Great Falls

Yesterday I visited the Great Falls National Historic Park in Paterson, New Jersey. I thought it was pretty nice and worth seeing if you live nearby. It reminded me a bit (on a greatly reduced scale of course) of Niagara Falls. We have gotten some rain recently so the Falls may have been a bit more impressive than usual. There was some spray or mist from the Falls at some of the viewing locations which was fine on a hot day but might not have been as pleasant in colder weather. There is no charge to view the Falls and parking was no problem yesterday.

I took the picture near the parking area.  With a little walking you can get a closer view of the Falls from the bridge in the background and from a viewing area on the other side.

Maryland v. King

Monday the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case Maryland v. King that it is constitutional for Maryland to extract (via a cheek swab) DNA samples from people arrested and detained for serious crimes.  I agree with the majority.  As a general matter I support crime fighting measures when the benefit to society clearly outweighs the costs imposed on innocent citizens.  Here the costs seem trivial and the benefits significant so I would be reluctant to find Maryland's law unconstitutional.  And I see no legal requirement to do so, the Fourth Amendment just requires that such searches and seizures be reasonable and there were no obviously controlling precedents so the Court was basically free to as it felt best.

Incidentally while Scalia's dissent accuses Kennedy's majority opinion of slanting the facts to support his argument the dissent does not appear to be perfect in this regard.  In footnote 2 Scalia claims:

By the way, this procedure has nothing to do with exonerating the wrongfully convicted, as the Court soothingly promises. See ante, at 17. The FBI CODIS database includes DNA from unsolved crimes. I know of no indication (and the Court cites none) that it also includes DNA from all-or even any-crimes whose perpetrators have already been convicted.

 

While Scalia is correct that DNA from "solved" crimes is not routinely checked against the offender database wrongfully convicted people have been exonerated after special checks.  A Westchester case with which I am familiar is that of Jeffrey Deskovic.  A somewhat weird kid he was convicted based on a false confession of the rape murder of a high school classmate despite that fact that he was not a match for DNA found on the victim (on the unsupported theory that the DNA was from a boyfriend).  After many years in prison he convinced a new DA to run the DNA against the offender database.  This hit against a prisoner serving a life term for a different murder.  The prisoner confessed and Deskovic was exonerated.  Now in this case the prisoner had already been convicted so under Supreme Court precedent it was okay to extract his DNA regardless of the outcome of King v. Maryland which concerns taking DNA samples from people who are accused but not yet convicted of serious crimes.  Still it should be clear that people in Deskovic's unfortunate situation are more likely to be exonerated when broader criteria are used to build the offender database.

 

Yaris

Back in March I spent a week in Maryland on a business trip.  I drove down in a rental car provided by my employer. When I picked the car up I was a bit disappointed to see it was a Yaris  hatchback since the only things I knew about the Yaris were that it was a low end Toyota and that Consumer Reports didn't like it.  Given these low expectations the car was a bit of a pleasant surprise although it did have some features that might explain why Consumer Reports didn't rate it highly.  The trunk was tiny (although adequate for my single suitcase) and the engine was noisy (although not in a way that bothered me).  On the plus side the car has plenty of headroom, a couple of inches more than my Toyota Solara which has barely enough for me.  It also felt more responsive and agile than my Solara.  I was also impressed that the radio continued to receive my favorite New York City stations.  This isn't really an endorsement, like Consumer Reports I might well like competitive small cars more and there is no reason to buy a good product if excellent ones are available at a similar price.  But it wasn't as bad as I expected.

Incidentally I could have used my personal car and received a mileage reimbursement.  This probably was the better option but I was deterred by the fact that my employer's insurance would not cover any damage to my personal vehicle.  But given the low value of my car and average driving ability the expected value of such damage was likely under $20 which would have been covered by the generous mileage allowance.  Also using my personal car would have meant I could have left from and returned to my house instead of from my work location (where I picked up and dropped off the rental) saving some time and hassle.  And I could have paid the tolls with EZ Pass instead of with cash again saving a bit of time and trouble.  And finally although I liked the Yaris well enough as with driving any unfamiliar vehicle there was a bit of a learning curve which meant I was probably at a bit higher risk of getting into an accident.     

Closure

I closed on the sale of my Ossining townhouse last Monday.  The sales price was 1.59 times what I paid back in 1989 off a bit from the high point of about two times for units like mine (back around 2006). At about 2% a year appreciation this didn't keep up with inflation. Even before deducting for the 5% real estate commission and other expenses. So in one sense this wasn't a very good investment. Although it wasn't terrible compared to renting. And on the other hand I got to live there 23 years rent free and I liked the place. Which is also an important consideration. 

I might done a bit better financially if I had been less slothful and gotten the place listed 6 months earlier in the Spring instead of the Fall of last year. Spring seems like a better time to list. There are more potential buyers looking and I think the complex is more attractive at that time of year with warmer weather and more greenery. Also I would have (potentially) saved some months expenses. 

I took the picture two days before the closing when I visited the place for the last time. My unit is behind the middle tree. It faced South so it was nice and sunny and I liked the views of the pond.

My Citations

I recently discovered the "My Citations" feature on Google Scholar.  It is kind of neat.  You set up a profile with a list of your papers and then Google Scholar finds, counts and lists many of papers which have cited each of your papers.  Listing my papers was easy as Google had already grouped most of them together and I just had to add the whole group and then delete a few interlopers (you would think Google would realize a paper published in the 1700s didn't belong with the others even if it was also written by James Shearer).  In order to make your profile public (so it shows up when you search Google Scholar for your name) you need a verified email address at an academic institution.  This was a bit of a problem for me as I don't have a current academic affiliation.  But then I figured out as a MIT graduate I could set up an email address at alum.mit.edu which would just forward email to my personal account.  After I did this (and waited a day for it to take effect) I was able to use it to pass Google's verification and make my profile public.

When I was at IBM I tried for a while (until I lost interest) to keep track (via Science Citation Index) of papers citing mine.  This is much easier.  And Google Scholar seems to be pretty good at tracking down free online versions of published papers.  It is interesting to see that the number of people citing my papers each year has been trending upward although I haven't been producing much in the way of new papers for a long time.  However I suspect this is mostly because the number of papers being published each year has also been steadily rising.     

In summary this seems like an interesting and worthwhile feature.  It does depend on authors setting it up for their papers.  At the moment many haven't but hopefully more will over time.

Address Change Delay

I moved out of my Ossining townhouse at the beginning of last year but it took me a while to get it listed for sale.  In the meantime I didn't file a change of address form with the post office as I was going up every few weeks to check on the place and could pick up my accumulated mail.  However I eventually got the place on the market last Fall and currently have a buyer.  If nothing goes wrong the closing should be in the next few weeks.  So when I was up there yesterday I went down to the Ossining post office and filled out a change of address form.  When I handed it in the clerk said it would be two or three weeks before it took effect which is a lot longer than I expected.  It doesn't make much difference for me as most of my mail is now going to my new address anyway but might be a bother in other circumstances.

Addendum (5/15): It seems I was likely given bad (or perhaps just highly pessimistic) information from the clerk. When I returned 2 weeks later for the final time I didn't have any additional mail in my box so it appears the change of address took effect almost immediately as I would have expected.

Tax Day

I mailed my tax returns Monday on the way to work.  I used to do my returns by hand but for the last few years I have been using TurboTax and did so again this year.  Tax software does make the process easier but TurboTax at least is far from perfect.  I had several problems with it this year.  A general complaint is that TurboTax seems to discourage using alternative more complicated tax calculation methods even though they can sometimes save substantial amounts of money.  I suppose they are worried that users will get annoyed if they work through a more difficult and complicated calculation only to find it has not saved them anything whereas if they stick to the simple method they will never know about any money they might have saved with a little more work.  This came up in two places on my return, tax refunds and estimated tax penalties.

Regarding tax refunds, these count as taxable income if you deducted the taxes in a previous year but only if (or to the extent) that the deduction saved you money.  In my case it hadn't because I was subject to the AMT (alternative minimum tax) which does not allow you to deduct state and local taxes paid.  Showing this requires refiguring your prior year's taxes which ideally TurboTax would automatically do for you (assuming you used it in the prior year) but which in any case isn't that complicated (assuming you were using TurboTax) although TurboTax explains it badly.

Regarding estimated tax payments the government doesn't want to wait until April 15th to get its money.  So it withholds taxes from your wages (and some other things) and requires quarterly estimated tax payments to cover the taxes on income (such as dividends or capital gains) not subject to withholding.  If you don't pay enough in estimated taxes you will in certain circumstances owe a penalty.  This includes cases where your total estimated tax payments were sufficient but you didn't pay them in equal installments throughout the year.  However you aren't required to predict the future, if your income comes in unevenly during the year your estimated tax payments can be uneven as well as long as they keep up with your income as received.  In my case I had large capital gains in December and made a large estimated tax payment in January.  If my income had come in evenly through the year I would have owed a substantial penalty but as it was I didn't.  However demonstrating this is a fairly involved process.   You have to figure your income (and deductions) for the first 3, 5 and 8 months of the year, annualize them, figure the tax and then show your payments (withholding and estimated tax) covered at least 90%  of the prorated tax amount.  There is unavoidably a lot of work in figuring your partial year income and deductions but once you have entered the amounts TurboTax should be able do the computations automatically.  But for some reason it doesn't, while it figures the regular tax on the annualized amounts it makes you figure the AMT yourself a fairly complicated calculation.  And then it uses the wrong threshold for the June 15 estimated tax payment.  This should cover 37.5% (90% of 5/12) of your annualized tax but TurboTax uses 45% (90% of 6/12 as if June was the seventh month of the year instead of the sixth).  This is not entirely its fault as it is following an IRS example with the same error (I am assuming this error hasn't actually been written into the tax laws).  Fortunately this didn't matter for me. 

As I recall TurboTax warns you the alternative computations above are a lot of work without providing useful guidance on when they are likely to save you money.  As a result I suspect some people are paying more in taxes than they are legally required to.

I found other aspects of the program irritating, it tries to sell various upgrades and when I printed out one copy of the return to mail and one for my records I got two copies of stuff like the filing instructions which is just a waste of paper (and ink). 

All in all I am not inclined to go back to doing my taxes by hand but I find the program irritating also.  Probably not enough to try a different program next year though.