An Associated Press story posted at 9:31 pm last night by Brett J. Blackledge notes that the Obama adminsitration “has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama‘s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.” Recipients of federal money were originally supposed to report how many jobs they had “saved or created.” Now, they’re just supposed to report how many people got paid with the money.
The “saved or created” approach was an attempt to estimate how the Recovery Act spending affected employment. Unfortunately, it was impossible for this approach to deliver what it promised, as I pointed out in testimony to Congress last May. To know how many jobs the Recovery Act spending saved or created, we need to control for other factors that affect employment. We also need to control for the employment effects of the borrowing (and future taxing) that pays for the spending.
This is what good “macroeconomic” analysis does. It is not what employers do when they put people on the payroll. Asking employers who received federal money to tell us how many jobs were created or saved is asking them to give us information that they do not have and cannot acquire.
Under the new approach, employers will report quarterly how many people they are paying with the federal money. Since the reports will be quarterly, some jobs may be counted more than once — I guess as much as four times a year. According to the AP story, some Republicans are complaining that the new approach will lead to even larger and more misleading job numbers.
The numbers will likely be higher. But they will not necessarily be misleading, as long as recovery.gov makes clear that these are simply reports on the number of people paid with the federal money, not an attempt to measure the number of jobs created.
Estimating jobs created is work for serious macroeconomists who try to control for other factors affecting the results. There’s of course plenty of room for disagreement over how to do this, as this commentary by my Mercatus Center colleagues Garrett Jones and Veronique de Rugy demonstrates.
The administration’s decision demonstrates once again the old adage that data is not knowledge.
Google’s policy blog just announced that Google, along with several other companies around the world, has been subjected to Chinese-sponsored cyber attacks. As a result, Google will stop censoring the search results on Google.cn and as a consequence, may close its Chinese offices.
This decision is refreshing. Despite over two decades of easing restriction on its people, Chinese regime remains brutally oppressive and continues to commit heinous crimes against its own people. In a world that’s all too eager to look the other way so it can cash-in on China’s economic boom, Google has decided to forgo profits and take a stand against this oppressive regime.
I hope that many other companies follow Google’s lead. Perhaps even the US government could do so, but so long as China owns one out of every four dollars of foreign-held US debt, Google shouldn’t count on it.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released new “Internet, broadband, and cell phone statistics” based on surveys conducted in late 2009. The survey, among the most respected industry, reveals the shocking racism of the cell phone industry, which is clearly discriminating against historically disadvantaged European-Americans: 62% of Hispanics and 59% of non-Hispanic blacks are “wireless Internet users” compared to only 52% of white Americans.
Congress must act to correct this clear racial travesty. Since it appears that white Americans still use home broadband at higher rates, the clear answer is to create an “Internet Truth & Reconciliation Commission” responsible for reallocating (by force, if necessary) un-cool home broadband connections to more mobile minority users and much “hipper” wireless connections (which are more popular among the technologically trendsetting 18-29 crowd) to coolness-challenged white users until a perfect numerical parity is reached. Only then will digital Racial Justice be achieved for all Americans.
Last year there was discussion of a possible return of the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” that used to apply to broadcasters. This year, we should all be aware of the FTC’s stepped-up rhetoric toward an “Unfairness Doctrine” for privacy–an increased effort toward enforcing the “unfair” part of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
Historically, the approach of the FTC toward privacy has been one of notice and consent and to hold companies to the word of their privacy policies — if companies say one thing and then do another, the FTC goes after them for being deceptive. This is the “deceptive” part of the FTC’s power to enforce the law against unfair or deceptive commercial practices.
For privacy, we really haven’t seen the “unfair” part being enforced. But if public comments from high-ranking officials is any indicator (and it is), that’s about to change.
A recent New York Times article summarizes its interview with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, chief of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. It’s another insight into how aggressive the commission wants to be toward privacy.
Advise-and-consent “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent,” Mr. Vladeck said. “The literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, he said.
But even if people did read privacy policies, Vladeck still doesn’t think it is fair that people give consent to data practices, often in exchange for free services: Continue reading →
they will collaborate to help companies create and use new forms of digital signs. By exploiting Intel chips and Microsoft software, the companies hope to bring more interactivity to such devices and help retailers customized marketing offers to consumers.
Signs equipped with cameras and specialized software could recognize the age, gender and height of people in front of them, and tell what products and images received the most attention, the companies said. By gathering information about which messages are more effective, they add, traditional retailers could develop marketing approaches that better counter Web-based competitors. “Every year retailers lose more ground to online [sellers], and they have to do something about that,” said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s embedded computing division.
Down below, I have jotted down a couple of thoughts about the rise of “digital signage” and more targeted forms of retail marketing, only a few of which I was able to get across in this short TV spot. I think it’s an exciting new development for both retailers and consumers for the reasons I explain down below:
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s Chief Information Officer, may want to turn his attention to the The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which begins its public hearings tomorrow. Here’s a screen shot of the Commission’s website as of 11:02am EST today:
I also grabbed a copy of the PDF-only Notice of Open Meeting, as the site, located at http://www.fcic.gov, is scheduled to launch in its full form later today. This is according to Ray Lehmann, Senior Editor with SNL Financial who spoke to a representative of the Commission this morning.
Launching a site for a Commission the day before it holds its first hearing is unacceptable. The “page and a PDF” placeholder above, which cannot be found using any of the major search engines, hardly makes up for this.
A good CIO should outline clear guidelines about how and when sites go live, especially in an administration that professes to have a strong commitment to making government more transparent. Either Kundra hasn’t established these protocols or the FCIC isn’t following them. Either way, Kundra needs to do his job and make sure this sort of slap-shod approach to making government information available on the web is no longer accepted.
Kundra was recently named 2009 CIO of the year by Information Week for his efforts to modernize the antiquated hulk that is the federal IT infrastructure. It would seem he still has much work to do.
If this robotic girlfriend—unveiled last weekend at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and costing $7-9k—actually goes mainstream, I’ll bet it’s only a matter of time before we see some state lawmaker somewhere propose to ban the toys. The FCC well, no doubt, follow suit, by demanding the incorporation of parental control tools into the devices so Junior doesn’t have his way with Ms. Roxxxy (or her soon-to-be-released male counterpart, Rocky) while Mom and Dad are out at NASCAR the opera.
Laugh if you will, but if Moore’s Law holds true, such robots will become smarter, cheaper, and probably sexier as microchips continue to plummet in price and meaningful artificial intelligence becomes marketplace reality. Move over, Roomba, Roxxxy has arrived—and she ain’t no Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons! Telegraph reports that there’s a whole book about this:
In a 2007 book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” British chess player and artificial intelligence expert David Levy argues that robots will become significant sexual partners for humans, answering needs that other people are unable or unwilling to satisfy.
But the most interesting part of the telegraph article is creator Douglas Hines’s motivation:
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever.
This sounds an awful lot like the plot of Caprica, the new SyFi television series, a prequel set 58 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, the cult phenomenon that even seduced hardened TV-refusenik like me. Continue reading →
The fun folks at Cracked.com tried to imagine what the world would be like without the Internet. Think porn, piracy, and pranks . But beyond that, the remaining examples point out how ill-suited the offline world is for the types of interpersonal communications that take place online. Maybe that’s why, without the Internet, these Photoshop pundits predict we’ll all be reading newspapers and getting perfect scores on grammar tests.
A funny thing happened to the FCC Friday on its way to regulating the Internet: a federal appeals court panel questioned the agency’s authority to regulate the web. There’s no final decision yet, but an adverse ruling could stop the agency’s Internet regulation plans in their tracks. And for good reason.
In proposing new neutrality rules last October, the FCC one rather inconvenient obstacle: there isn’t anything in the Communications Act, or any other statute, actually giving them power to regulate such things. Internet service, by the FCC’s own reckoning, is not a telecommunications service, nor is it cable TV, or broadcasting, or anything else the law give the FCC authority to regulate. Continue reading →
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.