Internet Resources on the Housing/Finanacial Crisis

• This American Life (radio show) episodes:
  
  1. 5/9/08: The Giant Pool of Money
     
     • Through that link, you can read a summary of the episode, download a transcript of it as a PDF or stream the audio to your computer -- or pay a dollar to download the audio, but who wants to do that?
  2. 10/3/08: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
     
     • For this episode, there's a summary, but you can only stream the audio or buy it-- no transcript to read available yet
  
  
• New York Times (newspaper) multimedia presentation:
  • The Debt Trap; videos, interactive charts, and newspaper articles about all the different people who are affected by debt and how they fall into it in the first place
  
  
• Washington Post (newspaper) slide show:
  • Anatomy of a Crisis; the slides are narrated, describing how the "Housing" crisis turned into the "Financial" crisis
  • Note: the narrator goes a little too fast if you're not already familiar with the events and the vocabulary he throws around

Black Turnout is Strong in Early Voting in the South

The usual way that people vote in a General Election (that's the name for an election that's nationwide) is by going to a "polling place" in their town where voting machines are all set up on Election Day. This year, our Election Day is November 4. These polling places are normally in a local school or library, and people go in and out of the place all day, whenever it is convenient for them, and it is usual to wait anywhere between 5 minutes and almost half an hour (depending on how quickly things are going).

There are other ways to vote, including Absentee Voting (which I just did today!), but this year, it has been especially popular to do Early Voting. Early voting is basically like going to the polling place on Election Day, except that you can turn in your ballot up to a month before the actual election -- and it gets counted early!

Part of the reason that this option is really popular this year is because more Americans are planning to vote than ever before in this Presidential election, and some people are worried that polling places will be overcrowded and that you would have to wait hours in order to vote.

An article just came out talking about exactly who is voting early this year,and according to it:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires several Southern states to report racial breakdowns among voters, an effort designed to prevent discrimination. But North Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana are the only ones reporting that information as early voting is proceeding.

Here are the data they've turned in:

---------------------	North Carolina	Georgia	Louisiana
Black Voters (as % of Early Voters in 2008)	31%	36%	31%
Black Voters (as % of TOTAL Voters in 2004)	19%	25%	--
Black Population (as % of State Pop.)	21%	30%	31.7%

[Update (10/30/08): These numbers are changing every day, since Early Voting continues up to Election Day. In Georgia, Louisiana, and almost in North Carolina, the total number of Early Voters has doubled those in 2004 for each state. The percent of this year's black Early Voters in Georgia has dropped a point to 35%; in North Carolina, it's fallen four points to 27%. And in Louisiana, that percent has actually risen to 36%.

And there's a new page with raw data (that I assume will be updated daily) on Early Voter turnout in all 50 states.]

Check out general facts on voter registration and state populations at the US Census Bureau website.

Probability: Schrodinger's Cat

Quantum physics is probably one of my favorite things in the world. It is the point where Science begins to blend with Philosophy and Religion, examining the very fabric of the universe. You have to ask yourself questions about Time (What happened before the Big Bang?), Space (What would happen if you fell into that Black Hole?), and even the particles and atoms that make up your own body. I'm making it sound really out there, like it is a bunch of old scientists sitting around and talking about life, but really it is Math-based and requires lots of experiments.

Before our time, Physicists (the scientists who work on this stuff) used to study the world on a level that we could see and touch. For example, you may have heard the story of Isaac Newton coming up with his theory of gravity when an apple dropped from a tree and hit him on the head. Well, that was in the year 1666, and we've come a long way since then.

[Extra: In the 1800s, Physicists were all about electricity and magnetism (which were discovered to be related when a teacher, setting up for class accidentally set some electric wires near a magnetic compass).]

As technology developed in the early part of the 1900s, people could make more and more exact observations about smaller and smaller objects. Physicists started to find that when they looked at the very smallest things, they behave in strange and surprising ways. I'm not talking about small like an ant or even small like the cells you learn about in Biology class. Smaller. I'm talking about atoms and the things that make up atoms, called subatomic particles. (That prefix sub- just means smaller than; and particle is a fancy word for object or thing.

[Extra: For those of you who have taken Biology, there are about 100 trillion atoms in a single cell -- and coincidentally there are about 100 trillion cells in a human body.)]

A picture of a Helium atom: two Protons and two Neutrons stuck in the middle (called the Nucleus), circled by two floating electrons.

You may already know about some subatomic particles from your science class: The most common ones are Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons. In addition to being subatomic particles, these can also be called quantum particles -- this means that they are particles that act in crazy and unpredictable ways because they are so small (we'll talk about some of that unpredictability in a minute).

Now, you may be wondering why a person would be interested in looking at something so small. Einstein got interested because he liked to think about Philosophy. The United States government got interested in the 1930s and 40s, when it was discovered that atoms hold huge amounts of energy for being so small and that if you blew up a lot of them at the same time you would have a bomb much more powerful than dynamite -- This led to the atomic bomb. Computer companies got interested in the 1980s when they started making electrical circuits so small that they acted in ways that the scientists couldn't understand -- Those circuits and chips now power your computers and cell phones.

One of the big things that makes the subatomic world so hard for us to understand is that opposite situations can be true at the same time. Remember how I mentioned that a coin when it's flipped can only be heads or tails when it lands? Not so for quantum particles.

These particles are rarely found alone (they are usually part of a larger atom, and atoms are usually clustered together), but let's imagine for a moment that we could flip an individual Neutron as if it were a coin. You toss it up in the air and when it lands, you cover it with your hand. If this were a quarter, you would know that it was Heads or Tails under there, and you were just waiting to find out. But for the Neutron, it would actually be both Heads and Tails -- until you looked at it. Only when you lifted your hand would the Neutron decide to be Heads or Tails. The situation in which the Neutron is both Heads and Tails -- or any time that opposites are true -- is called "Quantum Superposition" (This is part of the joke from the LOLCats picture at the beginning of this post: "kwantumz sooperpozishin.")

If you feel confused right now, it's perfectly natural; this idea makes no sense to us. Here's an example of how it would be if Quantum Superposition were possible for things that are our size: You could be watching a basketball game on TV, and let's say that a player is shooting at the buzzer to win the game. The ball is just leaving his hand, and suddenly your house's power goes out. You now do not know whether the ball goes in or not, whether the player's team wins or loses. Therefore, the team both wins and loses; the ball went through the net and it bounced off the rim. The team might even be both moving forward in a tournament and eliminated from it. ...That is, until you check the scores the next day to find out what happened (like lifting your hand off the Neutron). It turns out that the ball went in, and the team only remembers having won the game (not both possible outcomes). Crazy, huh?

The question that most people ask at this point is: how do we know that the Neutron wasn't Heads the whole time it was under our hand -- the way that a quarter would be -- and we only just found out when we checked it? That's the thing about the Quantum world: until a particle is observed (by another particle or by humans with a microscope), it doesn't have to decide what any of its characteristics are. A Neutron is not like a baseball or a watermelon that is solid and well-defined -- it's more fluid than that. A sub-atomic particle does not even have to choose where it is until an observer forces it to decide.

A Physicist friend of Einstein's, Erwin Schrodinger (SHRO-din-jer), took these issues a step further with the thought experiment (an experiment that you just imagine), that people usually now call Schrodinger's Cat. In the experiment, there is a certain atom that has a 50% chance of "decaying" (which means that it shoots out some of its energy as a tiny amount of light) in the course of one hour. The atom is inside a box with a detector that will see if light is released from the atom. That detector is hooked up to a device that, if some light is observed, would release poison gas into another box that has a cat inside. Once an hour has gone by (since it was the time period for the 50% chance that the atom would decay) so the experimenter turns off the detector.

PETA had a field day with this one.

This situation is different from the examples of "flipping" a Neutron and the Quantum basketball game, because it mixes the subatomic world with our very large one. A Neutron, by itself, has pretty much no impact on anything, so who cares if it's Heads or Tails. The quantum superposition of the basketball game simply does not happen in our world. But there is a quantum superposition for an atom's decay, and a cat's life hangs in the balance. (It could have been any animal or living thing in that box, just so long as it was something large enough to see and touch.)

The question that Schrodinger asked was: Could the cat be both dead and alive? Remember, we said that the 50% chance of the atom decaying and shooting off light is like the probability that a coin will land Heads or Tails, except that the coin is both Heads and Tails until we check -- the atom both has decayed and has not decayed. Can the cat in the box be in a quantum superposition of "Alive" and "Dead"? [There you go, that's the punch-line to the picture at the beginning of the post.] If the experimenter opened the box and found that the cat was alive, the cat would only remember having been alive. And if it were dead, then when did it die? When the experimenter opened the box?

Schrodinger first asked these questions in 1935. The best answer that anyone could give for a long time was: Yes, there is in fact a period of time in which the cat was both dead and alive (not like a zombie, but both fully dead and fully alive), until the experimenter opened the box. However, this is not true. Physicists have since figured out that there is no Quantum Superposition for very large things. If the experimenter opened the box and found that the cat was dead, then the cat died at some definite point before the experimenter opened the box and even before having turned off the detector. Remember how we said that the Neutron was both Heads and Tails, until we observed it? Well, the observer doesn't have to be a human; the detector in the box counts too. So there was in fact a definite time (let's say 35 minutes into the hour of the experiment) when the light was released from the atom and the cat died. There was no time when the cat was both dead and alive. [Note that if the atom had been all alone, far away from any other particles, then it would have been in a superposition of both decayed and not decayed -- but this is not the case in our experiment.]

This is all to give a simple explanation of an advanced concept in Probability. I'd said in a previous post that even though there is a 50% chance of getting Heads or Tails on any given flip, you couldn't have a coin flip that was 50% Heads and 50% Tails; it is always forced to be one or the other. Well, with (unobserved) subatomic particles, both Heads and Tails happen all the time. You can flip that Neutron as many times as you want, but as long as you don't look at it, then it is both Heads Up and Tails Up, every time.

Mr. Narasimhan's blog

Mr. Narasimhan, who sits at the desk next to mine, has his own blog called Some Random Math Stuff. Check it out.

Probability: Dice, Coin Flips, and Life

The six-sided die is one of the simplest, commonest, yet most perplexing devices created by human hands. How does something so tiny defy all but the most general predictions? Just consider the fact that it inspires such awe in our society that there are laws surrounding their use. (I should probably mention that even teaching about dice is frowned-upon in our country; some textbooks only refer to dice as "random event generators" -- but we know what they really mean.) Instead of fearing the die, though, let's empower ourselves by working to understand it.

[Note: This post is pretty long, so for those with short attention spans, I'll summarize it for you right here.

1. Probability is given as the number of desired outcomes, compared with the number of possible outcomes. The probability of rolling a 3 on a die is 1:6, since there is only one face on the die with the number 3 and there are six possible faces that can land up.
2. Past random events do not influence future random events. Just because you rolled a 3 doesn't mean you will roll all the other numbers before you roll 3 again. You can easily roll two 3's in a row.
3. Probability can be thought of as our confidence level that a particular event will occur. If you flip a coin four times, it is not guaranteed that the coin will land heads up twice. But you can be 50% confident that it will.

If you have trouble understanding any of these or want to explore them more then check them out in the corresponding Parts 1, 2, and 3 below.]

Part 1: One Die
A regular die has six faces -- all labeled a different number, 1 through 6 -- and the weight of the die is evenly distributed. (Even distribution of weight means that no single side is heavier than the others. If one side were significantly heavier, it would tend to land face down more often than the other faces; this is what we call a "loaded" die.) Casinos go to great lengths (ie they spend a lot of money) to buy dice in which the weight is perfectly distributed.

So, for a perfectly fair die, what are the odds that I roll a 6? And is it any different from the odds that I roll a 2?

The second answer is: No, the odds of rolling a 2 and a 6 are identical. The numbers on a die are simply markings that label the sides -- it would be the same as if they were labeled by letters or different colors. The number on each face has no bearing on the odds it will be rolled, since all of the faces are equally likely (remember that the weight was evenly distributed in the die).

At this point, we say confidently that the probability of rolling a 6 is the same as a 2 (is the same as a 1, as a 3, etc), but what exactly is the probability that I roll a 6?

The way that we calculate the probability of an event's occurrence (in this case, the probability of rolling a 6) is we consider the total number of possible results and compare it with the number of results that we want. Considering a die, as it rolls in our hand, there are six possible sides that we may roll; it may land on the 1, the 2, the 3, the 4, the 5, or the 6 -- s0 6 possible outcomes, all of which are equally likely. Now, we ask what is the probability I roll a 6? Well, there is only one desired outcome out of six possible ones, so we say that the probability is 1:6 (which is read as "one-to-six" or "one-out-of-six" and which may also be written as "1/6").

As a side note, randomly producing numbers is one thing that computers are very good at, and there are many sites on the web that have Java and Flash applications to roll dice. I like this one, since it allows you to choose the number of dice you want, and if you set Results to "Session," then it will record the results of each roll you do. (The "Auto-Roll" button gives the results for however many rolls you type in the box, and setting Results to "Historical" shows the results for every roll that has been done on the website.) You can go there to test out all the stuff we're talking about here or just pick up some real dice of your own.

For contrast, let's say that you and I are playing a game where we roll a die to see who goes first (ie whoever rolls the higher number). I start and roll a 3. You have to roll higher than 3 to get the first turn, which means rolling either 4, 5, or 6. In this case, those are 3 desired outcomes out of 6 possible outcomes (I'm assuming here that you want to go first...). So, we say that the probability is 3:6.

Another way to come to this conclusion is figuring which are the desired outcomes (4, 5, and 6) and adding up their regular, old probabilities. The probability of a 4 is 1/6; the probability of a 5 is 1/6; the probability of a 6 is (once again) 1/6. So, summing them up:

• 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 3/6

And like the fractions that you're used to, 3/6 can be reduced to 1/2.

But what does a 1:2 probability mean? Or for that matter...

Part 2: What does a probability mean, in general?
Well, in a very technical sense, a probability simply gives you two pieces of information: the number desired outcomes and the number of total outcomes (...which is exactly what we said before). But that doesn't really tell us anything, does it? Consider this: The probability of rolling a 6 is 1:6. But I might roll a 4 twice before I roll the 6 that I'm waiting for. If both faces of the die were equally likely: does that defy the logic of our discussion? Shouldn't I have rolled 4 only once before the 6?

Not at all. You should make a mental note to yourself that past (random) events do not influence future (random) events. This is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around, and even the most brilliant mathematicians and scientists, poker players and craps shooters make mistakes all the time because they forget that simple rule. If we could use past throws to predict future ones, then you could figure out an easy system to win every time. Heck, the stock market would be a gold mine. What this all means is that the opening scene of Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is perfectly possible (...however unlikely it may be).

In the scene, R. and G. are friends playing a game that they often do while out walking. Each is holding a bag of gold coins, and they bet Heads or Tails on coin flips, such that the winner of the bet keeps the coin that was just flipped. Rosencrantz has been betting only heads and has won 92 flips in a row, as they step onto the stage. They have played this game many times before, and it has always been about even. So, how is this possible? Guildenstern wonders aloud all the conceivable reasons why this would be happening:

Guil: It must be indicative of something, besides the redistribution of wealth. (He muses.) List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double headed coins, and betting against himself in a private atonement for an unremembered past. (He spins a coin at Ros.)

Ros: Heads.

Guil: Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety times... (He flips a coin, looks at it, tosses it to Ros.) On the whole, doubtful. Three: divine intervention, that is to say, a good turn from above concerning him, cf. children of Israel, or retribution from above concerning me, cf. Lot's wife. Four: a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually (he spins one) is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does.

We live in a universe of infinite possibilities -- and few of those possibilities are more likely than any others. Shortly after this mini-speech, G. goes on to observe: "The scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defense against the pure emotion of fear." In this case, phenomena refers to the unlikely number of heads -- the possibility of the improbable -- but there is a more general truth to what he is saying: Random events -- events that happen without any good reason at all -- scare us, as fragile human beings, and scientific or mathematical analysis is our way to face that fear, if not to conquer it. But I digress...

Part 3: Coin Flips
Flipping coins is even simpler than rolling dice, since there are only two possible outcomes. The probability the coin landing on heads is 1:2 and on tails is (surprise!) 1:2. Does this mean that a coin will land on each side 50% of the time?

1. On the first throw, a coin lands on heads. At that point, the coin has landed heads 100% of the time. If we stopped now. That would be our final tally... far off from our prediction of 50% of the time.
2. The second throw is heads again. Still 100%.
3. A third throw lands tails. This now means that we have landed heads 66% of the time (getting closer to 50%!) and on tails 33%.
4. A fourth toss lands heads, so now we have had heads 75% of the time.

Never once during this brief examination did we find that heads or tails had a 50% occurrence. The only way that you could get that result is if the coin could somehow land as both heads and tails (imagine something like the coin landing on its side) each throw. Since, however, the coin must land on either one side or the other (ie it is forced to be entirely in one of the two possible categories and not somehow both), we can think of a probability as our level of confidence that a particular event will happen. I can only ever be 50% confident that the coin will land heads; I can never believe that one side is more likely than the other to land face up.

Where we see to so 50% start to emerge again is not after a few flips, but when the number of coin flips grows larger and larger. Remember that dice rolling website I pointed out earlier? Well, there's a coin flipping page too. Set Results to Historical and take a look.

At this time I'm writing this, there had been 2,412,539,104 coin flips ever done on that page; 1,206,193,471 of them were Heads. That means Tails landed up over 152,000 times more often. (152,000 times that Guildenstern should have been winning!). But, overall, Heads won 49.99% of the time.

As the number of coin flips approaches infinity (which we will talk about later, I'm sure) the percentage of heads approaches 50% (See how close it was after 2 billion flips?). Likewise, with a 6-sided die, as the number of rolls approaches infinity, the number of 3's that you roll approaches 1/6 (which equals 16.67%).

Get it?

Every American Should See This Chart

"Obama and McCain's Tax Proposals," from the Washington Post



Read every word on it (even the small ones), and this chart basically stands for itself. Love it or hate it (which all depends on your point of view), this is what your family's income will look like in 2009.

The only extra piece of information that I would use to contextualize the numbers is that Obama's tax increase on the top 1% of earners in the country comes from eliminating the tax cuts that Bush put into place at the beginning of his first term. This means that the top 1%'s taxes go back to the same levels as in the 1990s (and they get to keep that 10% extra from the meantime).

Bottled Water

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a fantastic organization of scientists and sociologists (people who study the behavior of societies) based right here in the East Bay that studies all kinds of issues in people's everyday lives. Their latest study is on BOTTLED WATER. (If you're a Wave Maker, you probably have already drunk at least one bottle today, so this is a study for you to check out!)

The reason why the EWG did this study is because tap water has to be tested by the government at least once per year to see if there are pollutants, but there is nobody like that testing bottled water. The companies that make bottled water claim that they hold themselves to the same government standards, so the EWG decided to see if they were telling the truth.

The results are not great. First, they determined that Walmart and Giant's store brands ("Sam's Choice" and "Acadia," respectively) are essentially tap water. And those were the healthiest of the brands tested. There were all kinds of pollutants in the other brands, including Tylenol and arsenic:

Altogether, the analyses [...] of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.

The EWG did not name the other 8 brands of bottle water for various reasons, including the fact that the level of pollution in each brand can change over time (eg, a company might change its purification system slightly from one month to the next). In case you are wondering, the Walmart and Giant brands were revealed because they were some of the first tests that EWG did, and EWG is planning to bring a lawsuit against Walmart soon.

Now, there may be some of you at home who are wondering why Walmart would have a lawsuit brought against them, if they were just bottling tap water. Well, that's because California has some of the toughest laws in the county about chemical levels in consumer products. (You are probably familiar with the label: “WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer" -- note that it's only California and not other states!) Apparently, Walmart was bottling their water in Nevada (specifically in Las Vegas), where they allow higher levels of pollution. If Walmart doesn't change their water soon, they are going to have to start putting that Warning label on their water.

What should you, Wave Makers, do? Stop drinking water?

NO! If bottled water is all that's available, then by all means drink it! Water is one of the most basic nutrients for human beings. But instead of just thinking about what's immediately available to you, start planning ahead.

The first thing that you can do is take that empty water bottle that you just drank and fill it with the filtered water from the tap in the kitchen. That way, you get the healthiest water available and you produce less trash!

The second thing that you can do is buy something like a Kleen Kanteen, which is made of stainless steel, to hold your water. Long story short, many plastics have certain kinds of toxins that leech into whatever is inside of them. I wouldn't worry too much if I were you, especially if you're not putting hot liquids (eg hot chocolate) into them, but in both my and EWG's opinion, it's best to be on the safe side.

[Extra: EWG's last major report came out early in the summer, revealing that 4 out of 5 sunscreens "contain chemicals that may pose health hazards or don't adequately protect skin from the sun's damaging rays. Some of the worst offenders are leading brands like Coppertone, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena."]