Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 59

The Jueteng Economy

Filipinos can certaily be forgiven for having mixed feelings about jueteng, their nation's equivalent of the ol' numbers racket that used to flourish on these shores. After all, jueteng helped bring down the government of former President Joseph Estrada, who was later convicted of having close ties with the underworld characters who operate the lotteries. And so when officials periodically announce fresh crusades against jueteng, as happened just weeks ago, there are always millions of Filipinos who support the endeavor—especially those with strong allegiances to the Church, which has a long track record of opposing gambling in all its forms.

Perhaps there is a way to stamp out jueteng for good, but the current strategies seem doomed to fail. The main new tactic calls for state-sanctioned lotteries that offer slightly larger payouts than their illegal counterparts. But a Filipino business journalist argues that a different approach is needed—one that educates the wagering masses on the basics of odds:

An illegal, unregulated, and unsupervised operation allows the operator to rig the results and control how much he takes in and how much he pays out. The illegal operator can, for example, arrange a manipulated result that will allow him to pay out to the winning numbers only 30% of the total amount bet. That means 70% stays with the operator. Even with bribes paid out for "protection" up and down the line, that makes for a lot of profit. One should also not overlook the fact that the taxes and license fees that will have to be borne by a legal jueteng operator may even exceed the payola of an illegal one.

A truly serious attempt to eradicate illegal jueteng requires the serious use of textbook market forces: The market demand for legal jueteng must be boosted and the market demand for illegal jueteng must be dampened. Essentially, this means making bettors voluntarily choose to place their bets with a legal (licensed) jueteng operator rather than with an illegal one. Making this happen and thus increasing the demand for legal jueteng entails a consumer-type marketing and advertising approach that makes the betting public acutely aware of the advantages of patronizing a legal operation. This would involve an information and education campaign that will tell of how the illegal game is rigged, how a rigged game cheats the bettor, and how the bettor can have higher expected profits from a fair, unrigged, and supervised numbers game.

A noble plan, but there's one big problem: the Filipino public has little faith in their government's honesty, and thus the ability of regulators to ensure that legal lotteries adhere to their posted odds. Jueteng will thrive as long as gamblers trust their cousin on the corner more than a suit-wearing bureaucrat from Manila.

A Queen's Edge

Scrambling to prep for a key interview and finish a Wired essay, so just a quickie this morning. The clip above features the coolest drummer ever to brush a cymbal; the snippet below reveals how a young woman named Courtney Larkin was able to triumph in this year's Miss National Peanut pageant:

On Monday, Larkin was still relishing the National Peanut Festival victory and the fact that she was able to finish in the top five in the pageant subcategories of verbal skills, evening gown and peanut knowledge.

She said her best friend's father is a peanut farmer, and that connection helped her learn ahead of time some of the things she needed to know for the peanut knowledge competition. That inside track gave her extra confidence as she studied the peanut facts she and the other contestants were given to prior to the quiz.

It is a travesty, of course, that the peanut knowledge questions are not online.

"War Has Been a Very Efficient Schoolmaster"

One of Microkhan's top Alaskan correspondents recently alerted me to the existence of Project Facade, one of the eeriest and coolest art projects to be found on The Tubes. The endeavor is tough to describe in a pithy sentence or two, so please bear with me as I try: Project Facade is one artist's attempt to create visual interpretations of the plastic surgery techniques pioneered by Sir Harold Gillies during World War I. Many of the resulting items are phantasmagoric uniforms that are decorated with before and after pictures of soldiers who underwent Gillies' knife, as well as stitched surgical notes taken from Gillies' files.

The project got me thinking about one of the few upsides of war: the development of advanced medical technology and techniques, which always outlast the quarrels that cause violent conflict. That was especially true during World War I, as detailed in this engrossing read from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. There are tons of great nuggets strewn throughout, such as the fact that the mortality rate from femur fractures was an astounding 80 percent before doctors figured out how to minimize the occurrence of sepsis. But anyone who's kept track of the current battle over vaccinations must take special note of the following anecdote:

As late as the last decade of the 19th century typhoid was still causing 5000 deaths annually, and in the Crimean War it had caused greater mortality than the war itself. Colonel Sir Almroth Wright began trials using vaccines made from killed typhoid bacilli on himself and the military surgeons at the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley…Wholesale inoculation of British troops was attempted in the South African War but due to bitter opposition from influential persons less than 4% of the soldiers received the vaccine. As a result of this blunder the Army had some 58 000 cases of typhoid and about 9000 deaths.

During the whole of the Great War there were 7423 British cases, with 266 deaths, in an average strength of 1 200 000…In January 1916 records showed a British death rate from typhoid 31 times higher among the unprotected. In June 1916 the ratio had increased to 50 to one, a fact brought home to the public by a popular medical journalist of the time. Goodwin made the point in 1919 that inoculation was still voluntary in the British Army and that in 1914 the efforts made to persuade the men to have it were met by "the production of the page of a certain daily journal which strongly advised against inoculation." He goes on to state: "I think it says something for the persuasive powers of our eloquence and for the intelligence of the British soldier that we were able to overcome this most pernicious advice, and that 98% of our Army were inoculated against the disease."

I'm curious if anyone knows of other major medical advances that were developed during wartime, in order to keep as many soldiers on the battlefield as possible. (Or, at the very least, to keep those soldiers confident that relatively minor wounds wouldn't permanently disable them.) One that immediately pops to mind, which I touched on briefly in , is how doctors at the 20th General Hospital in Ledo, India, conducted pioneering heart-bypass experimentation on stray dogs during their rare free moments.

Oh, and the image at the top of this post? It's a German train-car disinfection machine. Much more effective than a generous hand washing, apparently.

After Vega$

Scrambling to catch up with a pile of work after a rough trip back from Nevada—funny how an overly large and inconsiderate seatmate can really ruin an otherwise uneventful flight. So no polymathism today; in its stead, please check out The A.V. Club's recent take on Death Wish 3, the subject of last week's Bad Movie Friday entrant. This line pretty much sums it all up:

Everything abhorrent about Death Wish—its inner-city stereotyping and casual racism; its embrace of lawlessness and righteous bloodletting; Paul's rancid transformation from naïve, bleeding-heart liberal into gun-toting angel of vengeance—gets blown up to such a grotesque degree that no sane person could mistake its world for the real one. It's like a paranoid right-wing small-towner's vision of what the big city is like: a gang-infested war zone, lorded over by the cast of Breakin'.

The piece also note that the author of the Death Wish source material rejected the films, on the grounds that they celebrate the sort of vigilantism he was trying to condemn. Check out an interview with him here; he points out that the entire spirit of the first film was altered by a single directorial choice.

Emerging from the Desert

I made it through my Vega$ trip without having to set foot inside a storefront, so I consider the trip a success. Voyaging back to Microkhan world headquarters today, so please enjoy the vintage Atari ad above as I hurtle through the air at upwards of 500 miles-per-hour. Catch you tomorrow.

Roboscrews

One of my current projects is a think piece about robots, specifically those that may soon be charged with carrying out morally weighty duties. That line of inquiry has led me to delve into the history of robot prison guards—or, perhaps more accurately, robots that were briefly purported to be the prison guards of the future. Such plans have obviously never come to fruition, but the Denning Sentry apparently came close to making the penitentiary rounds back in 1985, when this admiring piece appeared in Popular Science:

Southern Steel Co. of San Antonio, Texas, the country's largest maker of prison bars, beds, and other detention-facility hardware, has ordered 600 copies of Denny; eight of these, destined for prison duty, are now undergoing advanced testing. Denning is also building robot sentries with slightly different capabilities for another private security firm, and still others to patrol factories.

A Denning Sentry can detect, within a 150-foot radius, the presence of anything or anybody that shouldn't be there, the company claims. Its swiveling head contains microwave and infrared (IR) sensors that can detect people as well as smoke. In future editions the head will also contain sniffers that can smell the faint ammonia aroma of a human body.

Needless to say, the Denning Sentry never fulfilled its promise: its maker, Denning Mobile Robotics, went bankrupt in 1993, though it experienced a brief revival shortly thereafter thanks to Australian robotics guru Allan Branch. The problem does not seem to have been handwringing over the moral issues raised by putting robots in charge of human, but rather because the Sentries cost way too much—about $110,000 in Reagan-era money, not including maintenance. An entry-level human guard, by contrast, runs just $22,010 in today's dollars.

There doesn't seem to have been much consideration given to the potential for robot prison guards since the Denning Sentry's flameout. But I have to think it's a natural next application for the technology once SUGVs evolve a bit more. Let's hope folks stop to ponder the moral dimension to that usage—I have to wonder if human guards will be more willing to employ violent measures if they're operating a robot from a remote location, rather than actually walking the prison floors.

(Image via SPAWAR)

The Magnificient

Given my longstanding fascination with North-East India, one of the primary settings for my 386-page labor o' love, I've been following Mary Kom's boxing career for a good while now. The 27-year-old mother of twins just won her fifth world championship, a feat that earned her a true hero's welcome in her native state of Manipur—a welcome that included a fat one million rupee reward, courtesy of the Manipuri government. The BBC recounts how Kom, nicknamed "Magnificient Mary," first came to don the gloves:

"When I was small, I was very interested in fighting – karate, kung fu and boxing. I used to always watch action movies, all the Jackie Chan movies," [Kom] says breaking into peals of laughter.

She grew up in the Manipur countryside amidst lush green paddy fields with mountains swelling in the distance. Her parents still work in the fields, as she once did.

It was a tough upbringing in a state hit by a violent insurgency. Even our presence brought soldiers out from the neighbouring army base…

"She never told us she'd taken up boxing," her father Tonpa tells me.

"We only found out when we read in the papers of her success in a local competition. In fact, I didn't really want to encourage her to become a sportsperson because I thought it would cost a lot of money, more than we could afford."

One striking thing about Kom's celebrity is that she has been embraced by the BJP, India's fundamentalist Hindu party. This despite the fact that Kom, like many Manipuri's, is a devout Christian who credits Jesus for all of her pugilistic success. A little big-tent pushback against the cow-protection machinations of the rival Congress party, perhaps?

Sweatin' to the Goldies

I'm Vegas bound this morning, to work on a dynamite Wired piece that's currently occupying my creative front burner. As is always the case when I journey out to Bugsy Siegel's desert dream, my thoughts have recently turned to the ways in which folks work the angles in pursuit of wealth. Most of these schemes involve the manipulation of human beings, and thus require their perpetrators to have an innate understanding of psychology. But there are also some great scams that are more suited to...

This is What Underrated Looks Like

While drinking my birthday bottle of Lucky 13 the other night, the Chubb Rock classic above suddenly came over loud-and-clear on the latest WeFunk show. It reminded me how this heavyset artist rarely disappoints, especially when cuts from his golden age waft across the sonic transom. But perhaps what's most impressive about Rock is his dedication to making music a lifelong pursuit, rather than a youthful cash-in:

To me, the whole thing is being creative. There are many writers out there who...

Just Rats in a Maze Market

Think about the place where you regularly buy your groceries. After you pass through the sliding-glass door, how do you make your way around the premises? Perhaps you believe you take this path due to habit or preference, but odds are you're nudged in one direction or another by the store's physical layout. Some supermarket's make it so that you naturally circle the place in clockwise fashion; others opt for a design that encourages, if not requires, anti-clockwise navigation. Which approach ...