BCP Imports LLC, maker of the Silly Bandz bracelets that have become an accessory de rigueur on elementary school playgrounds, is the latest small company looking for a way to extend its appeal with pint-sized customers.

Retailers selling the packs of 24 bracelets for $5 to $7 a pop cannot keep them in stock, and the company has had to hire more than 350 employees since October, according to founder Robert Croak. Silly Bandz have generated more than $100 million in annual sales, he says.

The kids can’t get enough. As parents, we use them as incentives to get ours to do what they otherwise find difficult (practicing piano, putting away toys, etc.). Everybody seems reasonably happy with our very local economy. When this fad dies, our currency will crash. Of course, they’ll be another.

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Google is reading my mind—or trying to. Drawing on the terabytes of data it collects on people’s search queries, it predicts, with each letter I type, what I’m most likely to be looking for. …

It felt a little creepy, too. Every time Google presents me with search terms customized to what I’m typing, it reminds me that the company monitors my every move. The privacy risks inherent in such long-distance exchanges became apparent in February, when three European researchers revealed that they had used intercepts of some Google Suggest traffic to reconstruct people’s searches. Alerted to the breach, Google quickly added a new layer of security to the transmissions, but the researchers claim that vulnerabilities remain.

Fair enough and good to know. But one need not use Google. There are alternatives. Vote with your feet (fingers). Carr also writes,

Software programmers are taking the displacement of personal agency to a new level. Relentlessly focused on making their programs more “user friendly,” they’re scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment. We follow their scripts when we click on one of Google’s keyword suggestions, and we follow them when we select from a list of categories to describe ourselves and our relationships on Facebook. These choices are convenient, but they’re not our own. They’re generalizations masquerading as personalizations.

This goes too far. The choices are most certainly our own, beginning with the choice to use a Google product and including the choice to follow one of its suggestions. Is a thesaurus a masquerade too? After all, if I want a synonym for “overreach” and turn to a thesaurus it may suggest “fail,” “go wrong,” and “miscarry.” How convenient. I’ll choose “fail.” Is this a breach of my autonomy?! What if I wanted something more like, “hype.” Maybe I should throw off all the shackles of the oppressive language my culture has chosen for me and make up my own words. “Foobagiberglob!!!” Evil thesaurus!

Look, Google products and a thesaurus are tools. We can fail to understand them. We can fail to use them well. But the failure is ours.

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The question is how to do this? If I bring my laptop then the temptation to work too much will be great. I’ll want to write. I’ll want to blog. I’ll be distracted by my Google Reader RSS feeds. Plus, every time I open it, for any reason, there could be justified rolling of eyes from family members. The time away from work isn’t just for me. So, no laptop. Not only would it tempt me to do too much it will look like work even if I’m reading a novel in PDF form (it could happen).

Appearances matter. Apparently it can spoil other people’s moods if they think I’m working too much on vacation. My definition of too much and theirs may not be the same. My goal is to keep it confined to moments when my time really is my own and to keep it to reading only (marginal note taking is OK). In truth, I don’t expect to do very much of it. But I want to be prepared just in case. (Sometimes I’m up all night.) If I’m fully distracted by other things and sleeping well I won’t miss not doing any work related reading.

My solution had been (and likely will be) to bring a bunch of paper. When other folks crack open their novels or are otherwise doing their own thing, I can pull out a paper and read it. It almost looks like reading a magazine or a book, though not quite. That is, it just about appears to be vacation behavior even though it is work related. It would be fun for me and borderline acceptable behavior in appearance. Almost perfect!

I just printed what I want to bring and it is a lot of paper. I’m really embarrassed about having printed it all. Normally it would have resided on my laptop, and I’d have saved a tree or two.

Maybe it is time for an e-reader? If one or another of them can accept PDF, PowerPoint, and Word files then it would solve my problem. It would look exactly like I’m reading a novel in electronic form and wouldn’t require the lugging of all that paper.

Whether an e-reader is the solution depends on what it can take as input. I’ve put the question to co-blogger Ian and he wrote me:

It is easy to get PDFs on your iPad and there is an app called iAnnotate that will let you mark them them up like paper. Reading and marking up PDFs is one of the main reasons I got the iPad. Before the iPad came out, I bought a Kindle DX and returned it when I discovered it had no means of annotating PDFs beyond bookmarking. The iPad is really the killer device for going completely paperless.

OK then. I want one. If my family knows I’ll use it to read work-related material instead of novels on vacation, will they buy one for me? What if it has the ability to access the web? Does that make it too much like a laptop for vacation use?

Sometimes less is more.

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I did nothing wrong.  I follow the rules.  I pay my bills.  I go to my appointments.  I remember to refill on time.  I do everything right.  And I’m absolutely screwed.

Best health care system in the world my ass.

And remember, Carroll is a physician and a researcher who studies our health system. If it fails him, even in a small way, imagine what it’s doing to those less able to “work it.”

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It may be important to know that I run the latest version of Firefox with Google Toolbar and iTunes on Windows XP, and I listen to an iPod Nano (either first or second generation; I don’t know how to distinguish). Also, my Google toolbar gripes are consistent across three different computers. Finally, my Google Toolbar gripes are new (a week or two old) and my iPod ones are ancient (been happening for years).

1. Google Toolbar calendar button doesn’t work (clicking on it does nothing). Yes I’ve updated it, which causes it to work for the current Firefox session. It keeps reverting to a useless button. Why?

2. Google Toolbar search box history stays open even after initiating search, i.e. hitting “Enter” (I can close it by clicking elsewhere, but I shouldn’t have to). Yes I’ve read some stuff about this problem online, but nothing helpful. What gives?

3. iPod freezes up, requiring reset (holding down center button + Menu) upon initiating (requesting to play) first podcast after a sync unless I do so immediately after disconnecting USB cable. That is, I can avoid the freeze if after syncing and recharging I start playing a podcast immediately. But if I wait until the next morning to do so, it freezes. ‘Splain that one.

4. Can’t pause a podcast on my iPod within the first ~9 seconds. If I start playing a podcast (e.g. right after syncing–see number 3) and want to pause it right away I can’t. I have to wait about 9 seconds into the podcast. How come?

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I was pushing a wide, double stroller with a sleeping toddler as cargo (Fraktion freight of a different sort?). A support column in the center of the left checkout aisle I selected prevented my entry. Heroic contortions of the over-sized stroller might have permitted passage but would have risked waking the toddler. I know well the opportunity cost of a ruined nap so I kept the stroller steady and took the only checkout option available to me.

Thus, I moved from the left to the right cashier and was now in line behind the other shopper who could have used either checkout (she was pushing a relatively narrow shopping cart, not a double-wide stroller). The checkout I vacated was now empty with an idle cashier. Clearly I would have been better off if we had made the opposite assignment of cashiers to shoppers. At the moment I had this thought it wasn’t too late to do so as the other shopper had not yet removed any items from her cart.

A Pareto improving change in the allocation of cashiers to shoppers was possible! That is, I would be better off if the other shopper and I switched, she to the left and me to the right cashier. She would be no worse off. In fact, I could compensate her for making the change. How much were the few minutes of time saved by making the switch worth to me? A quarter? A dime? How much would she require to spend ten seconds switching? A nickle? A penny? This market should clear. But it didn’t.

That’s because we don’t normally think this way. It’s a little weird. Knowing as much I would not (and did not) offer her cash to switch. The most I would have done is politely point out that I was unable to use the other cashier and ask if she would mind changing. But I didn’t even do that. And the reason is that I was enjoying the thoughts I just shared.

With a sleeping child in the stroller and a rare quiet moment in a busy weekend my mind went into economist mode. I had a good time and would not have traded the experience for even a dollar. Paradoxically the allocation of cashier resources to shoppers turned out to be efficient after all. My delay provided an opportunity to think about its inefficiency, turning the loss into a gain. Moreover, the opportunity cost of a toddler’s blown nap has been revealed. As she slept my mind was free to compose this post. I typed it up later as the well-rested and happy child enjoyed the stickers and crayons that I had purchased during the shopping trip through which she had slept. Some things even (or especially) an incidental economist cannot improve.

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Maybe I’ll tell the story another time of how one seamlessly transitions from MIT’s Stochastic Systems Group to health policy. For now I’m going to tell the story of what my graduate research was about. Since this has nothing whatsoever to do with economics, health policy, law, or my current life, I would forgive readers for stopping right here. I can’t even promise this will be much fun. My main motivation for writing this post is that it finally brings my blogging about my publications up to date. With this post every single one of my publications has been described and referenced. Whew!

Onward! In graduate school I studied multiscale signal and image processing (in the spirit of, though distinct from wavelet-based multiresolution analysis). Huh? The quick-and-dirty way to think about this stuff is successive approximation.

Example 1: In an image that looks pretty much the same everywhere (like a close up picture of tree bark) there is something very different (like a big black blob). How would a machine find it? The multiscale way is to first figure out what quadrant it is in. Then, focusing on that quadrant, figure out what quadrant of that one it is in, and so on. Zoom in by successive quadrant selection. This is what I worked on for my master’s thesis. Only I didn’t have a normal image. My measurements were weirder. They were tomographic (like a CAT scan) [1].

Example 2: You have a one-dimensional series of data (like the S&P 500). You could model it as an autoregressive (AR) process of some order. No way you’re getting a PhD for that. Instead, consider a generalization of AR models, indexed not by the integers but by nodes of a tree (in the graph theoretic, not arboreal, sense). My work was to relate such models to wavelets [2], develop computationally efficient algorithms for estimating model parameters [3], and generalizing a famous algorithm known in the AR modeling framework (Levinson’s algorithm) and using it to solve a famous problem (covariance extension) [4].

Well, I did a few other things you can read about in my thesis, and many things you cannot read about anywhere. My years as a graduate student were wonderful and fulfilling. The proof is that among my bigger regrets is that I could only find 199 scholarly works to cite in my thesis. I had wanted to break 200 but in the final moments before submission I could not come up with even one more (these were the days before Google Scholar). Pretty trivial regret, no?

I learned a lot in graduate school, including that statistical signal and image processing were not for me. Not enough policy relevance. A month after graduation I began work in health policy and economics. Ten years later I launched this blog. I could not have guessed this trajectory in a thousand tries.

[1] Frakt AB, Karl WC, and Willsky AS, “A Multiscale Hypothesis Testing Approach Anomaly Detection and Localization From Noisy Tomographic Data,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 7(6) (June 1998): 825-837.

[2] Daoudi K, Frakt AB, and Willsky AS, “Multiscale Autoregressive Models and Wavelets,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 45(3) (April 1999):828-845.

[3] Frakt AB and Willsky AS, “Computationally Efficient Stochastic Realization for Internal Multiscale Autoregressive Models,” Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing, 12(2) (April 2001): 109-142.

[4] Frakt AB, Lev-Ari H, and Willsky AS, “A Generalized Levinson Algorithm for Covariance Extension With Application To Multiscale Autoregressive Modeling,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 49(2) (February 2003): 411-424.

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One of my other hobbies is playing the trumpet. I used to be very dedicated, and I played with some talented groups in my youth (with one I played at Carnegie Hall, no joke). Then I took a decade off. Now I’m trying for a comeback. Every week or so I play duets with a friend. We were getting bored with the music we own, and I didn’t know what to try next. Fortunately I have a connection to a major city symphony-level professional trumpet player. So I asked him. Here’s some of what he recommended:

It’s hard to beat the “Selected Duets” compiled and edited by H. Voxman published by Rubank. There are two volumes.

You can also try H. Pietzsch “24 Light Instructive Duets.” Ernest Williams has duets that are more technically instructive, but less musically satisfying.

If you are looking for performance quality duets, try the “6 Pieces Breves en Duo 2 Trompettes” by Casterede.

There are duets by Manfredini, Frescobaldi, Franchescini, Vivaldi, Pezel, Stanley. Or you can look at transcriptions by Handel or other famous composers.

A good resource for brass music is Robert King Music Sales. You can search and order online. They also have a “Brass Player’s Guide” if you prefer to look at a catalog.

Suggestions are always welcome.

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When I nap, there’s at least a 50-50 chance that I’ll wake up feeling groggy and awful. Whatever cognitive benefits naps offer, they’re vastly outweighed by the period of time in which I’m useless and unhappy and desperate to go back to sleep. And it’s not as if I’m bad at waking up in general: So far as the morning goes, my experience is that I’m better and quicker at waking up than most. So what gives?

What gives is that Klein’s naps are not the right length. And that doesn’t mean they’re too short. They are more than likely too long. For most people optimal nap length is less than 30 minutes (for me it is 20). The trick is to enter the first few lighter stages of sleep and then exit before experiencing the deeper ones. Going deep risks sleep inertia, that horrible, groggy feeling to which Klein refers.

Now, I’m not a sleep scientist so take all of the above with a grain of salt. (One might do better to consult the folks over at NY Times’ All-Nighters.) However, from 9th grade biology (when I wrote a report on the subject) to fatherhood (when I read many books on it) I’ve had a decades-long interest in sleep. I trained myself to power nap in high school thinking it’d be handy in college and beyond (correct I was). I’ve fought occasional battles with insomnia which have motivated me to contemplate sleep and why it is necessary, yet sometimes elusive.

One thing I learned in my amateur study of the subject is that the body has several different systems that regulate sleep. They’re quasi-independent and can get out of phase. They’re particularly apt to do so when you wake up at the “wrong time,” like from a deep sleep phase. Part of you is still asleep even though you seem awake. Your brain remains in a zombie-like netherworld until the systems re-sync hours later. That’s why you can be a morning person who fails at naps. Consider a shorter one. Sleep on it, literally.

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