15 October 2010 PM

Here are some random things:

Factual error: Stephen Hawking is a citizen of the UK. Nevertheless, we’d lose 93 percent of our Academy of Science level scientists (and about 60 percent overall).

This is the candidate I voted for (and met) in IL-18.

White House Science Fair

WASHINGTON, DC — On Monday, October 18th, President Obama will host the White House Science Fair celebrating the winners of a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions. The President will view exhibits of these students’ work, ranging from breakthrough basic research to new inventions, followed by remarks to an audience of students, science educators and business leaders on the importance of STEM education to our country’s economic future.

The White House Science Fair fulfills a commitment the President made at the launch of his Educate to Innovate campaign in November 2009 to inspire boys and girls to excel in math and science. As the President noted then, “If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.” The White House event will kick off a week that culminates with the USA Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall and in over 50 satellite locations that is poised to draw more than a million people nationwide.

Way cool!

Social
Remember all of those mortgage securities? That’s right…it is unclear where the actual notes are. In other words, those greedy bastards may have well screwed themselves!

While it seems that Geithner isn’t in any hurry to consider action on the foreclosure fraud crisis by declaring a national moratorium on foreclosures, saying that “a national moratorium would be very damaging to exactly the kind of people we’re trying to protect,” the SEIU is trying to help people protect themselves to the extent that they can.

They’ve launched “Where’s the Note” an online tool that will help homeowners figure out who it is that is actually holding their mortgage note. The mortgage note is the document homeowners sign when securing a home loan. The original mortgage note with the the borrower’s signature is the only proof that that the borrower owes the debt. Banks need the note to prove that they own the loan and can collect payments, or have the right to foreclose if payments aren’t made. And here’s the rub.

The problem is, banks now buy and sell mortgages up and down Wall Street – slicing them up and repackaging them to sell to other banks. The bank you bought your mortgage from two years ago may not be the bank that owns it today. But, in all the shuffle, the mortgage notes often don’t get transferred along with your debt.

This is where the SEIU’s new tool comes in. With it, you can find out who actually now holds your note. Here’s how they explain it:

The Wall Street banks’ foreclosure system is a mess. Their total disregard for mortgage laws and standards is what created the foreclosure epidemic in the first place. Now, their total mismanagement is catching up to them. As of today, some of the largest mortgage lenders – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and GMAC (now called Ally) – have been forced to halt foreclosures in 23 states and growing. We can’t rely on Wall Street banks to follow basic rules. We have to hold them accountable. At very least, they must provide the mortgage notes.

When Wall Street banks securitized, packaged, sold, and resold our mortgages, they created a system where it is often impossible to figure out who actually owns mortgage notes and therefore has the authority to foreclose on properties. But the big banks are getting tangled up in their own web. Recent events have exposed a handful of banks that are throwing families out of their homes even though they don’t have the mortgage note that proves they actually have a legal right to do so. There have been instances of two banks trying to foreclose on the same home, and in at least one case, of a bank trying to foreclose on a house where the homeowner had never even taken out a mortgage with anyone in the first place.

Whether you are facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage.

Hey, these reptiles don’t hesitate to use the law against the “little person.” So use the law right back!

Mark my words: the Republicans will start whining about having “compassion” on the banks and the other reptiles …..

15 October 2010

Science/Geek awesomeness
Here is a collection of cool images and charts.

Here is a sample:
(click for larger)

Mortgage Crisis: banks are sometimes foreclosing on properties that they don’t have the title to!

The story so far: An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on mortgage payments. So servicers — the companies that collect payments on behalf of mortgage owners — have been foreclosing on many mortgages, seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes? Horror stories have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits asserting that the papers are in order. And these affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don’t actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren’t.

So the response?

True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act. I mean, that’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying low, but conservative commentators like those at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s the government’s job to create them.

That won’t be easy, but there are good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has proposed giving mortgage counselors and other public entities the power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

We’ll see; but for now if someone tries to kick you out of your home, get a lawyer and ask to see the documentation.

Science, religion and stochastic factors
Jerry Coyne wrote an op-ed in USA today about how science and religion are incompatible. He then shared some of the feedback:

I want to briefly highlight one because its claim that I made a philosophical boo-boo has also appeared at several places on the internet:

Interesting but flawed argument

Jerry Coyne delivers a bold perspective on the compatibility of science and religion. He argues that a scientific viewpoint is contradictory to, and clearly trumps, a religious world view.

However, in his zeal to argue his point, he creates his own internal contradictions. He states that the existence of religious scientists cannot be used to support the compatibility of science and religion, and yet later he states that the incompatibility of science and faith is “amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists.”

Before Coyne can convincingly argue that science and religion are incompatible, he needs to take care of the incompatibilities in his own viewpoint.

Brent Metfessel; Eden Prairie, Minn.

I find this argument curious. My claim was that science and faith are philosophically incompatible. If there were to be evidence for such a philosophical claim, then it would not be that every scientist would be an atheist. Rather, we’d expect that scientists would tend to be more atheistic than the general public.

People simply don’t understand what a stochastic factor is. Here is an example: we could show that height is an advantage in basketball; one bit of evidence would be to measure the average height of an NBA player and compare that to the average height of someone in the public. BUT, there might well be a Spud Webb or Muggsy Bogues who would be an outlier (exception to the rule).

You see the same thing when people discuss the relevance of college entrance scores. True, there are some who score in the 30′s on their ACT and still flop and a few who might score in the teens but make it through. But if you look at 1000 random students with an ACT of 30 versus 1000 random students with ACT of 20, the first group will have more successes. But the first group will have some failures and the second group will have some successes.

Some Cartoons

Another old vacation photo

Again, from 1984. I had a day at Sea World and took some photos. As I was lining up a shot of an aquatic animal these individuals got in front of me…so I went ahead and took the photo:

14 October 2010 pm

I didn’t post much today but I did write this post about the “method of undetermined coefficients” for solving inhomogeneous second order linear differential equations with constant coefficients.