Monthly Archives: March 2007

The Law of Unintended Consequences

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unintended.gifAccording to this Bloomberg article, it’s alive and well in Switzerland:

Switzerland entered a treaty with the European Union to import workers, seeking more bankers, managers and academics.
What it got was an influx of prostitutes.
The number of people offering sex for money has risen by a third in Zurich and 80 percent in Geneva since Switzerland opened its borders to workers from the 15 EU-member states at the start of 2004, police estimate. Some lawmakers predict prostitution will grow even more after the government last year removed work restrictions for residents from 10 newer EU countries as well.

Refining the Apple Rule

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apple%20logo.jpgMatthew Bishop of The Economist, who has been writing recently on imposition of ill-advised regulation on business, has come up with a refinement to Larry Ribstein’s Apple Rule (see also here) — i.e., the exception from corporate criminal liability for a popular (as opposed to an unpopular) business executive who is involved in alleged wrongdoing at the executive’s company:

This suggests to The Economist the need for a new Apple rule to guide prosecutorsóat least in cases, such as backdating, where the main supposed victim is a companyís shareholders. Our rule: if a criminal prosecution is likely to hurt a companyís share price, then donít prosecute.
Are we serious? Well, we think it’s worth a discussion . . . Cost-benefit analysis is largely absent from Americaís approach to regulating business wrongdoing, not only in criminal prosecutions, and that is probably one of the main reasons why Americaís capital markets are indeed losing their competitive edge. At the very least, encouraging the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to employ a few less lawyers and a few more economists would be a step in the right direction.

But what about the Dell Rule? — the exception in which a popular chairman of a company gets a pass on criminal liability when the chairman steps back into the CEO seat with the company under the cloud of a criminal investigation. We already know what happens to an unpopular chairman when the Dell Rule does not apply.

Eichenwald’s non-disclosure

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kurt%20eichenwald.jpgFormer NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald — best known for his coverage of the Enron scandal for the Times and his book on the scandal, Conspiracy of Fools — penned this Times article (related blog post here) over a year ago that told the sad story of a teen-ager who was seduced by online pedophiles.
Well, fresh from making a mint off of writing about Enron’s alleged non-disclosures, it appears that Eichenwald has his own non-disclosure problem relating to this story, at least according to this NY Times Editor’s Note:

An article by Kurt Eichenwald on Dec. 19, 2005, reported on a teenage boy’s sexual exploitation on the Internet, and an accompanying Reporter’s Essay by Mr. Eichenwald published on nytimes.com explained the details of his initial contact with the subject.
The essay was intended to describe how Mr. Eichenwald persuaded Justin Berry, then 18, to talk about his situation. But Mr. Eichenwald did not disclose to his editors or readers that he had sent Mr. Berry a $2,000 check. Mr. Eichenwald said he was trying to maintain contact out of concern for a young man in danger, and did not consider himself to be acting as a journalist when he sent the check.
Mr. Eichenwald explained in his essay that, at the outset, he did not identify himself to Mr. Berry as a reporter. After they met in person, but before he decided that he wanted to write an article, Mr. Eichenwald said he told the youth that the money would have to be returned. Times policy forbids paying the subjects of articles for information or interviews. A member of Mr. Berry’s family helped repay the $2,000.
The check emerged as part of a criminal proceeding involving Mr. Berry in which a Michigan man is charged with criminal sexual conduct, enticing a minor to commit immoral acts and distributing child pornography. The trial began yesterday.
The check should have been disclosed to editors and readers, like the other actions on the youth’s behalf that Mr. Eichenwald, who left The Times last fall, described in his article and essay.

This New York Magazine article reports on Eichenwald’s testimony as a witness in the criminal proceeding and Eichenwald’s long explanation with related reader comments over at PoynterOnline is also quite interesting. Meanwhile, the Gawker weighs in with a snarky post here. As the story continues to gather steam, MediaWire Daily chimes in earlier this week with this interesting aspect of Eichenwald’s payment to Berry, and this FAIR article reports on a kerfuffle that recently arose between Eichenwald, the Times, Slate and journalist Debbie Nathan over investigating online child porn in violation of child predator laws, which Gawker is reporting will result in a $10 million defamation lawsuit by Eichenwald against Nathan. Finally, Michelle Malkin piles on here.

Jody Conradt steps down

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Jody%20conradt2.jpgLongtime University of Texas women’s basketball coach Jody Conradt resigned on Monday, ending a coaching career at UT that spanned 31 years and produced 900 wins, a national championship with an undefeated team in 1986, 21 NCAA tournament appearances, three trips to the Final Four and membership in the Basketball Hall of Fame. The Chronicle’s Richard Justice has a nice tribute to Coach Conradt here.
I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Coach Conradt, but we have many mutual friends who tell me she is a classy person. A fixture at University of Texas athletic department golf outings around the state during the off-season, Coach Conradt can tell a story with the best of them, as reflected by this classic one about former Longhorn Coach Darrell Royal. Inasmuch as she remains quite popular at UT and in Austin, Coach Conradt will almost certainly be retained by UT in some alumni-related capacity.
By the way, the end of this Joseph Duarte/Chronicle story on Coach Conradt’s resignation contains this week’s candidate for the worst sentence published in the Chronicle:

“Conradt said she’s comfortable leaving the program where it’s at.”

Argh!

The Conrad Black Trial

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conrad_black%20031207.jpgFormer Hollinger International chairman Conrad M. Black goes on trial in Chicago this week on various corporate criminal charges that he looted Hollinger. My post on the indictment from a year and a half ago is here, the NY Times article on the trial is here, and the WSJ’s Ashby Jones has a fun post on Black’s Canadian trial lawyer, Fast Eddie Greenspan. But Mark Steyn has the best analysis that I’ve seen to date on the case, which is another example of why the civil justice system is a better mechanism for allocating responsibilty for the alleged wrongs than the blunt force of the criminal justice system. Steyn concludes as follows:

Even if you concede that every charge against Black is true, it’s also somewhat disproportionate for the company to blow through a $200-million cost to the company of investigating it, for U.S. prosecutors to threaten him with a 95-year jail term, and for pusillanimous Canadian regulators to facilitate the collapse of Canadian companies.
Conrad and Barbara Black are easy targets — an orotund peer of the realm and his sinister Zionist trophy clothes horse. But they were good for readers, good for newspapers, and better for capitalism than a regime of arbitrary regulatory usurpation. What has happened to Hollinger is a disgrace. I hope Conrad Black is acquitted in Chicago. But there is much more at stake here than the fate of one man.

Is the Chronicle Brad Ausmus’ PR department?

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ausmus6.jpgThe Chronicle already has ran one puff piece this Spring on the Stros’ catcher, Brad Ausmus, in which the paper somehow overlooks the fact that Ausmus is the worst hitter in Stros franchise history. Not to be outdone, however, the normally realiable Chronicle golf writer, Steve Campbell, weighs in with yet another article on Ausmus, this time rationalizing that Ausmus’ pitiful hitting is somehow made up for by his stellar defense and Zen-like handling of pitchers.
The problem with this reasoning is that there is no objective basis for it. Using last season as an example, Ausmus generated 38 fewer runs for the Stros over the course of the season than an average National League hitter would have generated using the same number of outs as Ausmus. Although defensive statistics are less precise than offensive stats, Baseball Prospectus estimates that Ausmus saved the Stros six — count’em six — more runs over the course of the season than an average National League catcher would have saved the Stros from a defensive standpoint. Thus, the Stros generated 32 fewer runs last season using Ausmus than they would have if they had found a catcher who could hit and field at an average level.
Over the course of a season, those 32 runs would have generated at least 2.5 more wins. The Stros finished one game behind the Cards last season in the National League Central.
But even the Chronicle’s subjective worship of Ausmus doesn’t make any sense. Veteran Stros pitchers such as Oswalt, Clemens and Pettitte didn’t need Ausmus to help settle them down while pitching over the last several seasons. Meanwhile, it sure didn’t seem as if Ausmus’ comforting presence helped Brad Lidge much last season or had any positive effect on inexperienced pitchers such as Taylor Buchholz and Wandy Rodriguez. Ausmus doesn’t even throw out runners attempting steals on an average basis anymore. I will concede that he blocks pitches well — his one remaining above-average talent — but as Charles Kuffner points out, the Chronicle’s subjective musings of Ausmus’ intangible contributions simply do not square with the facts.
The Stros have been one of the better Major League Baseball ballclubs over the past decade. However, indulging a player as bad as Ausmus in the lineup for such a long time is the type of decision that has prevented the Stros from getting over the hump and putting together a World Series-winning club. Rather than being the public relations department for Ausmus, the Chronicle would be coming closer to doing its real job if it pointed that out every once in awhile.

Medstory Beta

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Medstory_beta_home.gifMedstory is an interesting new search engine that offers “Intelligent Search for Health & Medicine.” When I ran a search on “diabetes,” Medstory generated at the top of the results “Information that Matters” — specific categories of information regarding diabetes, including Drugs and Substances, Conditions, Procedures, In Clinical Studies, Complementary Medicine, Personal Health, and People. Each of these categories has five related topics on which you can click to narrow your search further. Beneath these categories are the Web results, which allow you to narrow your results to specific types of information, such as news, audio/video, clinical trials, or research articles. And there is even an RSS feed for each search. Inasmuch as speed and focus is the name of the game these days in search engines, Medstory looks to be a very promising addition to the medical search field. Hat tip to Tom Mighell for the link.

The impact of blogging

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blogging_for_dummies.jpgThe blogosphere’s coverage of the Scooter Libby trial prompted James Joyner to make the following insightful observation about the impact of blogging on the processing of information:

When the blogosphere broke open RatherGate, it was through a combination of two things that the mainstream press seldom has: obsession and expertise. There are people out there who simply care more about things like Dan Rather, Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, or just about any other topic that you can think up than anyone working for any press venue. Similarly, there are people out there who know a whole lot more about the nuances of 1960s era typefaces, perjury law, FISA, or what have you than any working journalist could possibly be expected to know. The combination of these things give citizen journalists a powerful advantage.
Because bloggers donít have to even pretend to be unbiased or interested in ìall the news thatís fit to print,î I wouldnít want to rely on any one blog for my news, or even my commentary. Collectively, though, blogs add an enormous amount of information and insight to the process.

A case study in governmental incompetence

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fema-trailers.jpgJust about the time that you think that the bureaucratic bungling of allocating governmental relief funds for New Orleans cannot be topped, another story appears to top the previous one:

In a hurricane-ravaged city desperately lacking health services for the poor, the primary-care clinics that arrived in New Orleans last summer looked to be just what the doctor ordered.
The six double-wide trailers from FEMA, each equipped with eight exam rooms, were supposed to be strategically deployed around the city and provide checkups and other nonemergency health services for the city’s poor and uninsured.
But nearly nine months after they were first delivered, the trailers are still in the parking lot of University Hospital waiting to be deployed, and Louisiana State University officials are angrily asking how the seemingly simple process of bringing them into service got delayed by red tape and political foot-dragging. [. . .]
LSU hospital officials began planning for a temporary network of neighborhood clinics in early November 2005, barely two months after Hurricane Katrina knocked Charity Hospital out of commission and threw health-care services for many of the city’s uninsured into disarray.
Eight months later, in late June and early July, FEMA delivered the trailers to New Orleans, with the $761,000 bill picked up by the federal government.
It wasn’t until last week that the New Orleans City Council agreed to temporarily waive the city’s zoning code to allow the trailers to be located at six schools around the city — three on the east bank and three in Algiers — for two years.
In between fell more than 100 meetings and dozens of e-mails about the issue involving LSU executives and officials at the city, state and federal levels. And the journey is not over. The zoning waivers still need approval from Mayor Ray Nagin, which cannot occur until next week at the earliest, as well as permits from the city that could take up to six months to acquire.
Donald Smithburg, who heads LSU’s hospitals division, said university officials have stood ready to operate the clinics — each of which require one doctor, two nurses and administrative staff — since last summer, which is when LSU officials first approached the City Council about a zoning change for the clinics.
He said he was flummoxed by the continued delays. “It’s been a procedural mystery as to how we get these trailers placed,” Smithburg said.

Read the entire sordid tale.

Thinking about diet and exercise myths

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scale%20and%20question%20mark.jpgOne of my goals this year is to blog more on issues relating to nutrition and exercise, which are two of the most myth-generating subjects in American culture.
Along those lines, contrary to the information about the latest fad diets that bombards most Americans on almost a daily basis, this Sandy Szwarc post explains the reality — diets do not work, at least for most people most of the time.
Similarly, long cardio workouts are often recommended as a way to burn calories for overweight folks, most of whom look absolutely miserable doing them. As Art DeVany explains, too much cardio actually has the opposite effect — long workouts will likely make a person fatter.