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Parents today in the US worry too much about letting their kids play outside without supervision. Are they paranoid?
The crime rate today is equal to what it was back in 1970. In the ’70s and ’80s, crime was climbing. It peaked around 1993, and since then it’s been going down.
If you were a child in the ’70s or the ’80s and were allowed to go visit your friend down the block, or ride your bike to the library, or play in the park without your parents accompanying you, your children are no less safe than you were.
But it feels so completely different, and we’re told that it’s completely different, and frankly, when I tell people that it’s the same, nobody believes me. We’re living in really safe times, and it’s hard to believe.
This ignores two crucial details. First, if fewer kids are being left unsupervised then there are fewer crimes to commit so if the number of crimes committed is the same as in the 1970′s then in fact we are living in a more dangerous world. Second, even holding constant the crime rate there is a coordination problem that parents must contend with. If all of your neighbors kids are inside playing their Wii and you let your kid go to the playground then he is the only target so you would be right to pass and go out and get your own Wii. In the 1970′s there were enough of us targets out there already that the marginal kid was safe.
The article is here. Cap clap: kottke.org.
Correlation is not causation but for anyone looking for an excuse, this study should be enough to get them guzzling wine if not beer. It says drinking wine in moderation adds five years to your life while beer adds 2.5. People who don’t drink die young.
Have not read the study but it reminds me of the fact that married men make more than men who never marry at all. Does marriage make men more productive? Does alcohol prolong life or is there another explanation?
The marriage counter-theory is easy: men who never marry on average do not have the social skills to do better at work. On the alcohol front, people who drink wine are on average wealthier than ones who drink beer. The rich have a healthier lifestyle, better medical care, cushier jobs etc. The study took place in Holland. The beer is great, much of it brought over from Belgium. Someone who does not drink this quality of beer and avoids alcohol all together has to be really, really antisocial and weird. Sad and lonely, they die young. Weak story at the end but best I can do while teaching.
Northwestern researchers base their model of the spread of H1N1 on estimates of the rate at which money flows through the economy.
At the heart of his simulation are two immense sets of data: air traffic and commuter traffic patterns for the entire country, and the yield of a whimsical Web site, Where’s George?
Where’s George? was started more than 10 years ago by Hank Eskin, a programmer who marked each dollar bill he received with a note asking its next owner to enter its serial number and a ZIP code into the Web site, just for the fun of seeing how far and fast bills traveled. By 2006, the site had the histories of 100 million bills.
From Michael Schwarz:
A Russian soldier comes home after years as a POW in Afghanistan. He tells his story: “I was cold, hungry, beaten, tortured and interrogated every day.” Asked if he confessed to anything, the soldier says, “Not a word, they would beat me and beat me but I simply told them again and again I do not know how the AK47 is designed. They got nothing out of me.”
“Very good,” his commanders were pleased. They asked the soldier if he has any words of advice to the new recruits, and the soldier replied, “Yes. You should pay close attention when they teach you the design of AK47.”
The main logic of torture is to inflict so much pain that the victim reveals all his information to make the pain stop. Incentives for truth-telling in this situation are eerily similar to those in the bank stress tests.
All banks want to report that they are healthy. To distinguish the lying sick banks from the healthy ones there has to be some verifiable information. Healthy ones have this information (e.g. they passed the stress test) and the sick ones do not. The healthy banks have to have the incentive to reveal the information. This is all too clear for the healthy banks: by revealing their results they can avoid bank runs, get liquid, start lending etc.
In the torture analogy, a healthy bank is an informed terrorist with real information of an attack and a sick bank is someone, say an uninformed terrorist, with no information. The assumption of the pro-torture people is that the informed terrorist will have the incentive to report his information to avoid pain. But an uninformed terrorist has the same incentive. To tell one from the other, the informed terrorist’s information has to be verifiable. For example, there has to be “chatter” on Al Qaeda websites that can be used to cross-check the veracity of the torture victim’s confession. If this information is out there anyway, one might ask why torture was necessary in the first place. Presumably, the information is vague or ambiguous. The torture victim’s information brings some clarity.
This process seems heavily error-prone. False confessions may also cross-check by accident. The information is so noisy that a lead that is very weak may be thought to be strong. The more noise there is, the more the victim’s report is uninformative cheap talk – it contains no true information as informed and uninformed terrorists all give information, false and true and impossible to distinguish.
There is a second problem. Once a healthy bank releases the stress test information, the game is over – the market has the information and responds correspondingly. A torture victim faces further torture. There is no way for the interrogator to commit to stop torturing. If the victim knows this beforehand, the victim lies in the first place as there is no way to stop the torture. If the victim finds this out between episodes of water-boarding, the victim might start lying to contradict their earlier true confessions.
The efficacy of torture relies on verifiability of information and the ability of the torturer to commit to stop if good information is revealed. Both properties are hard if not impossible to satisfy in practice.
The Privacy Act of 1974 does regulate how the government uses information about citizens, and it allows people to find out what the government knows about them and has done with that information. But the act does not apply to data collected by outside companies, such as social networks. This issue has come up in recent years because government agencies increasingly use data brokers like ChoicePoint for various sorts of investigations that are not subject to Privacy Act protection. There have been proposals to broaden the act to account for new technologies, but none has gotten much interest from Congress so far.
This article mostly just repeats paranoia about government using social networking sites, but its still worth reading for the legal context.
WiFi on airlines is coming. On some airlines it is already here. This article talks about a few of the providers and discusses service plans and pricing options.
“Yes, broadband is coming. We’re sitting there asking, ‘Who pays? Is it the airlines or the customers? And what will they pay? What is the right technology? … When does all of this happen?’ We’re in weird economic times,” Moeller said.
Its interesting that in high-end hotels the WiFi is paid for by the guest whereas in the cheap hotels the WiFi is free. So far this pattern is playing out on the airlines too with JetBlue offering free WiFi and others charging hefty fees. Of course it is not truly free so the way to understand this is that on airlines with business travelers it makes sense to charge a high price at the expense of excluding the cheapskates. On the low-cost airlines revenue is maximized by setting a low price that virtually everyone is willing to pay. If everyone is paying the price then it saves on transaction costs by rolling it into the airfare. And it makes us feel good to be told that it is “free.”
Every news story about airline WiFi has the obligitory porn reference.
As for the possibility of passengers offending their seat-mates by surfing for inappropriate content, Blumenstein said nine months of Wi-Fi availability on American yielded no such incidents. Still, airlines including American, Delta and United have requested screening for potentially offensive content, he said.
This is never going to be a problem. There is a key complementary activity and the ban on that activity is easily enforced. Without the complementary activity there will be no demand for porn.
Apropos my previous post on simplifying English, a more dramatic example is simplified Chinese:
A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)
Read a debate here.
Alex Kotlowitz has a beautiful essay about the wonderful city of Chicago. Here is an excerpt about the Hideout, where Jeff and I performed a few weeks ago:
One recent evening, Hogan met me at the Hideout, where she bartended for more than nine years and still sometimes performs. It’s hidden in a small industrial corner on the north side, so when Hogan gave me directions, she instructed me to go over the river, past the railroad tracks, across the street from the city’s fleet of garbage trucks. If you get to the old U.S. Steel plant, you’ve gone too far. She paused. “I guess it’s a good place to bump somebody off,” she laughed.
The Hideout is a wood-framed house built at the turn of the last century, probably by squatters, when the neighborhood was mostly working-class Irish. After prohibition, the downstairs became a drinking hole for steelworkers. In 1996, it was purchased by four partners who did little to change the look — photos of the original owners, Angelo and Phil, still hang over the bar — but brought in musicians. The thinking was that musicians could experiment here, and they have; on any given night you could stumble upon a jazz quartet or a rock band or a folk singer. Neko Case played the Hideout before winning wide acclaim. Fiddler/violinist Andrew Bird worked his way from swing to indie rock here. And when the Frames passed through town, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová used the place to test some songs they were writing for a little movie called Once — one, “Falling Slowly,” won Best Song at this year’s Oscars.
One of the Hideout’s owners, Tim Tuten, told me, “We’re conscious of what made Chicago great. We have a historical reputation to uphold. This is the city of Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Lou Rawls. It’s from the ground up.” It was past midnight, and Tuten, who speaks with the drive of a Hendrix guitar riff, expounded on the 1893 Columbia Exposition (The Devil in the White City made everyone feel like an expert on it) and the time Wilco played at one of their block parties (kick-ass block parties being a city tradition) and how he recently discovered that in the 1960s Nelson Algren would down a beer at the Hideout. On the drive home, I listened to a CD Hogan had burned for me. She’s singing covers — from Allen Toussaint to the Violent Femmes. Her voice, rich and eclectic as the city’s neighborhoods, wanders throughout an exhilarating range. As Tony Fitzpatrick once told me of Chicago, “It’s a place that allows you to run.”
I’m on leave next year and the article makes me wistful. (Of course I live in Evanston so I’m a fake Chicagoan!).
Suppose that you have evidence of wrongdoing but it is not definitive evidence. You are only 80% sure. Suppose that if you were sure you would feel a certain level of moral outrage. What fraction of that moral outrage should you feel when you are only 80% sure?
Surely it must be less than 100%. The suspect stands before you and you know that he is either guilty or innocent. Whatever level of outrage you feel, you are with 20% probability feeling morally outraged at someone who is innocent.
Is it 80%? Is the level of moral outrage proportional to the probability of guilt? This would lead to the absurd conclusion that, because we know somebody shot JFK, and we don’t know for sure who it is, and everybody around you is guilty with some probability, you feel a certain level of moral outrage toward everybody you meet.
Fortunately, there is a theory of crime and punishment that does not suffer from these paradoxes. Punishment for suspicion of a crime is designed to create incentives for good behavior and this implies a precise relationship between the level of suspicion and the level of punishment. And the relationship usually clashes with that of moral outrage.
For example, you can be certain that a crime was not committed and still insist on punishing. For example, the best way to deter doping in sports might be to set such drastic penalties that nobody will ever use performance-enhancing drugs. To enforce this we must use drug tests. And when a drug test comes up positive, we know it was a false positive because we know that the penalty is so high that nobody would be doping. But we must punish anyway because this is our deterrent.
The opposite is possible as well. You can be quite certain that a crime was committed and let the suspect go free with no penalty. For example, suppose there are two kinds of evidence suggestive of a crime. There might be circumstantial evidence and there might be an eye-witness. It may be an optimal deterrent to punish only in the event of an eye-witness and never when there is only circumstantial evidence, even very strong circumstantial evidence. This would minimize type II errors (convicting the innocent in the event of circumstantial evidence) and would still be a sufficient deterrent if the penalty in the event of an eye-witness could be set high enough.
Ok, so we can escape the paradoxes of moral outrage. Now that we have that settled, what I am trying to figure out is how these ideas extend so that I can escape the paradoxes of statistical voyeurism.
We made the mistake of buying Goose Island’s attempt to make high-end, Belgian style beer. It was terrible. I gave up even trying to drink it after a few sips. Wine can be over-oaked. I don’t know what the beer equivalent is called. Whatever it is, Matilda has that quality. Too sweet, overwhelming flavor. Yuk. Don’t buy it.
I was sitting in a restaurant last night when I spaced out and started listening to the jazz they were playing. The song sounded familiar. Perhaps the singer was Diana Krall?
I was wrong on the singer. There’s no way Diana K would stoop so low as to sing the song I recognized - “Everybody wants to rule the world” by Tears for Fears. It was followed by “Every breath you take” by the Police and, amazingly, “Boys don’t cry” by the Cure. All songs from my youth. I never listen to them now. They seem too childish.
In jazz format, (and I’m not kidding!) they initially take on the patina of sophistication. Plus they transport you back to key events in your life – underage drinking, smoking etc….- that were accompanied by the songs. So, doing Cure covers in a jazz format is going to open up a huge market if you do it right. Wistful middle-aged adults with disposable income. The problem is that listening to ten or more of these covers is going to make you throw up. This was the flaw in the CD playing in the restaurant. You have to mix things up with some real jazz. You have to get Dina Krall to do the covers. She’s married to Elvis Costello and has already compromised any purist principles she may once have held. I want to hear her do some Dr Dre or Gnarls Barkley. I’d buy that.
This morning something interesting was demonstrated on the NPR puzzle with Will Shortz. Each week a puzzle is given and listeners are given a week to email their answers. Among those with the correct answer a listener is selected at random to solve a series of puzzle lives on the air the next week.
Last week’s qualifying puzzle was unusually difficult. There was an exceptionally small number of correct answers. The best puzzle solvers right? The listener selected from this group played on the air this morning. The on-air puzzle was a relatively easy format and on a typical week the guest would get nearly all of them right. However, today’s winner got fewer than 1/4 of them. Why?
There are people who are relatively good at getting ideas quickly and there are people whose comparative advantage is in thinking hard for a longer period of time to solve harder puzzles. In chess, there are players who are good at 5 minute “blitz” time controls and those that are good at chess by mail. There is little overlap between these groups. When the qualifying puzzle is easy both types solve the puzzle. When the qualifying puzzle is hard we get a disproportionately large selection of the postalites. This means that the randomly selected listener is less likely to do well at the on-air puzzle which favors blitzers over postalites.
I have been trying to come up with a practical measure of the length of Chicago winters. Here are a few.
- On Oct 4 I swapped out my summer clothes for winter clothes. Tomorrow I will take the summer clothes back out of storage. 7 months of winter.
- On Nov 10 I wore my heavy winter coat for the first time. I downgraded to my wool coat for the first time on March 27. 4.5 months of deep winter.
- Sep 9 was the first day I did not wear flipflops. I wore them for the first time last week. 4.5 months of non-winter.
Hau muC tym dew kids wayst lerning tew spel ingliS? Sudent we 3ther standerdeys 0n a simplifeyd speling sistem or just ubandun speling cunvenCins oltewgether? And hau muC tym is lost lerning to r3d? I caym ucross the Spelling Society wiC advocayts speling r3form and 0lso Wyrdplay wiC arcayvs a number of simplifayd speling sistems raynjing frum the totul3 fonetic tew sistems wiC are intended tew bey incrementul steps toword r3form. This wun I am yewsing is just mayd up bayst 0n luking at a few uf them.
- Dont thinc that deveyces will mayk the pr0blem mewt. Yes my iPhone pr3dicts wut I am reyting but onl3 b3cus I spel the furst few letters curectl3.
- The pr0blem with fonetic sistems is that BritiS and Umericun werds wud be speld diferently.
- I expect that informul speling cunvenCuns wil 3merj sewn withaut a t0p-daun iniSitiv. Instunt mesujing is the furst big r3sun for kids to reyt tew 3C uther. Til nau, kids talct to 3c uther but rot onl3 tew thayr t3Cers. Thay develupt informul spocen layngwij ul0ngseyd the formul layngwij. This is hapening nau with reyting. Just as informul spocen layngwij perm3ayts the formul, this wil hapen with the ritin langwij. 3ven morso b3cus uf the 3fiSens3 gayns.
- This wud b3 a thing uf the past.
(C0nversaySin with Wolfgang and Tomek acn0lijd.)
I got two speeding tickets in less than one year. I worked off the first one by taking an online course. For the second one, they make you go to an 8 hours (!) course over two nights. The only course that fit my schedule was in Rolling Meadows. Just like Old Orchard in Skokie, there may have been farmland there a while ago but there are no rolling meadows now.
It’s obvious that the punishment in terms of wasted time is harsh so that you do not speed again. Your first thought is whether you can persuade the teacher to let you go early. This desire was very strong on Thursday night when the Bulls were playing the Celtics in Game 6 of their best of seven series. The class took place in the basement of a courthouse and it turns out the police monitor the teacher to make sure he does not let the class off early. Of course the teacher would love to go home early too so the incentives for renegotiation are huge. The police have to stay anyway so they enforce the rules.
So I was stuck in the class but I kind of enjoyed it because I got to meet people I do not meet everyday otherwise. I also got lots of information that I would not gotten in my normal interactions.
The hippie woman: “I got a ticket because I gave a ride to a Jamaican guy who turned to be a homeless ex-convict. I got a speeding ticket when I got scared driving him to his shelter.”
The hippie girl: “When I have fatigue, I do yoga to wake up before I drive”
The truck driver: “Go to White Castle before you drink. The grease soaks up the beer.”
The Comcast guy: “Ritalin is like cocaine if you don’t have ADD. I’m taking Ritalin now so I can sit in this class without going crazy.”
Lucca, the waiter: “The strip clubs in Indiana are better than the strip clubs in Chicago. The Indiana girls are nicer and they want dates. Always go to a ranch style strip club.”
I’m not sure how the last comment was related to the class.
This is a family favorite. There’s blackberry but enough tannin to make it dry and not sweet. Smoky barbecue. Acidic aftertaste. Great value for $22. It’s widely produced and distributed. Get any vintage you can find.
Did you know that since 2001 heroin, cocaine, marijuana and all similar drugs were decriminalized for personal use in Portugal? Decriminalization means that there are no criminal penalties, and instead citations for use result in the offer of counseling and voluntary rehabilitation. This CATO study reports that since then use of these drugs has actually declined.
The study is interesting for the historical account and other context but the claim about usage rates is hard to believe. The paper is missing details on how usage rates are calculated but a simple alternative explanation is this. Without criminal penalties, law enforcement has reduced incentives to issue citations and thus users are undercounted.
I think I need to sign up. The home page is here. They host conferences. Here is the program for the 2008 conference in Portland. Notice the scholarly outings in shaded green. The first issue of their society journal appeared in 2006 and features an article by Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden. McFadden is a small-time wine maker whom I once heard say “How do you become a millionaire in the wine business? Start with 2 million.” Orley Ashenfelter is the editor of the journal and here is a working paper entitled “Predicting the Quality and Price of Bordeaux Wines.“
They have a blog here and there is a sister organization called The Association of Food Economists. (Gatsby Gesture: Marginal Revolution)
It is not hard to make a good espresso nor is it hard to steam milk to the right temperature and frothiness to make a cappuccino or latte. But virtually all coffee houses fail both, especially the supposedly high-end ones. The espresso should not run much beyond the point it turns dark brown/black to blonde. The milk should be lukewarm, not hot, and it should be pourable. If you see your barista spooning milk into a cappuccino, run away fast. The milk is almost certainly scalded.
Most people think that coffee just tastes bitter and they grin and bear it. Or they pour in a lot of sugar. But the bitterness comes from over-run espresso and burnt milk. In fact, properly done, a latte is sweet and needs no sugar. Milk is naturally sweet and gentle frothing accentuates the sweetness. Coffee is nutty. A good cappuccino can have flavors of hot chocolate or even peanut butter cookies.
Small World coffee in Princeton consistently makes a good cappuccino. The right volume, the right temperature and sweet. I have been in Princeton all week and had two cappuccinos per day from 10 different baristas and all but one was drinkable and a few were downright excellent. I highly recommend this place. A few details:
- the internet is free for one hour but somewhat flaky.
- stay away from the biscotti. Grab a muffin from the bakery at Olives which is three doors away.
- the layout of the place is nice. The mirrored columns have a funny effect on you when you try to find a place to sit. If you are by yourself take a seat at the bar looking over the lower level.
- even a good barista makes a bad coffee from time to time. today the barista dumped the first latte he made for me because he could see it was not perfect.
- as i said, it is easy to make a good coffee. but it took me years of practice to do this:
The Small World baristas are still working on it:
A game-theorists’ term derived from the commonplace admonishment “Talk is Cheap.” To say that “talk is cheap” is to suggest that words have no meaning because they don’t raise the stakes. “Actions speak louder than words.” Or, to quote the game theorist Yogi Berra “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Our casual understanding that the meaning of words derives solely from their ultimate consequences demonstrates that we have deep game-theoretic instincts.
But game theory is useful because with careful study we arrive at insights one or more steps beyond our instincts. And indeed, upon further reflection, just because talk is cheap does not imply by itself that words have no meaning. In fact “cheap talk” can and often does matter because it enables credible exchange of information provided such communication is consistent with self-interested motives. Even though talk is cheap, when upon landing at O’Hare, I phone my taxi dispatcher and tell him I am ready to be picked up at the curbside, he believes me and sends a cab.
Moreover, cheap talk is credible even when there is substantial conflict of interest between the talker and the listener. Despite my claims to the contrary, the dispatcher knows that I am actually calling from inside the airplane and I am not at the curbside yet and he delays the dispatch long enough so that the driver arrives at the curbside after me and not before.
Suprisingly, talk can be credible sometimes only because it is cheap. If instead of me, it is an uninterested third-party who calls the dispatcher to send a cab, the dispatcher knows that she has no reason to say anything other than the truth, and the dispatcher sends the cab immediately.
A final digression on the genesis of the phrase “cheap talk” as a term of art in game theory. It is tempting to suppose that the popularity of the phrase derives from the irony that the logic of incentive-compatible communication turns the idea that “talk is cheap” on its head. But the origin of the phrase is something of a mystery. The first game theorists to demonstrate the role of communication in strategic interactions were Vince Crawford and Joel Sobel in their hugely important paper “Strategic Information Transmission“ Interestingly, a quick search through the text of that paper reveals that neither “cheap” nor “talk” appears anywhere in the paper.
(dinner conversation with Dilip, Tomek, Stephen and Sylvain acknowledged.)
