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'Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has one.' If you thought you'd heard everyone's arsehole on the Webber-Vettel incident by now, think again.
Last week it was Max's turn. He should know better as he's a past master of the 'play the journos' game, but apparently when some German rag interviewed him he couldn't contain himself. Makes him look pathetic, of course. He's stepped aside, enjoying retirement (in his dungeon, I bet) and pretending he doesn't want to reign over his grave. And here he is, showing off his German and throwing his weight around over a little incident well after everybody else has weighed in. Probably has to do with his being thick as thieves with Red Bull's owner, Dietrich Mateschitz.
I had him on the phone shortly after, asked him how's life with your nose up Mateschitz's arse? I could hear him smile, and he said "Come on, Bernie, you should know better than that. I form my own opinions, and in this case mine just happens to coincide with Dietrich's."
"Dietrich's." This tells me volumes. He's up to one of his little games again. Mark my words, we haven't heard the last of this.


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Democrats Hope Tea Party Offers an Opening in the Center
My latest Capital Journal column explores whether the rise of the tea party movement also presents an opening for Democrats:
A few weeks ago, Democrats' strategy for the midterm election seemed perfectly clear: Having lost their grip on many moderate and swing voters, their best hope was to rev up the party's more liberal base and get them to the polls in November.
Now, in the wake of a shocking Senate primary in Delaware, Democrats will be asking whether it's time to rethink that view.
The question is whether the rise of the tea-party movement—quite conservative and rough around the edges—is scaring moderate voters and making them available, once again, to Democrats. In other words, do Democrats have a renewed shot at moderate voters because of a perception the Republican party is being taken over by tea-party extremists?
Best guess: To some extent yes, but in a year of deep alienation, probably not as much as they may hope.
Certainly Democrats have good reason to think moderate voters are in easier reach now in a few selected states—in Delaware, where Democrats think Republican primary winner and Sarah Palin-endorsed tea partier Christine O'Donnell is unappealing to centrists; in Nevada, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to save his seat by portraying tea-party favorite Sharron Angle as erratic and dangerous; and in Kentucky, where Democrats hope to portray GOP nominee and tea party banner-carrier Rand Paul as out of the mainstream. (Of course, the tea party also is exciting conservatives in all those states at the same time.)
See the full column here.

subset: commoncrawl


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Cover Story
Researching the Extremes of Visual Perception
Staring at bag after bag on an x-ray monitor at an airport check-in line, a security officer can get used to the routine of not seeing anything suspicious. Nail file, book light, knitting needles, machete — all clear. Whoops.
APS Fellow Jeremy Wolfe of Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School aims to understand and reduce this sort of mistake, the mental blunders we can make at the limits of our visual searching abilities. Airport security screening has attracted his attention because it pushes our visual perception to these limits: Screeners need to scan through enormous amounts of visual data in order to find rare target objects that might not even appear. Wolfe suggests that the scarcity of these target objects can make it harder for screeners to find the objects even when they are present.
In a 2005 study published in Nature, Wolfe had subjects act like security personnel and scan mock x-ray images of baggage for targets that appeared at different frequencies in different trials. When targets were less frequent, scanners spent less time searching for targets and were more likely to miss them. "If you don't find it often," summarizes Wolfe, "you often don't find it." Other results from Wolfe's lab suggest that a brief period of re-training for security personnel might help to adjust search behavior in a way that could reduce mistakes.
Wolfe's airport security work is practical and visible, but it's just one part of an enormously influential body of work on visual attention that helps to explain just how we find what we're looking for, a problem that presents surprising complexities.
"It's a bit like the search for Waldo," explains APS Board Member Anne Treisman of Princeton University, referring to the popular children's books that challenge the reader to pick out a uniquely-dressed character from a large crowd of people. "How do we do this when an object is defined only by a conjunction of features that are shared by other objects in the scene?" Treisman's work on visual attention — in particular, the notion that we bind features of objects together to form a unified concept of an object — laid the groundwork for Wolfe's research.
Wolfe, who will be delivering the Keynote Address at the upcoming APS convention in May, has helped outline a model of visual processing that contains two pathways: selective and non-selective. The selective pathway is able to pay detailed attention to a particular object and bind its features together into a cohesive image, but is limited by its processing power and can only recognize one object, or perhaps a very small number of objects, at a time. On the other hand, the non-selective pathway can recognize basic attributes of the visual world very quickly, without being able to bind together the features of any of the objects in the visual field. Together, these two pathways combine to paint a picture that seems relatively rich and that can guide us through the visual world without the need to fully process every piece of visual information we receive at the same time.
One of Wolfe's key contributions to the two-pathway model is the idea of guided search. In the model, the non-selective pathway gives us access to disconnected pieces of information from all over the visual field: colors, shapes, sizes, and other features of objects. These help to guide our selective attention to cast its searchlight on a specific object based on what we're looking for by pulling it toward the features we seek. "Guided search was a major contribution to the problem," says Treisman.
The guided search model builds off of Treisman's Feature Integration Theory. In both models, initial "preattentive" processing cues us in to the patterns, colors, and shapes that constitute Waldo's basic features. Guided search proposes that your attention is attracted to the red-and-white stripes of Waldo's shirt, the shape of his circular spectacles, and his understated blue jeans. With a bit of guidance, your attention can be guided to the real Waldo: the place where all of these features meet.
Waldo searching is interesting because it is difficult. "Under normal circumstances, we're doing visual searching all day, every day, so brilliantly well that it doesn't occur to do that you're doing a search task!" exclaims Wolfe. "The cases that are useful to research — and fun to demonstrate — are the places where this breaks down. We're doing psychological atom smashing here, in order to figure out how you search under normal circumstances."
The stresses of airport security have provided one important laboratory for Wolfe's work, but another line of his research has made use of the phenomenon of change blindness. Integral to a magician's act, change blindness is what can cause us to miss a substantial change in an object that we're not paying attention to, as long as the change doesn't disrupt the gist of the scene. The change can be dramatic too: A 1999 study by Simons and Chabris showed that subjects paying close attention to a group of actors on a screen could be completely oblivious to an actor in a gorilla suit walking across the frame.
In Wolfe's description of the phenomenon, our non-selective visual processing and our prior experience with the scene provides the gist of an image while our selective visual attention provides current updates for just a few of the objects in the scene at any moment. This combination of information convinces us that we can fully see and understand the scene in front of us, so we're surprised to find out that we weren't actually sure what we were looking at.
Wolfe's work with change blindness has helped to demonstrate the limits of our visual attention: A 2006 study showed that our ability to detect change may have an even lower capacity than the standard estimates of about four objects.
Wolfe thinks that basic research on attention might help to find the most effective ways for a human brain to work together with a computer to conduct a successful visual search. "Many, many years of research have failed to make machines smart enough to get the human out of the search task," laments Wolfe. In routine breast cancer screening, for example, about three tenths of a percent of mammograms will show tumors. This low prevalence complicates what is already a difficult visual search task. Computer Aided Detection (CAD) systems can highlight tissue that looks potentially cancerous, but since the CAD system is imperfect, a person is still needed to search the highlighted tissues and to check if the computer missed something.
The same is true of airport security, where a computer can point out objects that are potentially dangerous, but security personnel need to make sure they're looking at a real handgun and not a hairdryer.
Despite the visual limitations that Wolfe's research has helped to discover, human vision has a lot going for it. "People are great at looking for things!" he reminds us. "If you sent your laptop into the kitchen and told it to find the coffee, then find the coffee mug, it'd take hours to process that visual data, even though you could do that ridiculously easily."
"Jeremy Wolfe's work tells you things about the senses that aren't obvious," lauds Linda Bartoshuk, APS President and a sensory researcher. "He shows how scholarly work in attention can be applied to real-world problems."
"It's easy to say you just see stuff," says Wolfe. "But you don't realize that the act of seeing involves this active attention mechanism bouncing around the world at a rate so fast you can't introspectively appreciate it." Wolfe's work has made enormous strides towards picking apart the deceptively complex world of visual attention, and has shown how the theoretical structure of perception can impact our daily lives.


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Interview of Rebecca LeGrand, Partner at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC
This week I had the privilege of talking to Rebecca LeGrand, a partner at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC in Washington, DC.... Read More
U.S. Census Reports that a Large Gender Pay Gap Still Remains in the Law
The ABA reported that full-time female lawyers earn 77% of their male counterparts. These numbers are based on the release of the... Read More
Four Superhero Women Embark to Break Open the Glass Ceiling
Once upon a time, four great women were asked to participate on a panel about the effects of gender in the courtroom... Read More
Current Happenings by and for Women in White Collar Defense
Amy Greer from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius represented three AIG affiliates in 9.5 million settlement with the SEC. According to the charges,... Read More
Florida Bar Study Reflects Shameful Statistics for Young Women Lawyers
The Florida Bar's Young Lawyer Division just released a random survey of young women lawyers who are 35 years or under or... Read More
Lisa Cahill Represents Woman Exonerated After Serving 10 Years
Most independent observers don't realize this, but the judicial system is stacked against our clients in every way. We get a front... Read More
Our System's Shameful History of Solitary Confinement
Albert Woodfox, one of the well known "Angola 3", was just released Friday after spending 43 years in solitary confinement in the... Read More
Defending A Client Against an Accusation of Violence Against Women
There has been a tremendous amount of commentary and criticism surrounding the Jian Ghomeshi trial. As we posted last week here, Ghomeshi... Read More
This Week: Women Defenders in Trial
Evan Jenness and Vicki Podberesky Obtain Partial Acquittal for Clients in L.A. Last week, Evan Jenness and Vicki Podberesky finished a two... Read More
Monique Pressley is the Face of Bill Cosby's Defense Team
How often do we see that in spite of the diversity of lawyers representing a high profile defendant that the media attention... Read More


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You are here
Letter dated 12/23/10 - Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Fact Sheet Summarizing Advocacy's Letter
Printer Friendly Version (PDF)
The Honorable Jennifer J. Johnson
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
20th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20551
E-Mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
Re: Regulation Z; Docket R-1390 Truth in Lending
Dear Secretary Johnson:
The Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (Advocacy) submits this comment on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System's (hereinafter, "the Board") proposed rulemaking on Regulation Z; Docket No R-1390 Truth in Lending.(1) Advocacy is concerned that the proposal may be extremely burdensome on small entities and that Federal Reserve has not analyzed properly the full economic impact of the proposal on small entities as required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA).(2) Advocacy recommends that the Board postpone the proposed rule until the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act- Truth in Lending (RESPA-TILA) issues can be resolved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in order to avoid duplicative and burdensome regulations.
Advocacy Background
Congress established the Office of Advocacy under Pub. L. 94-305 to represent the views of small business before Federal agencies and Congress. Because Advocacy is an independent office within the Small Business Administration (SBA), the views expressed by Advocacy do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA or of the Administration. Section 612 of the RFA requires Advocacy to monitor agency compliance with the Act, as amended by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act.(3)
In September 2010, section 604 of the RFA was amended when Congress passed the Small Business Jobs Act.(4) Section 1601 of the Small Business Jobs Act amends section 604 by requiring a federal agency to include, in any explanation or discussion accompanying the final rule's publication in the Federal Register, the agency's response to any written comments submitted by Advocacy on the proposed rule and provide a detailed statement of any changes made in response to the comments.
Requirements of the RFA
The RFA requires agencies to consider the economic impact that a proposed rulemaking will have on small entities. Pursuant to the RFA, the federal agency is required to prepare an IRFA to assess the economic impact of a proposed action on small entities. The IRFA must include: (1) a description of the impact of the proposed rule on small entities; (2) the reasons the action is being considered; (3) a succinct statement of the objectives of, and legal basis for the proposal; (4) the estimated number and types of small entities to which the proposed rule will apply; (5) the projected reporting, recordkeeping, and other compliance requirements, including an estimate of the small entities subject to the requirements and the professional skills necessary to comply; (6) all relevant Federal rules which may duplicate, overlap, or conflict with the proposed rule; and (7) all significant alternatives that accomplish the stated objectives of the applicable statutes and minimize any significant economic impact of the proposed rule on small entities.(5) In preparing the IRFA, an agency may provide either a quantifiable or numerical description of the effects of a proposed rule or alternatives to the proposed rule, or more general descriptive statements if quantification is not practicable or reliable.(6) The RFA requires the agency to publish the IRFA or a summary of the IRFA in the Federal Register at the time of the publication of a general notice of proposed rulemaking for the rule.(7)
Pursuant to section 605(a), in lieu of an IRFA, the head of the agency may certify that the proposed rule will not have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities. A certification must be supported by a factual basis.
The Proposed Rule
On September 24, 2010, the Board published in the Federal Register a proposed rule on Regulation Z: Truth in Lending. The proposal implements the Truth in Lending Act (TILA). The purpose of the proposal is to revise the rules for the consumer's right to rescind certain open end and closed-end loans secured by the consumer's principal dwelling.(8) The proposed regulations would revise and enhance disclosure requirements of Regulation Z for transactions secured by a consumer's principal dwelling and the consumer's right to rescind open- and closed-end loans. The amendments are proposed in furtherance of the Board's responsibility to prescribe regulations to carry out the purposes of TILA, including promoting consumers' awareness of the cost of credit and their informed use thereof. The proposal would also revise the rules for determining whether a closed-end mortgage is a higher-priced mortgage loan subject to special consumer protections, to ensure that prime loans are not incorrectly classified as higher-priced loans. Finally, the Board is proposing rules to mandate reverse mortgage counseling and prohibit reverse mortgage cross-selling. These restrictions are proposed pursuant to the Board's statutory responsibility to prohibit unfair and deceptive acts and practices in connection with mortgage loans.
Compliance with the RFA
In the RFA section of the preamble, the Board acknowledges that the proposed rule will have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities and prepared an IRFA. (9)However, the Board states that there is not a reliable source for the number of small entities that will be impacted. It also states that the effect of the revisions on small entities, including the costs of updating the specifications on current systems, is unknown.(10)
The Proposal Will Be Burdensome
Advocacy is concerned with this proposal going forward when so little is known about its potential costs, at a time when other major changes to the industry are on the horizon. Advocacy had a conference call with representatives from the industry on this proposal and according to the industry representatives, the industry is being inundated with regulatory changes. These burdensome changes may lead to small entities leaving the mortgage industry which could have a negative impact on the availability of mortgages, competition and the consumer.
Moreover, on November 10, 2010, several banking organizations submitted a letter to the Board, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development requesting a comprehensive and integrated approach to TILA and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) reform. They stated that the changes to TILA, the new RESPA disclosures, and other compliance requirements were stretching the compliance capabilities of financial institutions and could possibly threaten the availability of housing finance options. They further stated that since additional changes to RESPA and TILA may considerably revise TILA, a postponement of this rulemaking was warranted.(11)
Matter Should be Postponed until RESPA-TILA Issues Are Resolved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
In July 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Act).(12) Section 1011 of the Act establishes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to supervise certain activities of financial institutions. Pursuant to Section 1032, the new CFPB will have the authority to prescribe rules for consumer financial products and services. Section 1032(f) states that not later than year after the designated transfer date, the Bureau shall propose for public comment rules and model disclosures that combine the disclosures required under TILA and sections 4 and 5 of RESPA into a single, integrated disclosure for mortgage loan transactions covered by those laws, unless the CFPB determines that any proposal issued by the Board and HUD carry out the same purpose. As such, this issue will be revisited again in the near future.
In addition, Section 1100G, entitled "Small Business Fairness and Regulatory Transparency," amends 5 U.S.C. § 609(d) of the RFA, to require the CFPB to comply with the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA) panel process, making it the third agency with this responsibility, joining EPA and OSHA. When Congress amended the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) in 1996, it created a requirement that EPA and OSHA conduct special outreach efforts to ensure that small entities' views are carefully considered prior to the issuance of a proposed rule. This outreach is accomplished through the work of small business advocacy review panels, often referred to as SBREFA panels. A SBREFA panel consists of a representative from the rulemaking agency, the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and the Chief Counsel for Advocacy. The panel solicits information and advice from small entity representatives (SERs), who are individuals that represent small entities affected by the proposal. SERs help the panel better understand the ramifications of the proposed rule. Invariably, the participation of SERs provides extremely valuable information on the real world impacts and compliance costs of agency proposals and viable alternatives. The product of a SBREFA panel's work is its panel report on the regulatory proposal under review.
The panel process achieves several objectives. First, it ensures that small entities that would be affected by a regulatory proposal are consulted about the pending action and offered an opportunity to provide information on its potential effects. Second, a panel develops and recommends less burdensome alternatives to a regulatory proposal when warranted. Past panels have recommended alternatives that have saved small entities billions of dollars. Finally, the panel provides the rulemaking agency with input from both real world small entities and the panel's report and analysis prior to publication.
Postponing this rulemaking until after TILA is transferred to the CFPB will not only minimize the potential of conflicting cumulative rulemakings, it will also allow for an opportunity to examine less burdensome alternatives. The CFPB will need to conduct a panel for the RESPA –TILA rules. That panel may provide information about the industry and real world implications of the changes to the regulations that may be useful in reducing the economic impact of this action on small entities.
The additional time would also allow the agency to perform the necessary outreach and research to garner a better understanding of the economic impact of this action. Once the economic impact is fully understood, the agency may be able to develop less burdensome alternatives which would be beneficial to the industry. In addition, it may also help the agency understand the real world implications of this action which would be beneficial to consumers.
Over the past few years, the mortgage industry has been inundated with changes to TILA, RESPA, and other mortgage-related laws. These constant changes are economically burdensome to the industry and confusing to the consumer. Postponing this rulemaking until after the upcoming RESPA-TILA proposals will allow an opportunity to fully analyze the impact of this proposal in light of the changes to the industry. In addition, since the issue would then be transferred to the CFPB, the agency would be able to obtain meaningful information from the SERs so that the economic impact could be fully ascertained and less costly alternatives could be developed.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this important proposal and for your consideration of Advocacy's comments. Advocacy is available to assist the agencies in their RFA compliance. If you have any questions regarding these comments or if Advocacy can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact Jennifer Smith at (202) 205-6943.
Winslow Sargeant, Ph.D.
Chief Counsel for Advocacy
Jennifer A. Smith
Assistant Chief Counsel
For Economic Regulation & Banking
Cc: The Honorable Cass Sunstein, OIRA/OMB
3. Pub. L. No. 96-354, 94 Stat. 1164 (1980) (codified at 5 U.S.C. §§ 601-612) amended by Subtitle II of the Contract with America Advancement Act, Pub. L No. 104-121, 110 Stat. 857 (1996). 5 U.S.C. § 612(a).
11. Letter from American Bankers Association, American Financial Services Association, Community Mortgage Banking Project, Consumer Bankers Association, Consumer Mortgage Coalition, Housing Policy Council, Independent Community Bankers of America, Mortgage Bankers of America to the Honorable Timothy Geithner, The Honorable Shaun Donovan, and The Honorable Ben Bernake, November 10, 2010.


text: "Our ability to access information is becoming nearly unlimited. It's an amazing human achievement that is a testament to our cleverness and to the power of applied math and engineering. But what does the loss of that gap in time between wondering and knowing mean to your brain? Soon, with the right kind of brain interface we may even be able to think of a question and the answer will pop into our heads. Then it's goodbye to the wonder gap…" [Read Article]


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Tums Chewy Bites Vs. A Slice Of Pepperoni Pizza At A Skating Rink
July 18, 2017 Leave a comment
Tums has had a number of commercials featuring food fighting the people that just ate them. They're underratedly funny. In this one, a slice of pepperoni pizza starts whooping a guy's ass while they're roller skating. Fortunately, he takes Tums Chewy Bites (which really sound like candy), and soon enough they're dancing with each other. Huzzah! Also, here's an amusing one with bacon beating up a guy during a traffic jam.