race geographically nearby), rather than actual race or ethnicity based selection of a spouse.

Intermarriage rates are higher for the college educated, despite the fact that the ethnic diversity of college campuses is considerably lower than the ethnic diversity of society as a whole. The gap between the intermarriage percentage that you would expect by random chance if people married others with the same level of education, and what is actually observed, is quite modest among college graduates, but its quite high for high school dropouts.

Asian and Latino intermarriage seems to fit the general profile of immigrant assimilation. Second and later generation immigrants assimilate very fully into their communities linguistically and otherwise, and often outmarry. The future of Asian and Latino marriage patterns may follow that of the "Southern European" identity, which ceased to be very ethnically distinct in the United States in a way that drives marriage patterns. Yet, the WASP v. non-WASP divide, which distinguished people from Catholic and Jewish immigrant populations, from Ireland and Southern Europe in the case of most of the Catholics, and from Eastern Europe in the case of most of the Jews, from non-immigrant American whites, has faded greatly from our ethnic consciousness.

My intuition is that interracial marriage rates for African immigrant populations (e.g. recent immigrants from Ethiopia and Kenya), are probably more similar to Latino and Asian immigrant populations than to African-American populations. For example, immigrant Africans in Denver's public housing projects are much more likely to be married than African-Americans in Denver's public housing projects, and there is probably less discrimination against African immigrants than there is against African-Americans in economic and social contexts.

Razib notes that "The article ignores the elephant in the room: that Americans do not treat African ancestry like they treat Asian (or Amerindian) ancestry. Someone with a black American parent may identify as mixed race, but there is a great deal of social pressure and expectation, such that they are de facto viewed as black." But, I am not so pessimistic.

While African-American outmarriage rates are lower than for U.S. born Hispanics and Asians (a little more than half as much for African-American men, and a quarter as much for African-American women), this has changed dramatically in the last fifty years when it was almost zero, and outmarriage rates have continued to surge in the last twenty years.

Anecdotal evidence that I have encountered, at least, suggests that "one drop" rule notwithstanding, that mixed race children with a black parent and a white parent are indeed a major bridge between the two groups in social settings. A many fold increase in the number of children of black and non-black parents, probably under reported by statistics that only measure actual marriages, means that the bonds between these two ethnic communities in the United States are probably much stronger than they were a generation or two and getting stronger all the time.

Social Class Implications

This elephant in the room is also shrinking as social class divides based on race and ethnicity fades.

The increase in rates of African-American outmarriage closely mirror the growing ranks of the black middle class in the same time period against a background of very low social class mobility in the United States generally..

Despite the fact that almost every statistic you may see on African-American socio-economic success is discouraging, in the big picture in the medium to long term, the story has been one of remarkable socio-economic progress.

Indeed, the rise of the black middle class made possible by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and social gains of second generation immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants, who have been able to advance further socio-economically than parents who were not native English language speakers and were not assimilated into American culture, explains a great deal of all of the social mobility in the United States in the last forty years. The flip side of this optimistic fact, is that social class mobility is probably considerably lower in the United States for Anglos than the overall figures suggest.

On the other hand, some of the apparently high social class mobility seen in many European nations may be a product of immigrant assimilation patterns seen in the United States, as most of the developed countries of Europe has experienced considerable immigration in recent times. Immigration in the United States in recent years has been typical of the developed world generally.

The seeming immutability of social class boundaries among American whites is remarkable given how fiercely we deny that social class divides exist in American culture (something that our obsession with race has helped make possible), and how irrelevant the distinctions between white ethnics have become in our society.

Perhaps we truly are developing a meritocratic society and perhaps social class divisions based for a couple of generations on real merit are more stable than divisions based on proxies for merit. But, it may also be the case that the weak social welfare system in the United States makes where you start more outcome determinative than it is elsewhere.

New Tribes

Professor Rainier Spencer, who is quoted in the article notes: “The mixed-race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe. A new Balkanization of race.” This may be the case. Definitions of race evolve and have changed in almost every census. The Latin American experience, the French colonial era experience in North America, and the experience in places like Jamaica and South Africa during colonial eras, has been to conceptualize mixed race identities as a "new tribe" or as "new tribes."

If you run mathematical models in which some people in each ethic category have strongly endogenous attitudes and others do not, in a surprisingly small number of generations, almost everyone but those with strongly endogenous tendencies ends up as mixed race, although the smaller a group is, that more quickly this happens.

The fact that more than half of U.S. born children of immigrants still do in marry, and that anecdotal evidence suggests that preferences are similar for third and later generation individuals to those of second generation individuals, suggests that some version of this kind of model makes sense.

My sense in reading political and identity politics rhetoric has been to see a tendency to conceptualize a large "brown" category that includes Hispanics, mixed race people of all types, North Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Arabs, that has been gaining traction relative to the "People of Color" conception that includes all non-Anglos. The latter is probably easy to measure with linguistic databases like Google's new toy, but the former, because "brown" is used in so many senses, would be harder to measure.

In the same vein, I find it quite interesting that white Southerners in the United States increasingly identify as "American" in ethnicity, while whites outside the South tend to see a connection to some ancestral place of origin in Europe. This is more than a question of style. It has some authentic base in reality and history.

For example, most whites outside the American South practice a religion that has clear historical roots in Europe. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Jews, Orthodox Christians and Catholics, for example, all practice religions with direct European sources and often have religious denominations that remain in communication with parent denominational authorities in West Eurasia. In contrast, the Evangelical Christians of the American South have far more cryptic ties to their European forebears. Colonial era European Baptists, for example, were closer theologically and in liturgical practice to American Quakers and Anabaptists than to the Southern Baptists whose denomination is the predominant white Baptist denomination in the United States. Evangelicals in Latin America, Africa and Asia trace their roots to the United States, not the other way around.

There are multiple narratives of people from the American South touring Europe and discovering just how non-European they are culturally, despite the fact that they look similar physically. An Evangelical Christian white Southerner is more distant culturally and in values from the European norm than a Bostonian Anglican, a Lutheran from Saint Paul, or a white Catholic in Buffalo. The 18th century Scotch-Irish society that those white Southerners who do not identify as "American" identify with barely exists any more outside United Kingdom's territory of Northern Ireland, as the herding and marginal farming economy that sustained that culture has faded away. Politically, the federal election Republicans of the American South (who are overwhelmingly white and whose politics are the overwhelmingly dominant ones of white Southerners) have few parallels in Europe apart from the far right neo-fascist parties.

The American South from the 1700s to the mid-1800s is really one of the better cases in recent history of ethnogenesis. In religion, culture, politics and dialect this cauldron created an ethnicity so distinct from its antecedents that its sources aren't easily traced to a single source anywhere. Few other places in the United States have been more of a melting pot and less of a mixing bowl.

Indeed, the fusion of this new culture and worldview has been so intense that ethnically identified non-Evangelical Christians have been increasingly pressured in reaction to abandon their more specific ethnic ties in favor of a united Pan-American mainline, liturgical Christianity. First, ethnic divisions within major denominational distinctions within Christianity by fusions of ethnically divided denominations of Reformed Christians, Lutherans and Orthodox Christianity, respectively, as these ethic divisions faded in favor of purely denominational ones going back to pre-ethnic division roots. Increasingly, institutions like the National Council of Churches and ecumenical efforts between particular mainline denominations are erasing even that level of division.

Ethnically and culturally, the descendants of Northern, Midwestern and Western white ethnics have been dissolved into an ethnicity that outsiders have described a "Yankee," as inapt as that may be to describing their real roots. How long will it be before whites outside the South start to identify their ancestry as "European" rather than Italian or German or Danish or French or English, in contradistinction to the "American" of Southerners?

Will people who have roots in both Europe and Asia start to identify themselves as "Eurasians," in ancestry, as distinct from Africans or those who self-identify as "Americans"?

I also think that it is possible that we may increasingly start to see a divide in self-identification between African-Americans from the South, and those who are from outside it.

I do think that racial categorization at a social level is basically inescapable. No matter how much the educational establishment and social elite urge us to leave in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s truly color-blind society, I seriously doubt that it will happen, at least not in my lifetime or even that of my grandchildren. But, I do think that the racial and ethnic divisions of the United States will grow increasingly balkanized replacing many categories with the stark black-white dichotomy, and that as we reach a point where there is no majority race or ethnicity in the United States, that those distinctions will become less pernicious.

Now Jordan

Mass street protests against autocratic regimes have spread from Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen to Jordan, something that is notable because Jordan's monarchy is one of the most moderate in the region and is a monarchy rather than a dicatorship or one party state. Politically, Jordan vests executive power greater than that of an American President in the King, while having a parliament that still has some genuine power. The arrangement is rather comparable to that of Great Britain in 18th century, and provides more genuine democracy than many other nations in the region.

Protesters want the prime minister and department heads to be appointed by parliament rather than the king, and they want to resignation of the current government that is view as corrupt: "opposition activists from Jordan's main Islamist opposition group, trade unions and leftist organisations gathered in the capital, waving colourful banners reading: 'Send the corrupt guys to court.'"

They protesters do not appear to be calling for an end to the monarchy, simply to a diminution in his active role in the executive branch.

French v. U.S. GDP Per Capita

French GDP per capita is lower than U.S. GDP per capita almost entirely because the French has chosen to have more leisure and make less money as a result.

[H]ere are some ratios of France to the United States:

GDP per capita: 0.731
GDP per hour worked: 0.988
Employment as a share of population: 0.837
Hours per worker: 0.884

So French workers are roughly as productive as US workers. But fewer Frenchmen and women are working, and when they work, they work fewer hours.

Why are fewer Frenchmen working? . . . [D]uring prime working years they’re as likely to work as Americans. But fewer young people work (in part because of more generous college aid); and, mainly, the French retire earlier. . . it’s not a problem of weak productivity or mass unemployment.

And why do the French work shorter hours? Probably for the most part because of government policies mandating vacation time.

The bottom line is that France is a society with the same level of technology and productivity as the US, but one that has made different choices about retirement and leisure.

Per Krugman.

Egypt and Yemen on Fire

Inspired by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, masses of protesters are filling the streets to try to unsettle the regimes of Egypt and Yemen.

Egypt has an authoritarian dominant party system in which President Hosni Mubarak has been President for thirty years and has hinted at installing his son as a successor, although Egypt has remained engaged with the world and had some semblance of a normal economy, rather than withdrawing from the world as Albania and North Korea did.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdallah Saleh, is "a strongman who has ruled this fractured country for more than 30 years . . . His current term expires in two years, but proposed constitutional changes could allow him to hold onto power for longer." Despite Saleh's authoritarian policies, however, a substantial part of Yemen is beyond the government's control.

Police responses have been violent in Egypt, but the response has not yet escalated to that level in Yemen.

It is hard to tell if we are replaying something like Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, or for those with a longer run view, Europe's revolutions of 1848, or instead are seeing something like 1989 when the Soviet system fell apart.

Indeed, assuming that Tunsia's revolution is now irreversible, the fear may be that Egypt or Yemen may be to Tunsia what Tiananmen Square was to the fall of the Soviet Union, a disasterous crackdown spawned by success elsewhere.

On the other hand, if revolutionaries succeed in Egypt and Yemen as they appear to have prevailed in Tunisia, this could mark the end of an epoch of strongmen in a wide spawth of the world. Iraq, of course, already lost its long time strongman by very different means, and Sudan, while not actually shedding its twenty year old strongman's authoritarian regime is in the process of ceding much of its territory in South Sudan. Serbia hardline regime, likewise, lost Kosovo.

It isn't clear if there is any likelihood that this wave of revolutions will spread to similar regimes in Libya (whose strongman has been in place for four decades), Syrai (where dictatorship is in a second generation), Sudan, other African regimes, or to the monarchies of Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, or Oman.

Algeria's regime, with doubtful democratic credentials between years of violent insurgencies by popular Islamists against a secular military linked regime, truces to resolve the struggle, and popular uprisings has probably doesn't have the same level of pent up frustration that its neighbors share.

Turkey, Albania, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, while all having flawed, troubled, intermittent or untested democracies, have also established the precedent that political systems in which civilian officials chosen in genuinely contested elections are possible in predominantly Muslim countries. None of these nations have really achieved "mature democracy" status, but Islamist factions have as often been a force for democratization as they have been barrier to democracy in these nations. This undermines the long standing argument in foreign policy circles that Islam, or at least Islamists movements were incompatible with democratic government.

It is a time to hope for the best and fear for the worst. In the meantime, understandably, oil prices are surging, which means that these events half the world away, will have a direct effect on ordinary Americans.