Now we get four years of half the nation's whackadoos arguing that Barack Obama is not really the president because John Roberts screwed up the oath, and the other half screaming that the Chief Justice screwed up the oath on purpose for exactly that reason.
P.S.: At 7:50 pm on January 21, Drudge is flashing that President Obama has been re-sworn by the Chief Justice in the White House.
20 January 2009
15 January 2009
12 January 2009
It's Time For Another Round Of Thoughtful . . . Or Creepy?
The guy in line at the grocery store who had two items, a bouquet of flowers and a large tub of "I can't believe it's not butter."
10 January 2009
Cancer Gene Becomes 100% Fatal: Progress Lauded
Breast cancer gene-free baby born (BBC.com, 1/9/09)
The first baby in the UK tested before conception for a genetic form of breast cancer has been born.
Doctors at University College London said the girl and her mother were doing well following the birth this week.
The embryo was screened for the altered BRCA1 gene, which would have meant the girl had a 80% chance of developing breast cancer.
08 January 2009
The Bomber's Veto
If we believe that:
If so, then Hamas can always torpedo a truce between the Palestinians and the Israelis, at least so long as Arab governments, including the PA, continue to use hatred of the Jews to distract their people from their own failure to secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If demography is really the Palestinian's friend, then Hamas can win, or at least convince itself that it can win, simply by preventing peace until such time as the Palestinians so greatly outnumber the Israelis that Israel's position becomes untenable. Of course, by preventing peace Hamas also keeps the Palestinians poor, so it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
So what can Israel do? It can decide to simply absorb the rocket attacks. This is, in fact, what it decides periodically, until the burden on its populace becomes too great. Since I think that this is an immoral abrogation of the basic responsibilities of government, I'm less than happy with this tactic.
It can wipe out Hamas. I'm generally skeptical of the "fighting terror only creates martyrs and recruits" argument. Al Qaeda has found that we can make enough martyrs to limit the number of recruits, or at least prevent them from doing anything constructive with the recruits they do get. But the Israelis, who have been calling and texting people living near their targets and telling them to seek shelter, including members of Hamas, are not willing to do what it takes to wipe out a popular movement mixed into a civilian population. This is another indication that, contrary to most people's expectations, the US -- following the Declaration of Independence -- is more ruthless than the Israelis.
The other possible solution is OJ's argument that the Israelis should let Hamas govern, with the expectation that it will fail. This is similar to the Anbar Awakening, in which seeing the future that AQ was trying to bring about up close and personal drove the Sunnis into alliance with us. The problem with this is two-fold. First, Hamas already has some experience delivering social and civil services. Second, whenever Hamas gets in trouble with the people, all it need do is lob a few rockets into Israel, leaving us back where we started.
There is another solution, of course. The federal government owns or managers 86% of the land in Nevada, some 61 million acres. Israel is less than 5.5 million acres. Let them make another desert bloom.
- People are born with certain inalienable rights;
- Among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and
- People consent to government in order to protect these rights,
If so, then Hamas can always torpedo a truce between the Palestinians and the Israelis, at least so long as Arab governments, including the PA, continue to use hatred of the Jews to distract their people from their own failure to secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If demography is really the Palestinian's friend, then Hamas can win, or at least convince itself that it can win, simply by preventing peace until such time as the Palestinians so greatly outnumber the Israelis that Israel's position becomes untenable. Of course, by preventing peace Hamas also keeps the Palestinians poor, so it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
So what can Israel do? It can decide to simply absorb the rocket attacks. This is, in fact, what it decides periodically, until the burden on its populace becomes too great. Since I think that this is an immoral abrogation of the basic responsibilities of government, I'm less than happy with this tactic.
It can wipe out Hamas. I'm generally skeptical of the "fighting terror only creates martyrs and recruits" argument. Al Qaeda has found that we can make enough martyrs to limit the number of recruits, or at least prevent them from doing anything constructive with the recruits they do get. But the Israelis, who have been calling and texting people living near their targets and telling them to seek shelter, including members of Hamas, are not willing to do what it takes to wipe out a popular movement mixed into a civilian population. This is another indication that, contrary to most people's expectations, the US -- following the Declaration of Independence -- is more ruthless than the Israelis.
The other possible solution is OJ's argument that the Israelis should let Hamas govern, with the expectation that it will fail. This is similar to the Anbar Awakening, in which seeing the future that AQ was trying to bring about up close and personal drove the Sunnis into alliance with us. The problem with this is two-fold. First, Hamas already has some experience delivering social and civil services. Second, whenever Hamas gets in trouble with the people, all it need do is lob a few rockets into Israel, leaving us back where we started.
There is another solution, of course. The federal government owns or managers 86% of the land in Nevada, some 61 million acres. Israel is less than 5.5 million acres. Let them make another desert bloom.
05 January 2009
Barack Obama, The Perfect President
In one way, Barack Obama might be the perfect president: he was in the Senate, but not of it. He has no reason to feel any institutional loyalty, he wasn't there long enough to be coopted, and I suspect that he understands -- as all reasonably intelligent, reasonably impartial observers must understand -- that the Senate is a ridiculous institution and that Senators are, largely, pompous blowhards who, if they could do anything else, would. Spending any time at all with Joe Biden, who is what passes in the Senate for intelligent and well-informed (he almost certainly knows what century it is), can only underscore that message.
Thus, we see, thanks to OJ, that Obama didn't run his nominee for head of the CIA past Diane Feinstein, and she's now in a snit.
There are certain things that are true of the men who are elected President. One is that they want to be President. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush, doesn't see his allotted role as ushering in the re-animation of congressional governance. He's no more likely to run his nominees past the Senate grandees then George W. Bush, who was lectured by Harry Reid on the necessity of selecting his judicial nominees from a list provided by the Senate.
Does the Senate dare withhold its consent from the Democrat's anointed one? That's the beauty of it: the Senate dares nothing.
Thus, we see, thanks to OJ, that Obama didn't run his nominee for head of the CIA past Diane Feinstein, and she's now in a snit.
There are certain things that are true of the men who are elected President. One is that they want to be President. Barack Obama, like George W. Bush, doesn't see his allotted role as ushering in the re-animation of congressional governance. He's no more likely to run his nominees past the Senate grandees then George W. Bush, who was lectured by Harry Reid on the necessity of selecting his judicial nominees from a list provided by the Senate.
Does the Senate dare withhold its consent from the Democrat's anointed one? That's the beauty of it: the Senate dares nothing.
30 December 2008
Can Google Survive Its Success?
As I understand (admittedly dimly) Google's success is based on an algorithm that does a particularly good job ranking search results based upon how many other web pages link to it. But what happens now that no one finds anything on the web other than through Google? Now Google's algorithm must basically be to rank pages in the order that Google ranks them. I understand that now they're concentrating on getting every web page in the world into their servers multiple times, but that seems like a pretty low-return game.
26 December 2008
Happy Boxing Day
Today is Boxing Day, the day when, um, er, I have no idea (Ma'nish ta'na...).
Is it:
a) The day baby Jesus kicked the Wise Men's asses?
b) The day in England on which the servants are expected to wrap their presents from their masters?
c) A day for organising one's closet? Or,
d) A day in which the English go to "Pantomimes," which they watch from theatre boxes.
Whatever it is, let's all enjoy it. Holidays need no excuses.
Is it:
a) The day baby Jesus kicked the Wise Men's asses?
b) The day in England on which the servants are expected to wrap their presents from their masters?
c) A day for organising one's closet? Or,
d) A day in which the English go to "Pantomimes," which they watch from theatre boxes.
Whatever it is, let's all enjoy it. Holidays need no excuses.
25 December 2008
Christmas Conundrum
Trying to run a hierarchical linear model, I've discovered that my dependent variable, Return on Assets, is leptokurtotic. I can improve it somewhat by running a full model on the raw data, analyzing the residuals and dropping some outliers, but ROA is still leptokurtotic. A logit transform, which is supposed to reduce kurtosis, just makes things worse. It turns out that ROA, which is a very common dependent variable in Strategic Management, is almost always kurtotic because it violates the assumption of proportionality; that is, the relationship between net income and total assets is non-linear.
What is kurtosis? Here's a picture of leptokurtotic data plotted against a normal curve:
What makes it kurtotic is that it is "peakier" than the normal curve. Why should we care? Because the most common statistical methods assume that the residuals of the dependent variable (how far each point is from the predicted value) are normally distributed. If they aren't, then the estimate of how likely it is that a particular result found in a particular sample is chance rather than real is unreliable. Since that's all that statistics do, that's a problem. So, for example, if researchers assume that headaches are distributed normally in the population but they're not, then a treatment that seems effective might not be.
More to the point, some economists think that Long Term Capital Management failed because its models assumed that certain financial measures, like Return on Assets, were normally distributed when they're not. At least one economist has argued that the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which is related to the LTCM model is also wrong for the same reason. Since Black-Scholes and other, related, models are the basis for most modern finance, that implies that people pricing the risk of various financial instruments without much of a history might have assumed that Return on Assets, etc., are normally distributed. Because, contrary to this assumption, ROA is leptokurtotic, the models might have overestimated the expected return on investment, underestimated the risk and mispriced the instruments.
In other words, the fact that ROA is leptokurtotic is a possible explanation, and a more satisfying explanation than most out there, for the sub-prime mortgage and CDS implosion.
What is kurtosis? Here's a picture of leptokurtotic data plotted against a normal curve:
What makes it kurtotic is that it is "peakier" than the normal curve. Why should we care? Because the most common statistical methods assume that the residuals of the dependent variable (how far each point is from the predicted value) are normally distributed. If they aren't, then the estimate of how likely it is that a particular result found in a particular sample is chance rather than real is unreliable. Since that's all that statistics do, that's a problem. So, for example, if researchers assume that headaches are distributed normally in the population but they're not, then a treatment that seems effective might not be.
More to the point, some economists think that Long Term Capital Management failed because its models assumed that certain financial measures, like Return on Assets, were normally distributed when they're not. At least one economist has argued that the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which is related to the LTCM model is also wrong for the same reason. Since Black-Scholes and other, related, models are the basis for most modern finance, that implies that people pricing the risk of various financial instruments without much of a history might have assumed that Return on Assets, etc., are normally distributed. Because, contrary to this assumption, ROA is leptokurtotic, the models might have overestimated the expected return on investment, underestimated the risk and mispriced the instruments.
In other words, the fact that ROA is leptokurtotic is a possible explanation, and a more satisfying explanation than most out there, for the sub-prime mortgage and CDS implosion.
23 December 2008
Recommendations
Of all the different ways of listening to music on the internet, I've listening to Pandora. Basically, you choose a genre, artist or song you like and Pandora picks out features of that song that it looks for in other songs. At the moment, I've just started a "Fred Smith" channel and Pandora is looking for songs that have "folk rock qualities, extensive vamping, acoustic sonority, major key tonality and a breathy male lead vocalist." Well worth suffering through their affectation that they've identified musical DNA.
A Pirate Premium?
Does anyone know why, over the last week or so, the WTI Cushing price for a barrel of oil has started trading at a $5-$10 dollar discount to the other spot markets?
Festivus Comes Early
Via Ann Althouse, I see that the New York Times printed a letter to the editor from the Mayor of Paris lamenting the anti-democratic nature of Caroline Kennedy's possible appointment to the Senate. It reeks, he implies, of American decline.
The letter is a fake.
Now, on to the feats of strength.
The letter is a fake.
Now, on to the feats of strength.
21 December 2008
Timing The Surge
When it does become time to judge George W. Bush's presidency, one big question will concern the timing of the surge. If it could have been done successfully earlier, than it should have been. If it had to wait for AQiM to prove to the Sunnis what vicious idiots they were, then it couldn't have been done much sooner.
19 December 2008
Rick Warren At The Inauguration
First thought: If McCain had won and invited Warren, the progressive left would have told us about how this just proves that Obama would have been so much better.
Second thought: For the left, this is just like how it would have been for the right if McCain had invited Rev. Wright to give the invocation.
Third thought: That's exactly what McCain would have done.
Second thought: For the left, this is just like how it would have been for the right if McCain had invited Rev. Wright to give the invocation.
Third thought: That's exactly what McCain would have done.
What Does Democracy Do?
There are three possible justifications for democracy (including representative democracy):
There's some truth to all of this, but each thesis has different policy implications. If the kindergarten thesis is right -- given the chance, the American people will do the right thing -- then we care about information flow and informed voters. We want to think about things like poll taxes or literacy tests, and we want to force the candidates to make public their specific plans. We care about campaign promises the same way we care about product warranties and fitness for a particular purpose. Parliamentary systems tend to follow this model.
In the Jeffersonian thesis, we're more interested in the people running for office than in what they plan to do. We want exposure to the candidates personality so that we can judge what kind of people they are, rather than their specific plans for specific problems. This is a pretty good positive description of the current system in which we make the candidates spend two years working long hard hours debating, eating corn dogs, giving speeches, going on Letterman, writing (or putting their name to) articles in Foreign Affairs, etc.
In the black box model, all we need as a decision. We don't have to know or care how that decision was arrived at. Random works fine, so long as all the actors agree to be bound by the decision. the black box thesis doesn't have much to say about the campaign, but it loves the Electoral College in which even a random and ambiguous close vote is translated into a clear win.
I find, as I get older, that I become more attracted to the black box thesis. Given that we need to have a president, for example, and that he needs to be the clear winner, an election is as good a way to choose him as any and better than most. At that point, retrospective sense making and our psychological need to see ourselves in control of our fate will kick in and we'll all agree that he is the legitimate leader, chosen by the Jeffersonian electorate. (And, if push comes to shove, G-d won't let anything too bad happen to us.)
(We can also add the Bismark corollary, which says that it doesn't really matter how we choose our leaders because G-d's going to take care of us anyway, but I assume that it's obvious why the less we talk about that, the better.)
- The people, corporately, make good decisions (which I'll call the "kindergarten thesis");
- Election to office lends legitimacy from the sovereign people to our temporary leaders (the "Jeffersonian theis"); or
- We need to get our leaders somewhere and voting beats accident of birth or force of arms (the "black box thesis").
There's some truth to all of this, but each thesis has different policy implications. If the kindergarten thesis is right -- given the chance, the American people will do the right thing -- then we care about information flow and informed voters. We want to think about things like poll taxes or literacy tests, and we want to force the candidates to make public their specific plans. We care about campaign promises the same way we care about product warranties and fitness for a particular purpose. Parliamentary systems tend to follow this model.
In the Jeffersonian thesis, we're more interested in the people running for office than in what they plan to do. We want exposure to the candidates personality so that we can judge what kind of people they are, rather than their specific plans for specific problems. This is a pretty good positive description of the current system in which we make the candidates spend two years working long hard hours debating, eating corn dogs, giving speeches, going on Letterman, writing (or putting their name to) articles in Foreign Affairs, etc.
In the black box model, all we need as a decision. We don't have to know or care how that decision was arrived at. Random works fine, so long as all the actors agree to be bound by the decision. the black box thesis doesn't have much to say about the campaign, but it loves the Electoral College in which even a random and ambiguous close vote is translated into a clear win.
I find, as I get older, that I become more attracted to the black box thesis. Given that we need to have a president, for example, and that he needs to be the clear winner, an election is as good a way to choose him as any and better than most. At that point, retrospective sense making and our psychological need to see ourselves in control of our fate will kick in and we'll all agree that he is the legitimate leader, chosen by the Jeffersonian electorate. (And, if push comes to shove, G-d won't let anything too bad happen to us.)
18 December 2008
And You Think We Have Problems
This has got to be the weirdest comment thread I've ever read, including on Screw Loose Change.
No Logic Please, We're American
OJ points us to an article arguing that the Europeans hate us because of our freedoms. Of course, the terrorists hate us because of our freedoms, too. So, as we all suspected, Europeans are terrorists.
14 December 2008
"So what if a guy threw his shoe at me,"
George W. Bush is, in the end, probably not a great president. He is a little too dismissive of the bully pulpit to qualify as great, a characteristic failing of his family. Supposedly, his grandmother once complained that George H.W. Bush was talking about himself too much in one of his campaigns and this reticence, odd in a family that gave us two presidents, seems to have affected W. as well. It is also, I suspect, partly how Laura likes it and partly an entirely laudable effort not to be Bill Clinton.
He has been, however, the perfect president for me. For better or worse, if I were designing a president, I'd end up with George W. Bush. And I for one will dearly miss a president who's reaction to having a shoe thrown at him is "So what?"
He has been, however, the perfect president for me. For better or worse, if I were designing a president, I'd end up with George W. Bush. And I for one will dearly miss a president who's reaction to having a shoe thrown at him is "So what?"
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