1. What does Gladwell mean when he says that, 'Puzzles are "transmitter-dependent"; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are "receiver dependent"; they turn on the skills of the listener.'?
He means that puzzles, which depend on the information and how much of it is given, are dependent on the source of the information, the "transmitter", whereas since mysteries, since we already have the information and just usually cannot interpret or understand it correctly, are more dependent on the skills of the receiver to solve the mystery.
2. Why didn't Enron have to pay taxes on their S.P.E.'s? What would be Enron's defense? Can you name the Illogical Fallacy present?
Enron didn't have to pay taxes because "the I.R.S. doesn't accept mark-to-market accounting; you pay tax on income when you actually receive that income" and since Enron wasn't actually having any real income coming in, the I.R.S. didn't think it was making any money and thus didn't tax it. Enron would probably just say that they "knew" they WOULD make that money for real, and when they did they could pay taxes, but right now they shouldn't have to pay the I.R.S. because they haven't actually attained the money yet.
This fallacy is called Special Pleading/Double Standard, when someone/a party thinks everyone else should have to follow the regulations except for themselves, because they have an excuse.
3. Did Enron try to hide the fact that they weren't paying taxes?
Enron did not try to hide that fact, or really much of anything, they just didn't flash it out in the open, and nobody bothered to ask the questions and actually read Enron's documents and financial statements that would clearly show what they were doing.
4. Why does Gladwell claim that, 'Woodward and Bernstein would never have broken the Enron story.' Why don't you think anyone asked about Enron's financial statements? Is there a fallacy at work here?
Because they were just young kids with no experience, who had the type of energy and persistence necessary for solving a puzzle, when you need to uncover missing information, but this was a mystery that required "experience and insight" to understand the complex financial statements.
Probably the reason nobody asked about Enron's dealings is that there wasn't a lot of evidence yet to show they were sinking themselves, and not a lot of people -if anybody- knew that the money Enron claimed to be making wasn't actually real. To me this seems like the Ad Ignoratium fallacy, where because there was no proof known (UNDERSTOOD) by outsiders, they didn't think to accuse Enron of the real problem.
5. Gladwell claims that, 'Mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. Because if you can't find the truth in a —even a mystery shrouded in propaganda—it's not just the fault of the propagandist. It's your fault as well.' Do you agree with the implications of this statement?
I agree to some extent because With puzzles, it can be that the company or whoever the offending party is is hiding information from us that we cannot find out because we are not inside that party (for example, if Enron had NOT reported their financial deals on paper, no one else could report it for them because only Enron has that information), but in the case of a mystery, when we have the information available to us, it is our job to ask questions and actually LOOK at the information and if necessary learn how to read/interpret it. If we don't do this, as no one did at first for Enron, we are partially to blame for the situation at hand. However, I think in areas or situations where people may not be as educated or have as many opportunities open to them to investigate such a thing as Enron's financial documents (for example, living under a strict government where it is illegal to interfere with corrupt companies or whatever), it is not the people's fault if they are not aware or can do nothing to solve the mystery or stop the corruption.
6. What was the advice of the Cornell students to anyone who held Enron stock?
Their advice was "Sell." They believed Enron's stock values were too high because they weren't actually making all their claimed earnings, so the students thought, logically, it would not be wise to hold stock in such a company that really isn't worth all it says it is and will probably go down the tubes soon...
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Visiting Seniors Reflection & EE Assignment
Please take a few moments to reflect on the visit by Seniors. What is the ONE PIECE OF ADVICE that you took away from their presentation? What can you do to follow that advice? What might keep you from following the advice?
The presentation wasn't all that surprising to me because I've heard pretty much everything they said before... All the kids in the IB program say do your work on time and just try to find ways to relax. Unfortunately, I am not a good stress-handler at all so those tricks don't usually help me too much, especially in being able to get focused again after taking a break and relaxing. I think I'm too burnt out most of the time to really focus on much, after a full day of school, etc.
The one piece of advice that really got drilled into me from their presentation was to NOT PROCRASTINATE and to just buckle down and do the work on time, following the schedule that the teachers have set to help you. To follow this advice I could waste less time at home talking and whatever else in order to actually get work done... But like I said before, what keeps me from following this advice, even though I give it to myself all the time and convince myself that I will do the work ON TIME, is my stressed nature, already burnt-out ness and inability to focus on schoolwork for more than a bit at a time, and the other activities such as church and homelife that always seem to suck up my time...
The presentation wasn't all that surprising to me because I've heard pretty much everything they said before... All the kids in the IB program say do your work on time and just try to find ways to relax. Unfortunately, I am not a good stress-handler at all so those tricks don't usually help me too much, especially in being able to get focused again after taking a break and relaxing. I think I'm too burnt out most of the time to really focus on much, after a full day of school, etc.
The one piece of advice that really got drilled into me from their presentation was to NOT PROCRASTINATE and to just buckle down and do the work on time, following the schedule that the teachers have set to help you. To follow this advice I could waste less time at home talking and whatever else in order to actually get work done... But like I said before, what keeps me from following this advice, even though I give it to myself all the time and convince myself that I will do the work ON TIME, is my stressed nature, already burnt-out ness and inability to focus on schoolwork for more than a bit at a time, and the other activities such as church and homelife that always seem to suck up my time...
Friday, April 17, 2009
Enron #2
1. How does a Special-Purpose Entity (S.P.E.) work? Why does the "partnership" giving money to your company make a big difference?
A partnership holds a company's leases and borrows money from the bank at a much lower interest rate than the bank would charge the company who's not doing so well if they were to borrow all that money from the bank, then the partnership gives the company the money. This makes a big difference because by the "partnership" giving you the money but paying the interest, much less money is lost to interest (since if you were receiving the money directly, you would be paying a lot higher interest).
2. How did Enron pit "twists into the S.P.E. game?" What does it mean that Enron "didn't always put blue-chip assets into the partnerships"? What was problematic about Enron using its own executives to manage the S.P.E? What was Enron's guarantee?
Enron twisted the "game" by selling "less than sterling assets" and sometimes even selling them to insiders instead of outsiders (so that the property and money was actually staying right within the company). By that phrase, it means that Enron sometimes sold off leases that would not necessarily reliably generate income. What was problematic about Enron using its own executives to manage the S.P.E. was that not only were they receiving all the money from the deal, but the leases were not even in more stable hands than those of Enron (they were still in Enron's hands essentially, so the bank should have still been charging that higher interest). Enron's guarantee was that "if whatever they had to sell declined in value, Enron would make up the difference with its own stock." so in essence they were selling parts of itself, to itself.
3. How did the world come to learn of Enron's use of S.P.E.'s? Is Gladwell correct in claiming that this is another example of a mystery? Explain.
The article says "The public became aware of the nature of these S.P.E.s through the reporting of several of Weil's colleagues at the Wall Street Journal—principally John Emshwiller and Rebecca —starting in the late summer of 2001." And it says they were tipped off the same way as Weil, by reading Enron's own public files.
I think Gladwell is correct in his claim that it's a mystery rather than a puzzle because it wasn't simply that the directors/investors didn't KNOW all the information - much of it was right there for them, but it was so much, so detailed, and so confusing that they couldn't understand it.
4. What is the difference between "scrounged up" and "downloaded?"
"Scrounged up" sounds like much more work had to be done to find these documents that were carefully hidden and covered up by Enron, when the reality is that Enron had these documents in public, all that had to be done to read them was to download them. This is using emotive langauge to make it sound like Enron was trying to hide everything.
5. Why does Gladwell claim that "It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public."? Explain what Gladwell means when he says, "But here the rules seem different." Who is Andrew Fastow?
He claims that because who can/will read 3 million pages of confusing S.P.E. info?? Nobody could read that much and digest it enough to understand it and draw an accurate conclusion. By saying the rules are indifferent in this case Gladwell means that the rule of puzzles- the more pieces that are added, the clearer the picture becomes- does not apply here because the more information revealed about the S.P.E.s, the more detailed, complicated, and confusing the situation gets.
Andrew Fastow was Enron's chief financial officer who put together the S.P.E. deals.
6. Why has the "Disclosure Paradigm" become an anachronism?
The idea that the more business information revealed to the public, the better off it is, is no longer correct in this time period because many business transactions, such as Enron's with the S.P.E.s, are so complicated and detailed that the more information included just makes it more confusing and less understandable to the public, so the public would probabaly have a better understanding of what was really going on with just a summary or something.
7. Why did treating the German secret weapon as a mystery prove to be more useful? Specifically, how did the "propaganda analysts" (the batty geniuses) use reason to uncover the Nazi V-1 Rocket?
If they had treated it like a puzzle and been like, "We don't have enough information and we can't really get it" they probably would not have figured it out, but since they treated it like a mystery and like all the information was already there, in the broadcasts, they focused on translating that information and were then able to understand what the Germans were doing/going to do. They used reasoning by listening to the broadcasts to the German people and reasoning that since the German leaders would try to keep the trust of the people, they weren't really lying, and when there was a 10 day period during which the weapon was no longer mentioned, that must mean that there was a delay in development and afterwards, less certainty...
8. How has diagnosing Prostate Cancer transformed from a puzzle to a mystery?
Doctors used to wait for the "missing puzzle piece", the symptoms that would show that the pacient had prostate cancer, the lumps on the gland... But now doctors don't wait for the missing piece/symptoms, the regularly test and examine middle-aged men, but sometimes whether the patient actually has the cancer remains a mystery because sometimes the test results are inconclusive, or the doctors don't agree, or one thing could mean something else, etc.
9. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, how has "the situation facing the intelligence community has turned upside down?"
It says "Now most of the world is open, not closed. Intelligence officers aren't dependent on scraps from spies... In a post-Cold War world of "openly available information," Inman said, "what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they're observing." Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses."
The situation has changed from a puzzle with not enough pieces to almost a puzzle with too many pieces, so that investigators have lots of information but it is difficult to put it together correctly and come to a conclusion.
10. How does Admiral Bobby R. Inman believe the U.S. should strengthen the U.S. intelligence system? Why was his answer seen as unusual?
His answer was that they should revive the State Department. This was seen as unusual because the State Department was "the one part of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that isn't considered to be in the intelligence business at all."
11. Gladwell writes: In a post-Cold War world of "openly available information," Inman said, "what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they're observing." Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses.
Does this curriculum sound familiar?
I know what Inman means, that what they need is not more information or more people to find the information, what they need is more equipped interpreters of the information they already have. They need professionals to solve mysteries, not a bunch of little kids to solve puzzles.
However, I don't specifically remember anyone else having this theory...
A partnership holds a company's leases and borrows money from the bank at a much lower interest rate than the bank would charge the company who's not doing so well if they were to borrow all that money from the bank, then the partnership gives the company the money. This makes a big difference because by the "partnership" giving you the money but paying the interest, much less money is lost to interest (since if you were receiving the money directly, you would be paying a lot higher interest).
2. How did Enron pit "twists into the S.P.E. game?" What does it mean that Enron "didn't always put blue-chip assets into the partnerships"? What was problematic about Enron using its own executives to manage the S.P.E? What was Enron's guarantee?
Enron twisted the "game" by selling "less than sterling assets" and sometimes even selling them to insiders instead of outsiders (so that the property and money was actually staying right within the company). By that phrase, it means that Enron sometimes sold off leases that would not necessarily reliably generate income. What was problematic about Enron using its own executives to manage the S.P.E. was that not only were they receiving all the money from the deal, but the leases were not even in more stable hands than those of Enron (they were still in Enron's hands essentially, so the bank should have still been charging that higher interest). Enron's guarantee was that "if whatever they had to sell declined in value, Enron would make up the difference with its own stock." so in essence they were selling parts of itself, to itself.
3. How did the world come to learn of Enron's use of S.P.E.'s? Is Gladwell correct in claiming that this is another example of a mystery? Explain.
The article says "The public became aware of the nature of these S.P.E.s through the reporting of several of Weil's colleagues at the Wall Street Journal—principally John Emshwiller and Rebecca —starting in the late summer of 2001." And it says they were tipped off the same way as Weil, by reading Enron's own public files.
I think Gladwell is correct in his claim that it's a mystery rather than a puzzle because it wasn't simply that the directors/investors didn't KNOW all the information - much of it was right there for them, but it was so much, so detailed, and so confusing that they couldn't understand it.
4. What is the difference between "scrounged up" and "downloaded?"
"Scrounged up" sounds like much more work had to be done to find these documents that were carefully hidden and covered up by Enron, when the reality is that Enron had these documents in public, all that had to be done to read them was to download them. This is using emotive langauge to make it sound like Enron was trying to hide everything.
5. Why does Gladwell claim that "It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public."? Explain what Gladwell means when he says, "But here the rules seem different." Who is Andrew Fastow?
He claims that because who can/will read 3 million pages of confusing S.P.E. info?? Nobody could read that much and digest it enough to understand it and draw an accurate conclusion. By saying the rules are indifferent in this case Gladwell means that the rule of puzzles- the more pieces that are added, the clearer the picture becomes- does not apply here because the more information revealed about the S.P.E.s, the more detailed, complicated, and confusing the situation gets.
Andrew Fastow was Enron's chief financial officer who put together the S.P.E. deals.
6. Why has the "Disclosure Paradigm" become an anachronism?
The idea that the more business information revealed to the public, the better off it is, is no longer correct in this time period because many business transactions, such as Enron's with the S.P.E.s, are so complicated and detailed that the more information included just makes it more confusing and less understandable to the public, so the public would probabaly have a better understanding of what was really going on with just a summary or something.
7. Why did treating the German secret weapon as a mystery prove to be more useful? Specifically, how did the "propaganda analysts" (the batty geniuses) use reason to uncover the Nazi V-1 Rocket?
If they had treated it like a puzzle and been like, "We don't have enough information and we can't really get it" they probably would not have figured it out, but since they treated it like a mystery and like all the information was already there, in the broadcasts, they focused on translating that information and were then able to understand what the Germans were doing/going to do. They used reasoning by listening to the broadcasts to the German people and reasoning that since the German leaders would try to keep the trust of the people, they weren't really lying, and when there was a 10 day period during which the weapon was no longer mentioned, that must mean that there was a delay in development and afterwards, less certainty...
8. How has diagnosing Prostate Cancer transformed from a puzzle to a mystery?
Doctors used to wait for the "missing puzzle piece", the symptoms that would show that the pacient had prostate cancer, the lumps on the gland... But now doctors don't wait for the missing piece/symptoms, the regularly test and examine middle-aged men, but sometimes whether the patient actually has the cancer remains a mystery because sometimes the test results are inconclusive, or the doctors don't agree, or one thing could mean something else, etc.
9. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, how has "the situation facing the intelligence community has turned upside down?"
It says "Now most of the world is open, not closed. Intelligence officers aren't dependent on scraps from spies... In a post-Cold War world of "openly available information," Inman said, "what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they're observing." Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses."
The situation has changed from a puzzle with not enough pieces to almost a puzzle with too many pieces, so that investigators have lots of information but it is difficult to put it together correctly and come to a conclusion.
10. How does Admiral Bobby R. Inman believe the U.S. should strengthen the U.S. intelligence system? Why was his answer seen as unusual?
His answer was that they should revive the State Department. This was seen as unusual because the State Department was "the one part of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that isn't considered to be in the intelligence business at all."
11. Gladwell writes: In a post-Cold War world of "openly available information," Inman said, "what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they're observing." Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses.
Does this curriculum sound familiar?
I know what Inman means, that what they need is not more information or more people to find the information, what they need is more equipped interpreters of the information they already have. They need professionals to solve mysteries, not a bunch of little kids to solve puzzles.
However, I don't specifically remember anyone else having this theory...
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Mr. Andre Reflection
Please take a moment to REFLECT on Mr. Andre's presentation in ToK. Did you learn something new? Did you enjoy his riddles? Why or why not? How do you think the Riddles about Monopoly and the Explorers relate to the story of Spider and Black Deer? This post must be completed by April 15.
His presentation of the possibilities for Mock Exams as a syllogism and the riddles we had to solve using reasoning and logic seemed confusing at first but after they were explained seemed very clear and simple. I did learn something new, that many more "riddles" or problems than we think can be solved by breaking it down into a syllogism or into a series of True/False statements, and that sometimes riddles are much more simple than we think (i.e. the man is just playing monopoly, he has not maxed out on his credit cards and gotten into a severely damaging car accident and now cannot work). I have a really tough time with riddles, and it never occurs to me to separate it into separate parts to see which ones are true and false and hence what are the real possibilities for an answer. I did not necessarily ENJOY the riddles he gave us because I get very frustrated when I can't think of an answer and then I feel very stupid afterward, but I enjoyed it in the sense that the riddles made me think and made me realize that sometimes you have to think outside the box, but not too far, because the answer could be fairly simple... I also liked how they opened my eyes more to HOW we reason, and the process our brains go through, sometimes without us actually realizing it, to reach a conclusion that seems logical to us.
The riddles about Monopoly and the explorers in the ocean relate to the story of the tribespeople trying to answer the riddle about Spider and Black Deer because we see, in trying to answer all 3, that context (what context the person trying to answer the riddle is thinking in terms of) plays a key part in determining what we see as a logical conclusion. Because the Kpelle people were probably used to folklore and their perspective on reality etc. is different than ours, they were thinking not in the hypothetical context we think in when asked a riddle, but what seems the reality to them. Similarly, when asked the riddle about the man who went bankrupt after arriving at a hotel, we do not naturally think in the context of the game Monopoly, so we assume it must be a real man at a real hotel with real money, and something went awfully wrong. When we gear the riddle about the 2 explorers who see a wild animal, our brains automatically think "jungle" and "tiger" or something to that effect, so we would never think "oh, the one moving faster will get killed because the wild animal is a shark who can sense blood movement."
His presentation of the possibilities for Mock Exams as a syllogism and the riddles we had to solve using reasoning and logic seemed confusing at first but after they were explained seemed very clear and simple. I did learn something new, that many more "riddles" or problems than we think can be solved by breaking it down into a syllogism or into a series of True/False statements, and that sometimes riddles are much more simple than we think (i.e. the man is just playing monopoly, he has not maxed out on his credit cards and gotten into a severely damaging car accident and now cannot work). I have a really tough time with riddles, and it never occurs to me to separate it into separate parts to see which ones are true and false and hence what are the real possibilities for an answer. I did not necessarily ENJOY the riddles he gave us because I get very frustrated when I can't think of an answer and then I feel very stupid afterward, but I enjoyed it in the sense that the riddles made me think and made me realize that sometimes you have to think outside the box, but not too far, because the answer could be fairly simple... I also liked how they opened my eyes more to HOW we reason, and the process our brains go through, sometimes without us actually realizing it, to reach a conclusion that seems logical to us.
The riddles about Monopoly and the explorers in the ocean relate to the story of the tribespeople trying to answer the riddle about Spider and Black Deer because we see, in trying to answer all 3, that context (what context the person trying to answer the riddle is thinking in terms of) plays a key part in determining what we see as a logical conclusion. Because the Kpelle people were probably used to folklore and their perspective on reality etc. is different than ours, they were thinking not in the hypothetical context we think in when asked a riddle, but what seems the reality to them. Similarly, when asked the riddle about the man who went bankrupt after arriving at a hotel, we do not naturally think in the context of the game Monopoly, so we assume it must be a real man at a real hotel with real money, and something went awfully wrong. When we gear the riddle about the 2 explorers who see a wild animal, our brains automatically think "jungle" and "tiger" or something to that effect, so we would never think "oh, the one moving faster will get killed because the wild animal is a shark who can sense blood movement."
Thursday, April 9, 2009
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