David Brooks on Genius

May 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

Essays about creativity teach us a lot.  Not a whole lot about creativity, mind you, but they teach us a lot about the person writing the essay and also the social and political context.   Not that David Brooks is a particularly important person to learn a lot about.  Instead, treat this more of as an example of how the way in which we talk about unique people really says something more about the way we see ourselves in relation to unique people.  (Similarly, this essay will not teach you much about its main subject matter but it will probably reveal stuff about me.)

People, especially intellectuals, are obsessed with what makes people creative.  Mostly what makes other people creative.  We are surrounded by amazing people who are always coming up with ideas that seem to come from nowhere.  It gets worrisome when every day we hear people say ingenious things that would never have occurred to us in a million years.  It is comforting to adopt theories of the origin of creativity that puts us on equal footing with them.

These theories come in two varieties.

  1. Theories that say that those people who seem to be unique are really just ordinary.
  2. Theories that say that us ordinary people are in fact unique.

And of course these are two ways of saying the same thing.  And that’s why these essays don’t really tell us anything about creativity.  But the choice of which way to say it reveals a lot about the person saying it.

Games Against Your Heirs

May 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 2 comments

You write several novels and transfer copyright to a publisher in exchange for royalty payment.  When you die your heirs have a legally granted option to negate the transfer of copyright.  This option limits how much your publisher will pay you for the copyright.  So you attempt to block your heirs by entering a second contract which pre-emptively regrants the copyright.

Eventually you die and your heirs ask the courts to declare your pre-emptive contract invalid.

You are (or were) John Steinbeck and your case is before the Supreme Court. If I am reading this right the appelate court decision went against the heirs.  And remarkably the Songwriter’s Guild of America filed an amicus brief in favor of the heirs. (ascot angle: scotusblog.)

Plagiarizing Wikipedia

May 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

Better to plagiarize more reliable sources:

After Fitzgerald learned that French composer Maurice Jarre had died, he immediately went to Jarre’s Wikipedia page, inserted some fake quotations, and waited to see if they would be picked up by news organizations. His experiment worked better than he ever imagined, as evidenced by this correction from The Guardian:

Fitzgerald’s experiment might sound familiar to espionage buffs. It was a variation on the “barium meal,” a term used by the British intelligence service MI5 to describe a process used to expose a leak or a mole: different versions of similar information would be fed to several sources and then you’d wait to see which version leaked, or ended up in enemy hands. Track it back and, voila, you’ve got the culprit. Tom Clancy called it the “canary test” in his novels—or at least that’s what a Wired.com journalist wrote after reading it on this Wikipedia page. (See how it works?)

NB:  most likely this story is completely made up.  (That would make it an even better story right?)

_A Course in Game Theory_ by Osborne and Rubinstein Now Free

May 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

A standard introductory graduate textbook on game theory, A Course in Game Theory by Martin Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein is now freely available in PDF format.  You can download it here.  This is a great step toward the day when there will be top quality freely available textbooks in all subjects and the day when students and faculty will not be held-up.  While we are on the subject, here is a list of other free economics books  (right-hand column.)

Hunger Strikes

May 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

Hunger strikes seem pointless to a game theorist.  You threaten to starve yourself.  I laugh and wait around until you give up and start eating again.  So why are they so common?  One answer might be that they are not common at all and its for that reason that the few hunger strikes that occur get so much media attention.  But I think they are more common than my caracicture would allow.  For example, there are two big hunger strikes in the news right now. Roxana Sebari, the American journalist imprisoned in Iran was on a hunger strike to draw attention to her captivity.  Mia Farrow, the American actress, was on a hunger strike to draw attention to the crisis in Darfur.

Both were called off in the last few days.  Do hunger strikes every achieve anything?

I can see one way that a hunger strike can be effective for a prisoner held in a foriegn country.  The key idea is that the hunger striker may reach a point where she loses the will/ability to feed herself and then the responsibility shifts entirely on the captors to keep the victim alive.  This may require moving the prisoner to a hospital or some other emergency action which will draw the attention of the international community and potentially bring pressure to allow medical attention from doctors in the prisoner’s home country.

And looking forward to this possibility, the captors may make concessions early to a hunger-striker as now both parties would benefit from preventing the strike from reaching that stage.

Update: Roxana Sebari will be freed today.  I wonder if the hunger strike played any role.  She abandoned it a few days ago and this turn of events today appears to be a total surprise.

Theory and History of Open Source Software

May 10, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 5 comments

Here is a new paper on the economics of open-source software by Michael Schwarz and Yuri Takhteyev.  They approach the subject from an interesting angle.  Most authors are focused on the question of why people contribute to open-source.  Instead these authors point out that people contribute to all kinds of public goods all the time and there should be no surprise that people contribute to open-source software.  Instead, the question should be why do contributions to open source software turn out to be so much more important than say, giving away free haircuts.

The answer lies in a key advantage open-source has over proprietary software.  Imagine you are starting a business and you are considering adopting some proprietary software and this will require you to train your staff to use it and make other complementary investments that are specific to the software.  You make yourself vulnerable to hold-up:  when new versions of the software are released, the seller’s pricing will take advantage of your commitment to the software.  Open source software is guaranteed to be free even after improvements are made so users can safely make complementary investments without fear of holdup.

The theory explains some interesting facts about the software market.  For example, did you know that all major desktop programming languages have open source compilers?  But there are no open source tools for developing games for consoles such as the X-box.

The paper outlines this theory and describes how it fits with the emergence of open source over the years.  The detailed history alone is worth reading.

Mado Restuarant, Bucktown, Chicago

May 10, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 1 comment

Mado has gotten good reviews.  It has the “think global, eat local” philosophy that we’re all meant to be embracing.  I’m happy to do it if the food tastes good but it didn’t, at least on the night we went.  Our food was under-salted.  The polpette with black-eyed peas did  not need so many peas and would have been better with some pasta or polenta.  I asked about a vegetarian entree since none was listed and was told it wasn’t my lucky night.  If you want to be seasonal and responsive to the seasons why not also be a little responsive to the clientele?  The oranges on the yogurt sponge cake were local.  We could tell because they were tart and out of season Wisconsin oranges rather than sweet ones flown in from Florida.  The cake was good so we ended on a positive  note.

Chateau Cap de Faugeres 2005

May 9, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 1 comment

2005 is a legendary Bordeaux vintage.  I have a dozen or so bottles stored away and this is the first I have opened.  Chateau Cap de Faugeres is in Cote de Castillon on the right bank.  Cote de Castillon doesn’t have the reputation of the big-name regions in Bordeaux but that is why you can get good wines like this for relatively cheap.  It has a special significance for us because Jennie and I had the 2003 the first time we were in Paris together.  I recently finished the last of my 2003 stash, and that was an excellent investment at $22/bottle.

Based on this bottle I am sold on 2005.  On the nose there is massive fruit. Blackberries and black cherries.  Some smoke and a little oak.  The nose is really explosive.  And the color of this wine blew me away.  Then the taste.  Really rich fruit, big tannins, nicely integrated oak.  Excellent structure.  Everything you expect from the nose and then some roasted coffee tied in with the tannins on the finish.  As expected, the tannins are still pretty rough so I will leave the rest of my 2005’s for at least a few more years, but now I know what I am in for.  And I think I will buy a few more.

Update: 24 hours on, the wine is noticeably more refined.  The bold black fruit now leans toward the red.  The tannins are softer and the acidity comes to the fore.  The wine is delicious.

photo

Friday Night Wine: Ethos, Chateau St. Michelle, 2003

May 9, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

Sometimes you want a wine whose charms are obvious and available.  A young American starlet rather than a complex, aging French beauty.  I’m exhausted so it’s one of those nights for special effects, a shallow plot and an explosive ending.  If you’re in that mood too, Ethos is the wine for you.  Blackberry; rich, unctuous texture.  Slight acid on the finish for that final zing so that you’re not overwhelmed by the big, fat wine.  It’s  been sitting in my office in sunlight for over year and it’s still good.

Friday Night Links

May 8, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

  1. Swine flu parties.
  2. Class of 2009:  Consider the 5 year plan.
  3. William F. Buckley interviewing Jack Kerouac

QJEd

May 8, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments

Start your QJE clocks!  I just submitted my paper Kludged (rhymes with Qjed) to the Quarterly Journal of Economics.  The QJE has a reputation for speedy rejections.  For me this is a virtue.  Obviously I prefer not to be rejected, (although for some a QJE rejection is a well-earned badge of honor) but conditional on being rejected (always the most likely outcome), the sooner the better.

Addendum: Alas, the paper was rejected 😦  It took about 3 1/2 months and I received 4 thoughtful referee reports.  All in all I would say I was treated fairly.

Fame

May 8, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | 3 comments

Warhol famously said that everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame.  Given the length of this video, Jeff and I are owed 7 minutes or so:

There’s no integration by parts unfortunately so Jeff did not get to display one of his strengths.  There was Bacchanalia, a few fans and I was dizzy, more because I drank on an empty stomach than because of any feeling of power.

Being Tito

May 7, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 3 comments

tito

hmmm…. On the night Sandeep and I did our bit for Mark Bazer’s Interview Show at the Hideout in Chicago, Tito Beveridge, proprietor of Tito’s Handmade Vodka was one of the headline guests and he suggested a simple path to profound happiness.  Take out a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.  On the left side, write down what you are good at.  On the right side, write down what you want out of life.

I tried that, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to get the two ends to meet.  Clearly it worked for Tito though, check it out:

How a Tipping Ring Would Work

May 7, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | Leave a comment

Following up on Sandeep’s post about Alex Rodriguez’s alleged pitch-tipping, a game theorist is naturally led to ask a few questions.  How is a tipping ring sustainable?  If it is sustainable what is the efficient pitch-tipping scheme?  Finally, how would we spot it in the data?

A cooperative pitch-tipping arrangement would be difficult, but not impossible to support.  Just as with price-fixing and bid-rigging schemes, maintaining the collusive arrangement benefits the insiders as a group, but each individual member has an incentive to cheat on the deal if he can get away with it.  Ensuring compliance involves the implicit understanding that cheaters will be excluded from future benefits, or maybe even punished.

What would make this hard to enforce in the case of pitch-tipping is that it would be hard to detail exactly what compliance means and therefore hard to reach any firm understanding of what behavior would and would not be tolerated.  For example, if the game is not close but its still early innings is the deal on?  What if the star pitcher is on the mound, maybe a friend of one of the colluders?  Sometimes the shortstop might not be able to see the sign or he is not privy to an on-the-fly change in signs between the pitcher and catcher.  If he tips the wrong pitch by mistake, will he be punished?  If not, then he has an excuse to cheat on the deal.

These issues limit the scope of any pitch-tipping ring.  There must be clearly identifiable circumstances under which the deal is on.  Provided the colluders can reach an understanding of these bright-lines, they can enforce compliance.

There is not much to gain from pitch-tipping when the deal becomes active only in highly imbalanced games.  But the most efficient ring will make the most of it.  A deal between just two shortstops will benefit each only when their two teams meet.  A rare occurrence.  Each member of the group benefits if a shortstop from a heretofore unrepresented team is allowed in on the deal.  Increasing the value of the deal has the added benefit of making exclusion more costly and so helps enforcement.  So the most efficient ring will include the shortstop from every team. Another advantage of including a player from every team in the league is that it would make it harder to detect the pitch-tipping scheme in the data.  If instead some team was excluded then it would be possible to see in the data that A-Rod hit worse on average against that team, controlling for other factors.

But it should stop there.  There is no benefit to having a second player, say the second-baseman, from the same team on the deal.  While the second-baseman would benefit, he would add nothing new to the rest of the ring and would be one more potential cheater that would have to be monitored.

How could a ring be detected in data?  One test I already mentioned, but a sophisticated ring would avoid detection in that way.  Another test would be to compare the performance of the shortstops with the left-fielders.  But there is one smoking gun of any collusive deal:  the punishments.  As discussed above, when monitoring is not perfect, there will be times when it appears that a ring member has cheated and he will have to be punished.  In the data this will show up as a downgrade in that player’s performance in those scenarios where the ring is active.  And to distinguish this from a run-of-the-mill slump, one would look for downgrades in performance in the pitch-tipping scenarios (big lead by some team) which are not accompanied by downgrades in performance in the rest of the game (when it is close.)

The data are available.

Alex Rodriguez has an M.B.A.

May 7, 2009 in economics | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for Alex Rodriguez.  Everyone is picking on him.  The latest strike against him is that he is being accused of collusion.  He has an enviable batting record but now it seems the figures may be inflated.  Alex is accused of pitch-tipping.  Pitch-tipping involves somehow signaling the oncoming pitch to the hitter of the opposing team.  According to an op-ed in NYT:

So, according to the latest story, Alex is connected to some pitch-tipping scheme in which he relayed signs to the opposing hitter (if he was a friend) or for someone who would return the favor when he was hitting. This was supposedly done in one-sided games where, in theory, one team had no chance of catching up. Alex was said to be in cahoots with a lot of middle infielders. Allegedly, there was some sign he would relay to the hitter — a movement with his glove or his feet — to let the hitter know what type of pitch was coming and where.

That is, there was “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” equilibrium.  No contract is in place to enforce this so it would have to be enforced implicitly over multiple rounds as a repeated game equilibrium.  It’s pretty cunning and companies have been known to do it.  Alex didn’t need a M.B.A. to be taught it.  He learned it in the game of hard strikes.

(Hat tip: Pablo Montagnes, PhD student).

Profiling and Discrimination

May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 14 comments

Suppose that a plane has just landed and a flu pandemic may be emerging.  You have the time and resources to check some but not all of the arriving passengers for signs of influenza.  A small fraction of the passengers are arriving from Mexico where the pandemic originated and the others have not been to Mexico.  How do you allocate your searches?

Efficient screening means that the probability of finding an infected passenger should be equalized across the groups that you screen.  And if searches of one group yield a higher infection rate than another then you should allocate your searches to the first group.   Since the passengers arriving from Mexico are much more likely to be infected, you will probably use all of your searches on them.

Even though the passengers from Mexico are being searched disproportionally more often than the others, this is not because you are discriminating against them.  Your motive is simply to use your limited resources most effectively to stop the spread of the virus.

These ideas should be kept in mind when you read articles like this one (via The Browser) which claim that the disproportionate number of searches of black motorists on the highways indicates that the police are racially biased.  The police probably are racists, this would not surprise anybody.  But the fact that they stop and search black motorists more often than whites is not evidence of racism, unless it can be shown that the proportion of stopped black motorists who are found to be committing a crime is smaller than the proportion of stopped white motorists.

In fact, this 2001 paper by Knowles, Persico, and Todd test for this using one particualar data set and find no evidence of bias.  I don’t know where the literature has gone since then, probably there have been other studies with other findings, but its important to know what the right test is.

Coordination Failure

May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

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.

Drink to Live

May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized, wine | Tags: | by | 6 comments

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.

The Velocity of Influenza

May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

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.

Torture: A Knee-Slapper

May 5, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

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.”

Torture “Confessions” are Cheap Talk

May 5, 2009 in economics | Tags: , , , | by | 6 comments

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.

Things That Are Worth Knowing

May 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

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 Pricing on Airplanes

May 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 3 comments

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.

Simplified Chinese

May 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

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.

Elegy for Chicago

May 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

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!).

Probabilistic Justice

May 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

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.

Matilda – the Beer not the Book

May 3, 2009 in food and wine | Tags: | by | 1 comment

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.

Pop Jazz

May 3, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 2 comments

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.

Blitzers and Postalites

May 3, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

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.

The data are available.  Anybody?

How Long is Winter in Chicago?

May 2, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

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.