Brave New Blog

Perverse Incentives

2008-12-04T07:09:00.004-07:00

In making policy, it seems that sometimes the possibility of unintended consequences is not considered. Unfortunately, whether by oversight or some other force, policies get created which create perverse incentives. Our complicated tax law has got people doing all kinds of unproductive things in order to get around paying taxes. In our welfare programs, we have some systems in place which actually make or keep people impoverished.

For example, consider a program which provides health insurance for families below the poverty line. For a family of four, this would be an income of $21,200 annually. If a job offer were extended to the father of this family for $30,000 per year, without health insurance, should he take it? It appears so, but actually, he might be worse off. If the health care benefit he is receiving is worth $12,100 per year (the average annual premium for an employer health plan covering a family of four), then in the first case, he is making practically $33,300; in the second case, he is only getting $17,900. The perverse incentive is for him to stay below the poverty line by staying underemployed.

What do you get when you extend welfare benefits to unwed mothers? Why, more unwed mothers, of course. This, in turn, creates more poverty. I'm sure the designers of our welfare programs did not intend to make more people impoverished. The fact is, when you pay for something, you get more of it.

The No Child Left Behind Act seems like a good idea, right? I mean, nobody wants to leave a child behind. The Act requires that schools show improvement in student test scores. This provides an incentive for the school to encourage low-performing students to drop out before they take the test. Oops.

Or, consider the various Digital Rights Management schemes which make it harder to copy and access music, movies, or video games. It seems like a good idea, right? But there are some fair uses of copyrighted material which DRM prevents, like saving your movies to your computer's hard drive so you can watch them without having to bother with the discs. Since pirated content doesn't have these restrictions, it creates a perverse incentive for people to pirate content instead of buying it, which is exactly the opposite of what the designers intended.

Instead of blindly reforming, we need to carefully consider all the implications of a policy before implementing it. There is an ecological balance, and if you adjust one side of the equation, you've got to deal with the other side, too.

The People of Bountiful Are Extremely Friendly

2008-09-16T09:19:00.003-06:00

My family recently moved into a new neighborhood in Bountiful, Utah. We are in a bigger house now, the drive to work is much shorter, and we have lots of fruit trees. My wife and I made a lovely pie from our fresh backyard peaches on Sunday. I couldn't be happier.

One thing that has pleasantly surprised me is just how warm and friendly our neighbors are. I feel like my family has received a very warm welcome into the local community. I have experienced this sense of hospitality in other places where I have lived, but never quite as strongly as in Bountiful. When we were moving in, my mother told me how happy she was for us, because "the people are so polite and courteous there." I haven't been disappointed.

I've lived in four different neighborhoods in Bountiful and the people have been friendly in each of them. This begs the question: Is this a trend, or a coincidence? Are the people of Bountiful really friendlier than in other places, and, if so, why?

My theories are thus:

The low crime rate makes people feel safe opening up to others in the community.
The homogeneity in religion, culture, and heritage help people feel at home with one another. People feel comfortable around people who are like them.
The very family-oriented lifestyle here helps people to love one another.
The slower pace of life makes people more relaxed and less in a hurry.
The people here are older (Bountiful's median age is 32 compared to Utah's 27, making it the 9th oldest in the state), and old people are friendlier.

Or, perhaps I am just starry-eyed. It's impossible to determine something like this quantitatively, so I think I will never know for sure. But of all the places I've lived in Utah, this place feels the most like Zion.

The Commoditization of Computers

2008-08-29T08:05:00.005-06:00

Refrigerators, televisions, and computers all cost about the same amount. You can get a good one for $2,000; a decent one for $1,200; or a cheap one for $300.

Computers stopped being cool once they started selling them at Walmart and at furniture stores.

People see computers now as just another appliance. They aren't something to be experienced, just something to get the job done. Nobody cares how a refrigerator works, they just want their food cold.

I remember when computers had mystique. When it was something special to know how one works and to have the ability to build, fix, and modify a computer. When people used to have computer hobbyist clubs. Now, computers are built in boring factories in east Asia using slave labor, and they're serviced by clueless drones at Best Buy.

These days, it seems like nobody cares. I have almost no emotional attachment to my home computer. I can't even remember the processor speed, what kind of video card it has, or how much RAM is in it. The fact is, it doesn't matter anymore. When it starts to get slow, you just go out and buy a new one. Ho hum.

There seems to still be some magic left in software, at least.

Little House on the Freeway

2008-08-22T09:32:00.007-06:00

Last night, my wife and I finally signed the papers to sell our first home.

We bought the place in October 2005, and moved in during General Conference. We were a young married couple expecting our first child, and we wanted a place of our own to raise him in. After a couple of months searching for a place we could afford, we found this one and fell in love with it. We negotiated the price and the terms with the previous owners over the kitchen table.

Compared to the other places we had looked at, it seemed wonderful. In our price range, we had been stuck looking at old houses in bad condition in questionable neighborhoods in Layton, Utah. So when my mother-in-law told us about this for-sale-by-owner house in Kaysville that she discovered, we were pleasantly surprised. It was newer (only 8 years old) and less expensive than the ones we had been looking at, and it was closer to Bountiful, which is were we both grew up and were living at the time.

There were only two problems. First, that it was small (1,213 square feet), although it was rather bigger than the one-bedroom basement apartment we had been living in. Second, it abutted Interstate 15, which was very noisy. I-15 is the major thoroughfare for Davis County residents going to and from Salt Lake County, so it gets a lot of use.

Easy Freeway Access

We decided to go through with it anyway, and were happy with it. I planted strawberries and had my own lawn to mow. I felt like I had more roots in the community because I was a landowner. The local ward had lots of young families like us, and we made very good friends with a couple of those families, even sharing Family Home Evening with them. After a couple of days, I didn't even hear the freeway noise, but it bothered my wife the whole time we lived there.

Eventually, I changed jobs from a software company in North Salt Lake to one in South Jordan, which changed my commute time from 20 minutes to 60. The long drive came to wear on me and so we decided to move closer to work. We fixed up and decorated the house, put it on the market, and spent a few months keeping it spotless. It all finally came to a close yesterday.

So, this is adieu to my first bit of soil. I'm happy for the memories and hope to make many new ones in our next place.

Home Again

2008-05-23T07:27:00.005-06:00

My little family has been living with my wife's parents in Bountiful for the past couple of months, because my wife had some complications with her pregnancy of our second child, William. (They are both doing fine now.) Her parents have been very helpful and supportive and I am very grateful that they helped take care of us while Chelsea was incapacitated. It was a good experience and I enjoyed getting to know her parents better.

We moved back into our house in Kaysville last night. It is good to be in a place of our own again, with all our familiar furniture, utensils, and appliances. Still, it doesn't feel quite like home. We put our house up for sale about the time we moved in with her parents, and it hasn't sold yet. It has been getting a lot of showings, but no offers. I understand this is pretty typical of the market right now. As part of our preparation to sell the house, we gave up our emotional attachment to it. So, it feels kind of like we are living in a hotel.

I am looking forward to when we can sell the place and buy our next house, and start that new chapter of life. It will be nice to finally settle down again. For now, though, I am just happy to be able to walk around the house in my underwear again.

Jaywalker Sighting

2008-05-05T13:35:00.004-06:00

My wife and I were driving up to the University Hospital in Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon. As we were heading up South Temple street in the Avenues neighborhood, there was a man staggering lackadaisically in the middle of the road. He loosely waved to us as we changed lanes to avoid hitting him. He must have been stoned.

Only in Salt Lake.

C# Generic Lists

2008-05-02T08:18:00.007-06:00

I remember the many frustrating hours I spent in C and C++ dealing with arrays. I remember the nights hunting down the cause of a bug, only to realize it was the result of exceeding my array bounds. I remember having to redefine and copy arrays when I wanted to change the number of elements in the array, because in C, array length is fixed.

When I learned about linked lists, it got better. Rather than allocating a specific chunk of memory, like a static array did, linked lists are much more flexible because each element simply contains a memory pointer to the next one. This is very flexible, because you can add, remove, or change the nodes in a linked list quite easily.

However, accessing the elements of a linked list is more complicated than accessing an array. In an array, if you wanted to loop through and output all the elements of an array, you could do the following:

for (int i=0; i < sizeof(arrMyArray) / sizeof(int); i++) {
cout << arrMyArray[i] << endl;
}

A linked list is not much more complicated:

for (LinkedList objNode = objMyLinkedList; objNode != null; objNode = objMyLinkedList->Next) {
cout << objMyLinkedList.m_Data << endl;
}

However, the linked list really showed its limitation when trying to access elements randomly. You can do the following with a C array, but not a linked list:

cout << arrMyArray[27];

Thankfully, in C++, the standard template library introduced vectors, which are a kind of dynamic array. The stl::vector saved me a lot of headaches once I learned how to use it.

In C#, you can use what are called generic lists, which are like C++ vectors. As I was programming my GEDCOM importer last night, I really came to appreciate generic lists. They have all the conveniences of the C array and the C++ vector. You can create them dynamically, but you can also access them just like an array. They're really easy to use, too:

using System.Collections.Generic;

List intNumbers = new List();

intNumbers.Add(3);
intNumbers.Add(7);
intNumbers.Add(8);

for (int i = 0; i < intNumbers.Count; i++) {
Console.WriteLine(intNumbers[i] + "\n");
}

Environmentalism is not just for hippies anymore

2008-04-30T08:24:00.001-06:00

Thanks to the rise of the popular anti-Global Warming movement, more and more people in America are becoming environmentally aware, even those who would not have traditionally been environmentalists. Car manufacturers are producing more hybrid and alternative energy vehicles. Congress is debating legislation to reduce carbon gas emission. Walmart is selling reusable cloth shopping bags for $5. But is this a good thing?

I imagine that the old guard, hard-core environmentalists feel frustrated that their movement is being hijacked by politicians and consumers wanting to show off their "green" credibility. I think a lot of people are getting in on the movement because it is hip, and not because they actually care about Earth in a meaningful way.

For example, consider the Honda Prius. An owner may buy one solely so he can smugly show off to the world how environmentally righteous he is. In fact, the New York Times reported that 57% of people who purchased a Prius in 2007 did so because "it makes a statement about me." It's a fashion statement. If people really wanted to save the world from the carbon-emissions bogey man, they would drive less.

We will have to wait and see whether today's green chic actually makes a difference. I, for one, am hoping it does. Personally, I didn't care much about protecting the environment a few years ago, but now, I am starting to think about it more. I hope that we the people of planet Earth can change our ways of exploitation and overuse and become more responsible stewards of this wonderful blue sphere we call home--whether it is fashionable or not.

Tree-Lined Streets

2008-04-28T15:49:00.004-06:00

When I visit the old neighborhoods of Salt Lake City or Farmington, I am impressed by the magnificent trees which have grown up alongside the streets. When I travel on those streets, I feel a certain kind of excitement and a connection with nature. I imagine what it would be like to live on such a street.

Besides being beautiful, tree-lined streets are shady in the summer, making for a pleasant walk or stroll. An ancient tree with its roots deep in the ground also acts as a symbol of the dignity and tradition of a neighborhood.

I wonder why more streets aren't lined with trees. I understand that sometimes, the roots of a tree can disrupt the sidewalk. However, if the homeowner selects the right kind of tree, this will not be a problem.

I suppose I am feeling sentimental not only for tree-lined streets, but for the communities they represent. Modern suburban developments tend to be devoid of trees except perhaps for tiny saplings. New developments, like the trees that are in them, lack maturity and "roots".

Perhaps with time, these new developments will also have great green trees towering gently over the quiet street, when today's new developments become tomorrow's old neighborhoods.

Top 10 Reasons Why Self-Driving Cars Would Be Awesome

2008-04-25T20:02:00.003-06:00

Your car could automatically pick up deliveries for you.
Automatic cars could manage to have the optimal amount of space between them, which would make merging smoother and reduce traffic congestion.
Those who are too old or too young to drive themselves would be able to get around.
Drunk driving would not be a problem anymore.
The technology necessary to create viable self-driving cars could be used in many other agricultural and industrial settings.
Your car would be able to easily find a destination without getting lost or making a wrong turn.
Publicly owned auto-automobiles could be used to ferry people from a mass transit station to their final destinations, thus increasing mass transit use and reducing pollution and energy use.
Cars could automatically move aside to let emergency vehicles pass with greater speed and safety.
Traffic speeds would be more uniform, which would increase safety while allowing speed limits to be higher.
You could sleep or watch a movie on your way to work.

I've Turned Off Anonymous Comments

2008-04-24T15:29:00.003-06:00

If you want to post a comment to my blog, you'll have to log in now. I was receiving several abusive comments from an anonymous user. Seriously, I am running this obscure little blog, getting 4 visitors per day, and one of them keeps posting garbage in the comments.

I think this is representative of a general lack of politeness and civility on the web. An ordinary person wouldn't shout vitriolic insults to someone's face, but when you give him a computer, an AOL account, and anonymity, suddenly he becomes an obnoxious jerk.

Salt Lake County House Prices

2008-04-23T21:28:00.006-06:00

I have been watching the local real estate market a lot lately, as I am planning on moving from Kaysville further south, to be closer to my job in South Jordan. As I am trying to sell my house and find another one to buy, here are some of my observations about the Utah market (particularly the Wasatch Front:)

Houses are still way overpriced. Home prices are dropping a lot in other parts of the country, but not in Salt Lake County. The Deseret News reported today that house prices have stayed virtually the same since the same period in 2007, but sales have gone down 42.21%.
The median income for a family in Salt Lake County is $54,470. The median house price is about $240,000. This works out to be about 4.4 times a family's annual income, which is higher than historical norms. Traditionally, home prices have a ratio of no more than 3 times a family's annual income.
That means that the median home price in Salt Lake County ought to be more like $164,000. That is a long way to fall before house prices reach an equilibrium based on market fundamentals.
Many REALTORS® are lying about market conditions to trick people into paying too much for a house. I think I may have got the only sane one. One clueless REALTOR® posted the following on the Deseret News website:

The economy is fine in Utah, just not in CA, AZ, and NV. You'll see that this summer will be a big year in Utah real estate and if you don't buy a house this summer, you'll miss the perfect buying opportunity. Get in now while the gettin' is good!

I think the market will correct itself with time, but that doesn't help me out much in my personal situation, since I want to move this year. It will be interesting to continue to watch the market and see how it irons out. With prices falling so sharply, a lot of people are going to get hurt if they were left holding the bag.

Polygamy, civil liberties, and the Texas raid on the FLDS Compound

2008-04-22T14:27:00.004-06:00

With the recent raid on the FLDS compound in Eldorado, Texas, I have been thinking about polygamy and civil liberties.

I am troubled because of the similarities between the government's persecution against the FLDS folk, and the persecution against my Mormon predecessors in the nineteenth century. My third great grandfather, Robert Owens, practiced plural marriage and was driven out of Navuoo, Illinois along with the other Mormons. They had to trek across the United States into the wilderness of what would later become Utah Territory, in order to live and practice their religion in peace.

Even after arriving in the Great Basin in 1847, the government continued to harass the Mormon people. They sent an invading army to the Salt Lake Valley in a conflict known as the Utah War. They passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy act in 1862 and the Edmunds-Tucker act of 1887, both of which were specifically targeted against the Mormon church. It was not until the church stopped practicing polygamy in 1890 that they were allowed to live in relative peace.

These early pioneers suffered persecution by violent mobs and also by government decree. Governer Boggs of Missouri issued an Extermination Order in 1838 to drive the Mormons out of the state, or kill them if they wouldn't leave voluntarily. The order wasn't rescinded until 1976.

These events have set a historical precedence of flagrant and tyrannical abuse by the government against the God-given, Constitutionally-protected rights of its citizens. It happened 150 years ago, and it can happen again.

With recent reports that the 2008 raid against the FLDS compound in Texas may have been instigated by a prank phone call, I am greatly concerned about the apparent violations by Texas authorities against due process of law, of the right to habeas corpus, and the protection of individual liberties of the citizens of the United States of America. It is the FLDS today, but tomorrow, it could be anyone. When will we cry out against injustice and tyranny?

May heaven help us all.

The solution to any problem, anywhere, is robots

2008-04-21T14:46:00.001-06:00

In my spare time at home, I usually have one or a few projects I work on for fun. When I get my muse, I become obsessed with creativity; my one-track mind can scarcely think about anything else except the function I am working on. This usually lasts until I get excited about something else which takes over my passion like a democrat is going to take over the White House in November.

Thankfully, my dear sweet wife is very understanding of my incessant need to create, and she lets me lock myself up for a few hours a week to work. After this last month of being Mr. Mom, I have come to appreciate this support from my wife more than ever.

Anyway, my latest obsession has been programming an automatic short-story generator. It uses artificial intelligence to create characters and plots, randomizes them together, and churns them out in dry third-person prose. It's never going to be Jane Austen, but what do you expect from a computer? It's not like my PC went to college to get a degree in English.

Before that, it was a GEDCOM importer for my online genealogy website, ActiveFamilyTree.com. Sometimes, I would like to build a time machine just so I can go back and tell the guy who created the GEDCOM format about the benefits of well-formed XML. That project is still unfinished, just like most of the other hobby projects I've started in the last ten years. If there were a job that involved creating things and never finishing them, I would be awesome at it.

There's No Accounting for Taste

2007-11-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a client of mine asked me what I thought of his website. I hadn't quite expected the question, and therefore hadn't formulated a real opinion of it, so I had to come up with a critique of it on the fly. This was a challenge for me because I had to quickly evaluate the website's strengths and weaknesses.

Together, we navigated through the website, and I explained elements I liked and elements I disliked. For some of these opinions, I was able to back them up with good reasons: the fonts need to be consistent throughout the site, the color scheme should match, gratuitous Flash should be avoided, and so on. However, with other features, I was only able to say that I liked or disliked them, but couldn't articulate why.

The client, in good humor, said I was using the "Boyd K. Packer" approach. Years ago, when he had been working for the Ensign magazine, Boyd K. Packer would point out elements in the magazine's design which he liked or disliked, but wouldn't offer a reason. This drove the designers crazy. Apparently, I was using the same approach in reviewing the website.

After the meeting, I kept thinking about it. Why do some things look visually appealing and others not? How do you explain why a sunset is beautiful, or why a garbage heap is ugly? How do you explain why a bad design is bad? It feels to me like trying to explain to someone how to swallow or how to breathe. Then again, maybe it's just a matter of personal style. After all, there's no accounting for taste.

Life is Busy

2007-11-13T08:39:00.001-07:00

It has been a long time since I posted here! Life gets so busy that it is hard to keep up. I find myself wishing to spend more time on projects like this, but, c'est le vie.

My wife is building a stop-and-shoot autonomous vehicle for her Engineering 1010 class at school. It is a pretty neat looking thing so far. I'll post some pictures when her group is done with it.

The Caves and Civilizations of Draconika

2006-12-16T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, I have been spending a bit of my time lately working on a web-based game, The Caves and Civilizations of Draconika. You can see that it is still in its very early stages of development, but here is a screen shot:

It is a wargame, much like Risk or Diplomacy. Each player will start out with a single territory, and will try to become a great civilization through conquest, diplomacy, and trade.

I am using MySQL for the database, PHP for the server-side coding, and Flash for parts of the user interface, including the main map. Although my forte is ASP.NET development, I'm using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack for this project because:

I'll be hosting this on a Linux server.
I do Windows/IIS/ASP.NET/SQL Server every day at work, so this is a good way to help develop some of my other abilities.
I'd like to do some fairly involved integration with VBulletin, which is written in PHP.

Now, I'm using Flash for the map and some other parts of the UI, because it can do some pretty cool effects, and it's faster/smoother than dynamic image generation. Every other web-based wargame I've found on the internet looks darn ugly, and I thought it would be cool if I could make one that looks totally awesome.

One neat thing I'm doing with the project is using AJAX and web services to get information from the server dynamically, so you don't have to refresh the page all the time.

So, keep reading for more news about this project over the next several months. Thanks for reading!

Chess

2006-07-17T13:57:00.000-06:00

I have been playing a lot of chess lately. I find that, as a parent, I have much less time to play really long games, like Civilization IV or World of Warcraft. Chess is nice because it's easy to fit in 15 minutes here or there for a quick game.

So, one of the two chess games I've been playing are Chess Titans, which is one of the free games like Minesweeper included in Windows Vista, Microsoft's upcoming version of its flagship operating system. It has statistics, good AI, and excellent graphics. It is simple but solid and elegant.

The other program I have been playing chess on is called Majestic Chess. Published by Vivendi Universal, Majestic Chess includes a fantasy storyline in which you play as a king, and go from place to place solving quests and gathering chess pieces. The graphics are good and the story is wonderful. (I hadn't thought it possible to develop a good storyline about chess, but they did it.) The AI doesn't seem quite as good and it hangs for long periods of time, though. Nevertheless, it's pretty entertaining.

Windows Vista Chess Titans:

Hoyle Majestic Chess:

Daniel

2006-07-12T13:34:00.000-06:00

Hi, it's been a while since I've written -- I sure have been busy! Back in April, my wife and I gave birth to our first child, a son, whom we have named Daniel. You can see some pictures of him at daniel.kevinowens.org. Isn't he just the most adorable little creature you have ever seen?

All About Unicorns Launched

2006-02-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have enjoyed my website about dragons, you may be interested to know that I recently launched a similar website about unicorns, called All About Unicorns. It is still very small, but I hope to grow it over the next few months as I find the time. It currently only has 100 images in its gallery, but I have over 1,000 that I will be adding after I make some improvements to the image gallery script.

Gingerbread Dungeon

2006-01-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

I've posted some photographs from our D&D group's new Christmas tradition: The Gingerbread Dungeon.

Phonics Rules

2006-01-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

I've just launched a new website describing some phonics rules. I have compiled it based on a number of public domain phonics sites on the web. So, for your reading pleasure (pun intended), here it is: Phonics on the Web.

Local Limericks

2005-12-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, here are some limericks I came up with the other day:

There once was a man from Salt Lake,
Who hated to shovel and rake.
His wife made him work,
But his work he did shirk,
So in kind she stopped cooking him steak.

There once was a gal from Woods Cross,
Who married the son of her boss.
She came to work tired,
And soon she was fired,
And she blamed Dad-in-Law for her loss.

Baby Pictures

2005-09-19T14:13:00.000-06:00

So, Chelsea got these pictures of our baby from the doctor. Although she generally frowns on my posting pictures of her insides, in this case we are making an exception. I just can't believe there's a little person growing inside of her. Well, here they are, ladies and gentlemen! Our baby's first pictures:

Home Sick; Website Updates

2005-09-13T16:46:00.000-06:00

I woke up feeling quite sick this morning, so I didn't go to work or school. I like to joke with my wife that I am getting "sympathy" sickness.

So, instead of just staying in bed all day, I got around to improving this website some. I made the pages look better and more consistent. I like this new look better; I hope everyone else does, too.

Chelsea went to the baby doctor for the first time today. She hasn't come back yet, but I hope that she and the baby are going to be healthy for the duration of her gestation. Also, we got a home inspection done on the house we itnend to buy in Kaysville. It had some big plumbing problems, so we're going to have to negitiate with the sellers to see what can be done to repair them.