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This is a personal note for a friend. Read it when you get turned down for tenure.
I was an Assistant Professor at Northwestern, came up for tenure according to schedule and was denied. Fired. Canned. Sent packing. It sucked.
But actually it wasn’t so bad. First of all even if you never get tenure anywhere you have like the greatest job ever. I live in a neighborhood full of people who earn 10 times what I do and they are all 10 times less happy than me. I once asked an investment banker whose daughter is in my daughter’s class how much of his salary he would sacrifice for the non-pecuniary benefits of an academic (doing whatever interests you, freedom to set your own schedule, university culture) and the best estimate we could come up with is that being an investment banker sucks big time.
But you will get tenure somewhere. Some places will want to put you on a fresh, probably shortened clock, you could go for that. But the other option is to ride out your lame-duck year. Universities are civilized enough to give you over one year notice before you are out on your ass. All the papers that have been in journal review purgatory will finally get published in that year and in the next year you will probably have a tenured offer.
It does kinda suck though to be dead man walking for a whole year surrounded by your executioners.
But the joke is going to be on them once you get tenured because here’s a little secret that only you, I, and our chairmen know: when you are finally tenured you will be making more money than most of them. Here’s a simple model. Professor A is employed by Department B and Departments C and D are considering making A an offer. Whatever they offer, Department B is going to match it, and you with your lexicographic preference of money first, avoid-the-hassle-of-moving second, will stay at department B. Since it’s costly to recruit you and make you an offer and that won’t be accepted in equilibrium anyway, Departments C and D don’t bother, B has no offer to match, and A, despite his new higher rank continues to live in Assistant Professor poverty. On the other hand when A is exogenously separated from B, he has a credible commitment to take the highest offer from C or D.
Failure rules.
(I must caution you however. As with any rejection, at first you will not be able to shake the hope that your current department will eventually see the error of its ways and hire you back after one year with tenure, Full Professor even. Don’t get your hopes up. That never happens.)
Drawing: Part of Your World from http://www.f1me.net
For a much-needed Spring Break holiday, we faced the Naples FL vs “somewhere exotic yet family friendly” trip dilemma. I was firmly in the Naples FL camp but was outvoted so we ended up in Andalucia. Here are my tips for a trip with young kids.
First, do not fly Iberia across the Atlantic. They are on strike a lot of the time. Our flight out got cancelled because of a strike and we have (so far!) narrowly escaped a cancellation of our return trip. For local trips, you are stuck with Iberia or Spanish trains which can also go on strike (or you can drive).
Since we actually got here, things have gone pretty smoothly.
Granada
If you are driving in, you can avoid the city by using the ring road and access the Alhambra parking lots and deposit yourself there. You can walk down via the pedestrian walkway just outside the Alhambra walls. This walk is wonderful in itself.
Book ahead for the Alhambra and get your tickets from the machines near the entrance hall. Tickets sell out quickly each morning and people start lining up at 6 am if they forget to book ahead. I can’t do justice to the Alhambra in this brief post but can confirm that there is enough interest to satisfy young boys – the castle watchtowers are fun, all the water canals that feed the gardens are fascinating and this is enough to sustain them on the walk through the Nasrid Palace. BTW, you have to arrive at the Palace at the specific time on your ticket.
The main other activity I enjoyed was the walk up the Albayzin hill, the old Moorish quarter. You are transported to an earlier time and you traipse up winding, narrow streets up the hill to the Mirador de San Nicholas for a spectacular view of the Alhambra
We did not have a good meal. The recommended place in the guidebooks is Bodegas Castenada. We had a passable meal and had to send the bill back when we noticed that it had many items added on. We loved the gelato at Los Italianos near the cathedral.
Our trip was shortened by the cancellation of our flight so we actually ended up not staying in Granada but in the countryside at El Amparo, a kind of B&B run by a British couple, Jeff and Sally Webb. It was extremely good value and we got a two bedroom. There were many other families staying. We all loved it even thought he swimming pool was not open as the weather was pretty cold. It is a bit isolated so you can’t just pop out to pick up provisions. But Jeff was great. He is a great cook and is happy to lay on toasted sandwiches for those with tapas ennui. El Amparo is a ten minute drive to Alhama de Granada which has many nice restaurants and is spectacularly located on a gorge. We had several short hikes including ones to a Roman bridge and Moorish dungeons.
Cordoba
The main attraction is the Mezquita, the former church, then Moorish mosque, now Christian Cathedral. The majority of the interior is made up of symmetrical arches designed to resemble date trees. These are simple and starkly beautiful. In one corner, the mihrab has ornate designs but non-traditionally does not point directly towards Mecca. And yet the decorations are appropriate and do not go over the top into kitsch. It is easy to imagine the devotion the architecture might have inspired. The cathedral is plonked right in the middle and could not be more different in style. No communication between religions.
The Jewish quarter is right outside the Mezquita. We mainly encountered the tourist shops before kid tiredness drove us home.
Seville
A real city. And we arrived here in Easter Week, Semana Santa. Each church has its own procession, many in the middle of the night. We woke many times. Navigating the town was hard with processions and crowds preventing any easy route from A to B from ever being fully completed. On Easter Sunday we latched onto a procession. The drummers announced the arrival of the main float. Cloaked and hatted devotees tossed candies to kids. A band followed the float. At many points we stopped so the men carrying the float could be swapped out. Their fervor and effort signaled the strength of their belief.
The Moorish Alcazar took us back to the pre-Christian era. I must admit to the notion that I actually prefer it to the Alhambra. Less hectic, the palace being equally beautiful and the gardens magnificent. Or it could be that we had good weather in Seville finally and it rained while were in the Alhambra. Try out the simple maze and play hide and seek in the peacock-filled gardens.
We finally had a meal without fried calamari, patatas bravas or tortilla. Pacador near the Alameda de Hercules displayed a level of sophistication we had not encountered so far on our trip, at least at the tapas level. As usual, they padded the bill but we noticed despite the vino tinto we had imbibed.
Now we have a kid with the flu so we are just resting in our overpriced and under-maintained apartment. We will skip the cathedral.
I have loved the trip and we could easily spend another week in Andalucia and enjoy it more. But in Naples FL I know where the CVS is when I need ibuprofen for kids.
People complain that American mainstream media are becoming more and more polarized. There is a tradition in American journalism that the journalist should be objective and report the facts without judgment. Opinion pieces and Editorials are relegated to the back pages.
Nowadays those standards are eroding. Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN have discernible biases but still pander to the idea that they provide objective journalism. Meanwhile there is the perception that this trend is degrading the quality of information.
From a narrow perspective that may be true. I learn less from Fox News if they selectively report information that confirms the preconceptions of their audience. But media bias makes the media as a group more informative, not less.
Suppose I have a vast array of media sources which are scattered across the left-right spectrum. When a policy is being debated I look at all of them and find the pivotal outlet: all those to the left of it are advocating the policy and all those to the right are opposed. Different policies will have different cutoff points, and that cutoff point gives me a very simple and informative statistic about the policy. If the range is more narrow or more sparsely distributed this statistic is simply less informative.
Another way of saying this is that there is social value from having advisors with extreme biases. When I am thinking about a policy that I am predisposed to like, I learn very little from an unbiased source but I learn a lot if a source with my bias is opposed to the policy or a source with the opposite bias is in favor of it. It must be especially good or bad for these extremists to go against bias.
Bicycle “sprints.” This is worth 6 minutes of your time.
Thanks to Josh Knox for the link.
This guy built an actual Turing machine.
My goal in building this project was to create a machine that embodied the classic look and feel of the machine presented in Turing’s paper. I wanted to build a machine that would be immediately recognizable as a Turing machine to someone familiar with Turing’s work.
The video is precious.
This is an absolutely fantastic article, I highly recommend it.
Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”
The article goes into great detail about the creative process. They are clearly master craftspeople. Once they have a hit, they find a star to give it to.
Rihanna is often described as a “manufactured” pop star, because she doesn’t write her songs, but neither did Sinatra or Elvis. She embodies a song in the way an actor inhabits a role—and no one expects the actor to write the script. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or eleven songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented business of today the artist has only three or four minutes to put her personality across. The song must drip with attitude and swagger, or “swag,” and nobody delivers that better than Rihanna, even if a good deal of the swag originates with Ester Dean.
You might think that a story like this will confirm your cynicism about pop music but in fact it will make you appreciate it much much more.
If you give them the chance, Northwestern PhD students will take a perfectly good game and turn it into a mad science experiment. First there was auction scrabble, now from the mind of Scott Ogawa we have the pari-mutuel NCAA bracket pool.
Here’s how it worked. Every game in the bracket was worth 1000 points. Those 1000 points will be shared among all of the participants who picked the winner of that game. These scores are added up for the entire bracket to determine the final standings. The winner is the person with the most points and he takes all the money wagered.
Intrigued, I entered the pool and submitted a bracket which picked every single underdog in every single game. Just to make a point.
Here’s the point. No matter how you score your NCAA pool you are going to create a game with the following property: assuming symmetric information and a large enough market, in equilibrium every possible bet will give exactly the same expected payoff. In other words an absurd bet like all underdogs will win is going to do just as well as any other, less absurd bet.
This is easy to see in simple example, like a horse race where pari-mutuel betting is most commonly used. Suppose A wins with twice the probability that B wins. This will attract bets on A until the number of bettors sharing in the purse when A wins is so large that B begins to be an attractive bet. In equilibrium there will be twice as much money in total bet on A as on B, equalizing the expected payoff from the two bets. One thing to keep in mind here is that the market must be large enough for these odds to equilibrate. (Without enough bettors the payoff on A may not be driven low enough to make B a viable bet.)
It’s a little more complicated though with a full 64 team tournament bracket. Because while each individual matchup has a pari-mutuel aspect, there is one key difference. If you want to have a horse in the second-round race, you need to pick a winner in the first round. So your incentive to pick a team in the first round must also take this into account. And indeed, the bet share in a first round game will not exactly offset the odds of winning as it would in a standalone horse race.
On top of that, you aren’t necessarily trying to maximize the expected number points. You just want to have the most points, and that’s a completely different incentive. Nevertheless the overall game has the equilibrium property mentioned above.
(Now keep in mind the assumptions of symmetric information and a large market. These are both likely to be violated in your office pool. But in Scott’s particular version of the game this only works in favor of betting longshots. First of all the people who enter basketball pools generally believe they have better information than they actually have so favorites are likely to be over-subscribed. Second, the scoring system heavily favors being the only one to pick the winner of a match which is possible in a small market. )
In fact, my bracket, 100% underdogs, Lehigh going all the way, finished just below the median in the pool. (Admittedly the market wasn’t nearly large enough for me to have been able to count on this. I benefited from an upset-laden first round.)
Proving that equilibrium of an NCAA bracket pool has this equilibrium property is a great prelim question.
Twitter has finally acknowledged a long-suspected bug that makes users automatically unfollow accounts for no apparent reason, and now that it’s working on a fix, many would rather keep the bug to cover the awkwardness of manually unfollowing people. Time to admit you’re just sick of your friends’ updates, folks.
Of course, Twitter power users like Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa don’t really want to automatically lose followers, but it’s sort of funny for him to tweet “one benefit of the unfollow bug is it gives me an excuse if someone gets upset i unfollowed them.” De Rosa’s far from the only one. It seems likehundreds reacted with the same sentiment on hearing the news. That’s because it’s true that sometimes you keep following some idiot just because you don’t want the drama of dropping them. Look at how many people publiclycomplain about losing a follower. Well, tweeters, it’s time for us to take responsibility for our actions just a little bit more. Take a cue from The Awl’s Choire Sicha and embrace the hate.
The link came from Courtney Conklin Knapp, who I believe still follows me but I can’t be sure.
- Nobody ever loses for being too slow to do what Simon says.
- One argument against any “Privacy Bill of Rights:” If private entities have unfettered rights to use your (voluntarily relinquished) private data then that guarantees the government can’t monopolize it.
- Can you tell what language someone speaks if you only hear them laugh?
- I need dry erase markers in burgundy, grey, aquamarine, etc. It says something about academics’ total lack of style that they are always red, green, blue, black.
- I saw the 2011 The Three Musketeers on a plane. So that we would understand they were French the characters spoke with British accents. Except d’Artagnon who spoke like a Yankee. This is a general phenomenon where to an American movie audience British accent=any historical non American squares or evil geniuses.
- Look at what google Ngram gives for ‘2001.’ Peaks at the turn of three centuries. Think you know why? Well now look at 2002, 2003, 2004, etc. The effect fades out at about 2020. Best theory gets a prize.
In basketball the team benches are near the baskets on opposite sides of the half court line. The coaches roam their respective halves of the court shouting directions to their team.
As in other sports the teams switch sides at halftime but the benches stay where they were. That means that for half of the game the coaches are directing their defenses and for the other half they are directing their offenses.
If coaching helps then we should see more scoring in the half where the offenses are receiving direction.
This could easily be tested.
Broccoli vs. Health Insurance
You can’t eat broccoli without paying for it. You can get health insurance without paying for it because hospitals are obligated to treat you if you turn up at the ER door. This means society is providing health insurance for free to some people. They are being subsidized by the people who pay for health insurance. There is no such issue with broccoli. Note I am using the phrase health insurance not health care as some of the justices tried to make a distinction between the two.
We can turn heath insurance into broccoli by denying care at the ER door to the uninsured. This is feasible as healthcare services are excludable. Whether society wants to do that are not is a political judgement. Hence, elections are the right mechanism to determine this issue.
Broccoli vs. Wheat
the Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, [gives] Congress the power
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.
How has this been interpreted? Again, via the New Yorker:
In the famous 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn, the Court said that the federal government’s authority extends to any activity that “exerts a substantial economic effect” on commerce crossing state lines.
The case involved Roscoe Filburn, an Ohio farmer who wanted to grow more wheat than he had been allotted under quotas introduced during the Great Depression to drive up prices. In deciding against Filburn and in favor of the Department of Agriculture, the justices pointed out that the actions of individual wheat farmers, taken together, affect the price of wheat across many states. That is what gives the federal government the power to limit their actions.
This argument can be made for any good, private or public. Hence, the externality argument made above is not necessary under this precedent. Also, Justice Scalia, Roberts etc can be forced to buy broccoli by law.
What is then the limiting principle? The commerce clause has no limiting principle, according to me, a non-lawyer. The limiting principle is the imposed by politics: any politician who seeks to regulate the broccoli market must run for election. This politician will reach the limit of his political career.
(Edit: Changed “eat” to “buy” re broccoli and “free insurance” to “care” re healthcare.)
Instead of a mandate to buy insurance and a penalty of $X if you do not comply, what if everyone’s taxes are raised by $X and anyone who complies with the mandate receives a refund of $X? Does that make it constitutional?
The schedule of compensation for postal workers suffering the loss of various body parts:
Compensation Schedule: The following is a table which shows the number of weeks payable for each schedule member if the loss or loss of use of the function or part of the body is total:
Member Weeks ( x your pay) Member Weeks ( x your pay) Arm 312 Loss of hearing – monaural 52 Leg 288 Loss of hearing – binaural 200 Hand 244 Breast 52 Foot 205 Kidney 156 Eye 160 Larynx 160 Thumb 75 Lung 156 First finger 46 Penis 205 Great toe 38 Testicle 52 Second finger 30 Tongue 160 Third finger 25 Ovary (including Fallopian Tube) 52 Toe other than great toe 16 Uterus/cervix 205 Fourth finger 15 Vulva/vagina 205 Compensation for loss of binocular vision or for loss of 80 percent or more of the vision of an eye is the same as for loss of the eye. The degree of loss of vision or hearing for a schedule award is determined without regard to correction; that is, improvements obtainable with use of eyeglasses and hearing aids are not considered in establishing the percentage of impairment.
The source is here. Finally you know what it is that costs an arm and a leg. 12 testicles.
(Mortarboard mash: Adriana Lleras-Muney)
Here’s a simple model of the slippery slope. You have to adopt a position on an issue and defend your position to yourself and your critics. The spectrum of positions ranges from the left-most extreme to the right-most extreme and you have to decide whether to take one of these extreme positions or some moderate point in the interior.
Defending a moderate position is a delicate balancing act. It’s a very special set of utility functions which attain their maximum right at that point, and you need to convince your critics that the right utility function happens to be one of those. Any slight perturbation of a utility function in that set will push you to the left or right so your critics have an easy task. And once you’ve lost the first battle your credibility is damaged.
The easiest positions to defend are the extreme ones. At an extreme position you have a binding constraint. To defend your extremist position it is enough to say that you are such an extremist that you would like to move even farther to the right if that were possible. The set of utility functions that have an optimum somewhere to the right of the right boundary is a large set. You can perturb such a utility function and the extremist position will still be optimal.
The same logic explains why a few special interior positions can be robust to the slippery slope. Think of a kinked budget constraint. A large set of utility functions achieve their optimum at a kink.
In January, I posted and tweeted this:
7c6d61820d512c87789bf13a5fd16876da6d7004
which is the SHA1 hash of the following text, my prediction of the 2012 RES tour party:
Today is Thursday January 5 2012 and here are my predictions for the 2012 Review of Economics Studies Tour. Last year I made my predictions after having interviewed all of the top candidates. This year I am making my prediction only after reading job market papers and letters of recommendations and before actually meeting the candidates in an interview setting. The interviews begin tomorrow morning. We can compare my results and decide whether the interviews are informative or not.
Gabriel Carroll
Melissa Dell
Arun Chandresekher
Michal Fabinger
Paulo Somaini
Briana Chang
Treb AllenAs with last year I make these predictions not because I have tremendous confidence in them but simply as an experiment to see how easy it is to predict job market outcomes well in advance. This year I am fairly confident that I will get at least 3 right. 4 is my expected value.
You can verify this by visiting this web site, copying and pasting the prediction text and generating the SHA1 hash. If you are curious how it works, here is Wikipedia.
And here is the actual list of RES tourists selected this year:
Saki Bigio – NYU (going to Columbia GSB)
Gabriel Carroll – MIT (going to Stanford?)
Melissa Dell – MIT (Going to Harvard Society of Fellows)
Nathaniel Hendren – MIT (Going to Stanford ?)
Matteo Maggiori – Berkeley (Don’t know where he is going.)
Paulo Somaini – Stanford (Coming to Northwestern????)
Joe Vavra – Yale (Going to Chicago Booth School of Business)
As you can see I got three out of seven. Which I must say looks like a pretty poor score but hindsight is hard to shake and I made this prediction wild guess after only having read recommendation letters and job market papers. I take this as evidence that the face-to-face interviews (that happened in the days after I made this prediction) convey a lot of information. I am pretty sure I would have gotten two more if I made the prediction two days later.
More generally I would say that my miserable performance both last year and this pretty much dispells the cynical view that job market stars are minted before the market opens. If you don’t believe me, next year you try it.
The word “Intrepid” is on Hans Scheltema’s business card, and it’s more than just the name of his business. The professional line-stander prides himself on sticking it out, in all kinds of weather, on behalf of the lawyers, lobbyists and others willing to pay for a place in line at big events, such as arguments before the Supreme Court this week on thefederal health-care overhaul.
But even a guy with supreme stick-to-itiveness has his limits.
On Sunday afternoon, after holding down spot No. 3 outside the Supreme Court for the better part of the day, he hired a homeless man to fill in for a few hours. Scheltema, 44, who had taken over Sunday morning for a guy who had held the spot since Friday, wanted to go home to recharge — both himself and his BlackBerry.
Bordeaux wine producers used to release their stock en masses In the past,
“Price,” he [Chris Smith, a wine investor] says, “is a function of supply and demand, and the traditional story of wine investment is that supply of any particular wine can only reduce over time as bottles are opened and drunk.”
With prices going up over time,
the decision made by Bordeaux châteaux, more or less from the 2006 vintage onwards, to hang on to much more stock than was the case in the past (from almost nothing to a full two-thirds of a particular harvest) has changed the game…..
If all of the stock of a particular vintage, though, is either held by private investors or retained by the châteaux, the traditional narrative falls apart, and top Bordeaux ceases to be what The Wine Investment Fund calls “the only asset class with a perfect inverse supply curve”…
The ‘lower risk approach’, Smith insists, is to continue to invest in pre-2005/6 vintages within his fund’s ‘universe’ of 35 châteaux. Those are the wines which are being guzzled. Guzzling is essential.
In the study, male fruit flies that had mated repeatedly for several days showed no preference for alcohol-spiked food. On the other hand, spurned males and those denied access to females strongly preferred food mixed with 15 percent alcohol. The researchers believed the alcohol may have satisfied the flies’ desire for physical reward.
Over the course of your life you have to decide your position on a number of philosophical/social/political issues. You are open-minded so you collect as much data as you can before forming an opinion. But you are human and you can only remember so many facts.
There will come a time when the data you have collected make a very strong case for one particular position on issue A, say the right-wing position. When that happens you are pretty sure that there is never going to be enough evidence to overturn your position.
That’s not because you are closed-minded. That’s because you are very open-minded and based on the weight of all the evidence you collected and processed as objectively as a person can do, you have concluded that its very likely that this is the right position on A. And the fact that this is very likely the right position on A does not just imply but is indeed equivalent to saying that you attach very low probability to the future occurrence of strong evidence in the other direction.
Now that means that there’s not much point in collecting any more information about A. And indeed there’s not much point in remembering the detailed information that led you to this conclusion. The only reason for doing that would be to weigh it against future evidence but we’ve already established that this is unlikely to make any difference.
So what you optimally, rationally, perfectly objectively do is allow yourself to forget everything you know about A including all the reasons that justify your strongly-held views on A and to just make an indelible mental note that “The right-wing position on A is the correct one no matter what anyone else says and no matter what evidence to the contrary should come along in the future.”
The reason this is the rational thing to do is that you have scarce memory space. By allowing those memories to fade away you free up storage space for information about issues B, C, and D which you are still carefully collecting information on, forming an objective opinion about, in preparation for eventually also adopting a well-informed dogmatic opinion about.
Here is an excellent rundown of some soul searching in the neuroscience community regarding statistical significance. The standard method of analyzing brain scan data apparently involves something akin to data mining but the significance tests use standard single-hypothesis p-values.
One historical fudge was to keep to uncorrected thresholds, but instead of a threshold of p=0.05 (or 1 in 20) for each voxel, you use p=0.001 (or 1 in a 1000). This is still in relatively common use today, but it has been shown, many times, to be an invalid attempt at solving the problem of just how many tests are run on each brain-scan. Poldrack himself recently highlighted this issue by showing a beautiful relationship between a brain region and some variable using this threshold, even though the variable was entirely made up. In a hilarious earlier version of the same point, Craig Bennett and colleagues fMRI scanned a dead salmon, with a task involving the detection of the emotional state of a series of photos of people. Using the same standard uncorrected threshold, they found two clusters of activation in the deceased fish’s nervous system, though, like the Poldrack simulation, proper corrected thresholds showed no such activations.
Biretta blast: Marginal Revolution.
Hotels provide you with two different media with which to cleanse your corpus after a long day of giving talks and going for coffees: plain old soap and then a substance packaged under various labels whose modal variant is something like bath and body gel.
The soap is delivered in the form of a solid bar and the bath and body gel is poured out of a plastic vessel like the shampoo that it’s usually paired with. Now I generally prefer to shower with a liquid detergent, (Lever 2000 is my go-to solvent, it’s hard to resist the industrial counterpoint to the traditional fay branding and the pitch on the squeeze bottle is “for all your 2000 parts.” My lifelong project is to count my 2000 parts one shower at a time) but I never reach for the shower gel in a hotel.
The reason ultimately stems from the fact that there are two choices available to begin with, but lets work backward to that. The proximate reason is that shower gel makes me smell like a geisha at a tropical fruit stand. Not that I have any objection to that smell, indeed it’s exactly how I would like a geisha to smell, especially when I am in the mood for a refreshing snack. It’s just not a smell that I personally wear very well. On the other hand, you can usually count on hotel soap to smell like soap or at least something more manly than the bath gel.
Liquid/gelatinous soap doesn’t have to smell girly, viz. Lever 2000, but in hotels it always does. What gives? As usual when pondering the deepest puzzles of lavatory accoutrements, the answer can be found in the theory of labor market discrimination. The little bottle of shower gel is like a job market applicant. It is sitting there asking you to try it out on your body. And indeed you will only really discover its cleansing qualities when you are fully awash in its lather. Whether you want to take that risk depends on how you expect it to smell, not on how it actually smells. This is just the theory of statistical discrimination where the true quality of a worker matters less at the hiring stage than what the potential employer expects based on her demographic characteristics.
Once we arrive at an equilibrium in which everyone knows that the shower gel is for her and the soap is for him, everyone who opts for the gel is expecting a girly fragrance. Just as in the theory of statistical discrimination this feeds back to the initial investment decision of the applicant, in this case the decision of how to scent the product. There’s no choice now but to make it as attractive as possible for the sub-market appearances have restricted it to. Thus the girly scent, and thus the expectations are confirmed.
- The poetry of Ally Sheedy.
- I haven’t seen The Lorax, but I am pretty sure that this review summarizes what I would think about it.
- Interactive demo of the Lytro camera ex-post focus feature.
- You may think that underwater re-animated dissected frogs legs activated by a midi-connected drum pad will repulse you but you will never know for sure unless you click this link.
- The Smiths’ This Charming Man using only Super Mario noises.
- Christopher Walken reads Where The Wild Things Are.
This is a beautiful instrument, invented only 10 years ago. I want one. For more music from Manu Delago, including tour dates with Bjork (!), visit his web site.
On E-book collusion:
Once Apple made it known it would accept agency pricing (but not selling books at a higher price than other retail competitors), the publishing companies didn’t have to act in concert, although one of them had to be willing to bell the very large cat called Amazon by moving to the agency model.
I’ve long had a personal hypothesis — not based on any inside information, but simply my own read on the matter, I should be clear — that the reason it was Macmillan that challenged Amazon on agency pricing was that Macmillan is a privately held company, and thus immune from being punished short-term in the stock market for the action. Once it got Amazon to accept agency pricing, the other publishers logically switched over as well. This doesn’t need active collusion; it does need people paying attention to how the business dominoes could potentially fall.
Again, maybe they all did actively collude, in which case, whoops, guys. Stop being idiots. But if they did not, I suppose the question is: At what point does everyone knowing everyone else’s business, having a good idea how everyone else will act, and then acting on that knowledge, begin to look like collusion (or to the Justice Department’s point, activelybecome collusion)? My answer: Hell if I know, I’m not a lawyer. I do know most of these publishers have a lot of lawyers, however (as does Apple), and I would imagine they have some opinions on this.
John Scalzi is an author, blogger, and apparently a pretty good economist too. Read the whole thing.
Observers cite the possibility of a brokered convention as the only reason for Newt Gingrich to remain in the race for the Republican nomination. If Mitt Romney cannot accumulate a majority of committed delegates prior to the convention, then Newt’s delegates give him bargaining power, with the possibility of throwing them behind Rick Santorum or even forging a Santorum/Gingrich ticket.
But why wait for the convention? If Gingrich and Santorum can strike a deal why not do it right now? There are tradeoffs.
1. If all primaries awarded delegates in proportion to vote shares there would be no gain to joining forces early. Sending Newt’s share of the primary voters over to Rick gives him the same number of delegates as he would get if Newt collected those delegates himself and then bartered them at the convention. But winner-take-all primaries change the calculation. If Santorum and Gingrich split the conservative vote in a winner-take-all primary, all of those delegates go to Romney. Joining forces now gives the pair a chance of bagging those big delegate payoffs.
2. Teaming up now solves a commitment problem. If both stay in the race and succeed in bringing about a contested convention, the bargaining will be a three-sided affair with Romney potentially co-opting one of them and leaving the other in the cold.
Those are the incentives in favor of a merger now. Working against is
3. A candidate has less control over his voters than he would have over his delegates. Newt endorsing Santorum does not guarantee that all of Newt’s supporters will vote for Rick, many will prefer Romney and others would just stay at home on primary day.
Gingrich and Santorum are savvy enough, and there is enough at stake, for us to assume they have done the calculations. Given the widespread belief that any vote for Rick or Newt is a really an anti-Romney vote, they surely have discussed joining forces. But they haven’t done it yet and probably will not, and this tells us something.
The huge gain coming from points 1 and 2 can only be offset by losses coming from point 3. Their inability to strike a deal reveals that the Gingrich and Santorum staffs must have calculated that the anti-Romney theory is an illusion. They must have figured out that if Gingrich drops out of the race what will actually happen is that Romney will attract enough of Gingrich’s supporters (or enough of them will disengage altogether) to earn a majority and head into the convention the presumptive nominee.
Newt and Rick need each other. But what they particularly need is for each to stay in the race until the end, collecting not just the conservative votes but also the anti-other-conservative-candidate vote in hopes that their combined delegate total is large enough come convention-time to finally make a deal.
So there was this famous experiment and just recently a new team of researchers tried to replicate it and they could not. Quoting Alex Tabarrok:
You will probably not be surprised to learn that the new paper fails to replicate the priming effect. As we know from Why Most Published Research Findings are False (also here), failure to replicate is common, especially when sample sizes are small.
There’s a lot more at the MR link you should check it out. But here’s the thing. If most published research findings are false then which one is the false one, the original or the failed replication? Have you noticed that whenever a failed replication is reported, it is reported with all of the faith and fanfare that the original, now apparently disproven study was afforded? All we know is that one of them is wrong, can we really be sure which?
If I have to decide which to believe in, my money’s on the original. Think publication bias and ask yourself which is likely to be larger: the number of unpublished experiments that confirmed the original result or the number of unpublished results that didn’t.
Here’s a model. Experimenters are conducting a hidden search for results and they publish as soon as they have a good one. For the original experimenter a good result means a positive result. They try experiment A and it fails so they conclude that A is a dead end, shelve it and turn to something new, experiment B. They continue until they hit on a positive result, experiment X and publish it.
Given the infinity of possible original experiments they could try, it is very likely that when they come to experiment X they were the first team to ever try it. By contrast, Team-Non-Replicate searches among experiments that have already been published, especially the most famous ones. And for them a good result is a failure to replicate. That’s what’s going to get headlines.
Since X is a famous experiment it’s not going to take long before they try that. They will do a pilot experiment and see if they can fail to replicate it. If they fail to fail to replicate it, they are going to shelve it and go on to the next famous experiment. But then some other Team-Non-Replicate, who has no way of knowing this is a dead-end, is going to try experiment X, etc. This is going to continue until someone succeeds in failing to replicate.
When that’s all over let’s count the number of times X failed: 1. The number of times X was confirmed equals 1 plus the number of non-non-replications before the final successful failure.
That alcohol provides a benefit to creative processes has long been assumed by popular cul- ture, but to date has not been tested. The current experiment tested the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication on a common creative problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Individuals were brought to a blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. Results are interpreted from an attentional control perspective.
For reference, 0.75 .075 BAC is 3 drinks an hour for someone who weighs 150lbs. In related news, here are spiders on LSD.
Charles Krauthammer has accused President Obama of not being seriously concerned about Israel’s security because the President seems disinclined to make hard military threats against Iran. It is surprising that Mr. Krauthammer could make such accusations when he is calling for aggressive military brinksmanship that would expose Israel to the gravest strategic risks.
Game theory teaches us the importance of looking at any potential conflict from the perspectives of all the parties involved. If Israel’s security depends on Iranian decisions, then anyone who really cares about Israel must try to look at the international situation from Iran’s perspective as well.
There are good reasons why Iranians should prefer not to have nuclear weapons. First, as Thomas Friedman has noted, Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons could provoke other neighboring countries to get their own nuclear weapons, to preserve the regional balance of power. The resulting regional proliferation of nuclear weapons would make everyone in the region less safe. Second, if Iran had nuclear weapons then Iranians would face risks of nuclear retaliation to a terrorist nuclear attack against Israel, even if the terrorists might have gotten their nuclear weapon from somewhere else. These are two very significant reasons why Iranians could become less secure by acquiring nuclear weapons. So what could be the advantages of nuclear weapons for Iran?
One potential advantage is that nuclear weapons might open some opportunities for profitable expansionism, perhaps taking control of some weak oil-rich neighbor in a moment of political instability. If Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait in 1991, he might have been able to hold Kuwait by threatening that any counter-attack would escalate into a nuclear war. Such potential for opportunistic expansionism would diminish, however, as other countries in the region acquired their own nuclear capabilities to defend the status quo.
The more important advantage is that nuclear weapons could make Iran immune to foreign invasion. This is a serious concern that needs to be recognized. In the past decade, the United State has invaded two countries that border Iran. American politicians and public opinion leaders have regularly insisted that the possibility of military action against Iran should be “on the table.” Keeping it “on the table” means making it something that Iranians have to worry about. And as long as they have to worry about even a small chance of an American invasion which could have been deterred by nuclear weapons, the people of Iran, even opponents of the current regime, have at least one very significant reason to want their country to acquire nuclear weapons. (Or at least to create some ambiguity about their nuclear capability.)
So when prominent critics of President Obama, such as Mr Krauthammer, call for America to threaten military action against Iran, they are actually reinforcing Iran’s political determination to get its own nuclear arsenal. If they were truly concerned about security for Israel or anyone else in the region, they would not be so eager to make such dangerously destabilizing threats.
Once we recognize the potential motivations for a country like Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, we can begin to look seriously for deterrent policies that address these motivations. A more effective way for America to deter Iran from getting nuclear weapons would be to (1) announce that America would offer broad military security agreements to Iran’s neighbors if Iran acquired nuclear weapons and (2) offer real American friendship to Iran if it complies with international standards of nuclear nonproliferation. A rapprochement between American and Iran would open up the possibility of cooperation for shared interests in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq, and it would eliminate Iran’s only real reason to make trouble for America’s ally Israel.
Although they have no common border, the security of Israel and the security of Iran have come to depend on each other. Efforts to assure the security of both nations deserve bipartisan support in America.
How can a guy who never misses a field goal miss an easy one at a crucial moment?
Still, a semiconsensus is developing among the most advanced scientists. In the typical fight-or-flight scenario, scary high-pressure moment X assaults the senses and is routed to the amygdala, aka the unconscious fear center. For well-trained athletes, that’s not a problem: A field goal kick, golf swing or free throw is for them an ingrained action stored in the striatum, the brain’s autopilot. The prefrontal cortex, our analytical thinker, doesn’t even need to show up. But under the gun, that super-smart part of the brain thinks it’s so great and tries to butt in. University of Maryland scientist Bradley Hatfield got expert dart throwers and marksmen to practice while wearing a cumbersome cap full of electrodes. Without an audience, their brains show very little chatter among regions. But in another study, when dart throwers were faced with a roomful of people, the pros’ neural activity began to resemble that of a novice, with more communication from the prefrontal cortex.
When I was in the 6th grade I won our school’s spelling bee going away. The next level was the district-wide spelling bee, televised on community access cable. My amygdala tried to insert an extra `u’ into the word tongue and I was out in the first round.
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