Kirk wantz 2B senatur?

Mark Kirk is my congressman, and a decent enough guy. He's running for senator in 2010.

My advice: get a good proofreader, so you don't send out any more e-mail with embarrassing typos in the subject line.

Unemployment inequities

We all know this stuff – it’s good to be white, a college graduate, and over 25 – but as this graph shows it’s more than just small statistical differences.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

 

Compare white college grads with blacks who haven’t finished high school, just to get the flavor of the unemployment differences.

 

A number of friends are looking for jobs at the moment or are underemployed.  They would clearly fit into the “white, over 45, college educated” level. Is it possible that the unemployment rate for these people is only 4.1%, when I am aware of so many?

 

Is it possible then that black men, 15-24, without a high school education (48% unemployment) might know few peers who had a job at all, let alone a good one?

 

Tricky, those Evanston parking garages

 

Random Spamdom

Diedre Bloom posted on the Harvard Social Science blog http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2009/10/sources_of_rand.shtml

 

"One member of our group stated that he would not trust a particular source of data to provide useful estimates of population means, but he would trust it to estimate regression coefficients. This puzzled me..."

 

It's not such a puzzle, and a comment by Cyrus explained this clearly. I also chimed in. 

 

But in addition to the two real comments there were 4 bogus ones, a sort of Randomness - Spamdomness in which a spam site tries to draw attention to itself and improve its mark on search engines by getting its site "referred to" on other sites. It's also cheaper than real advertising.

 

Here are the comments, leaving out the URLs they were trying to place:

 

I agree. Very well written. You know what you are talking about. I hope you plan to write more on this topic.

 

This topic is very good and is very interesting, I hope that you write more about it, thanks.

I agree this topic is really interesting to me too!

I am not sure I agree. I am still pondering the analysis.

They could almost be real.  They are from four different spam sites, although possibly the same ultimate spammer.

 

 

Be paid like F. Scott Fitzgerald!

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/22/live-like-a-fitzgerald/ John Scalzi discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald:

 

"...here's one fun fact: The engine of Fitzgerald's income ... was not his novels but his short stories. ... And how much did he make for these short stories? ...  roughly six cents a word.

"To flag my own genre here, "Six cents a word," should sound vaguely familiar to science fiction and fantasy writers, as that's the current going rate at the "Big Three" science fiction magazines here in the US: Analog (which pays six to eight cents a word), Asimov's (six cents a word "for beginners") and Fantasy & Science Fiction (six to nine cents a word). So, sf/f writers, in one sense you can truly say you're getting paid just as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald did; but in another, more relevant, "adjusted for inflation" sense, you're making five cents to every one of Fitzy's dollars. Which basically sucks. This is just one reason why making a living writing short fiction is not something you should be counting on these days."

John Scalzi draws the obvious conclusion: "... basically sucks. This is just one reason why making a living writing short fiction is not something you should be counting on these days."

I can't imagine trying to make a living writing short stories these days.  There used to be some in Sunday magazine supplements, and in weekly magazines. I don't know that there's any place I would see short fiction that I would read on a regular basis other than the New Yorker. [although from time to time I've picked up one of the magazines listed above]  I wonder what the New Yorker pays these days?

There's a bunch of other good Fitzgerald fun facts in Scalzi's post; check them out at the link above.

 

(Scalzi's post came from Andrew Gelman, who got it from Helen DeWitt, who got it from Scalzi. Unless you pass this on to two other bloggers within the next 48 hours, your blog will receive SPAM.)

Congratulations to Russell!

I will not win this competition.  My sister now has 6 grandchildren to my none. Plus, she's younger and has more children (5) than I do (2).

I console myself with the thought that I'll leave behind a smaller carbon footprint.

Mom, baby, and grandma look good in this picture, considering they probably were sleep deprived when this was taken (possibly by Dad).

Why not sign up today to be an organ donor?

Comic courtesy of XKCD, the web comic's web comic.

The Runaway Bunny, read slightly nonstandardly (safe for children)

Do you think his girlfriend made fun of his hair?

The Chicago Tribune has an online feature called "Mugs in the News", which consists of mugshots that are interesting in some way.

This one is hard to resist. I don't think I've seen a hairstyle quite like this, even on visits to Disneyland and Disney World.

Where's the Science at ScienceBlogs?

Andrew Gelman, a respected political scientist and statistician, has expanded his set of blogs and has started writing one at ScienceBlogs, so I decided to see what ScienceBlogs was all about.

It's about a lot of stuff, but science doesn't seem to be particularly prominent. It seems to be more of a place to do religion bashing. Here's four out of the six most recent posts across the many bloggers at ScienceBlogs (all by different bloggers):

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: I Could've had Religion

Ray Comfort meets the Evangelist's Nightmare

Against multiculturalism (multireligionism)

Christopher Hitchens doesn't like Mother Theresa

There's more, but I think my point is made. Four out of the last six. I don't see much "Science" in these, although the boundaries of social science are wide.

Perhaps I should take more of a sample before I give up on the site, but for now I'll pass.

My daughter gets engaged

I have dozens of pictures of the two of them, but not one in a standard pose that I can share with friends and relatives.

They are very likely to have a long and happy life together, but I pity their wedding photographer.

Economists get humbled

http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/economists-the-public-and-popular-culture.html has a clip from Jeopardy, when they had "Economists" as a category.

It's worth watching the video and reading the comments below.

Bernie Madoff's least believable statement

From a New York Times article on the interviews with Bernie Madoff:

Despite what Mr. Madoff described as the chronic ineptitude of the S.E.C., he said in the interview that he was “worried every time” examiners showed up.
“That was the nightmare I lived with,” he said, and he told Mr. Kotz he had wanted it to end. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago.

This isn't a credible statement. Eight years ago he already had a multibillion dollar fraud. So Madoff actually is saying he would rather have gone to prison for life at 62 than have 8 more years of high living and go to prison for life at 70.

This is stuff people say when they have become habitual liars, which certainly applies to a person who ran a Ponzi scheme for decades.

What Madoff and the SEC tell us about government regulation

So from the coziness of federal prison, Bernard Madoff wonders how he got away with it so long, and blames the ineptitude of the SEC.

Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the SEC didn't do much.

In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.
“If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do,” he said....

Mr. Kotz’s 10-month investigation of how the commission handled, and mishandled, numerous tips and warnings it received about Mr. Madoff over the years. His full report,released last month, found the agency had received six substantive complaints since 1992 — and botched the investigation of every one of them.

So, from the perspective of a deep recession caused largely by Wall Street firms, what do we know? (a) deregulation doesn't work, because Wall Street firms will sell anything that will give them a bonus this year, and (b) over time, regulatory agencies get inept and go through the motions, finding technical violations but not the real crimes.

[It's at this point that I should type out my solution to this issue. Still working on that. Feel free to put in your own.]

It's a miracle!

“ In this new version of the bible, Jesus asks the lepers what health care plan they're on before he cures them.”

 That’s a commenter named “Tim” on a NYTime blog.

This allows me to understand one of the great mysteries of the Bible.  There are a LOT of miracles in the Bible, but none now. That’s because with the death of Jesus and the original apostles, the health care plan shifted to the Roman Catholic Church and miracle providers were no longer covered. 

Meteoroids, meteors and meteroites

Today's vocabulary lesson:

 

Before it enters the atmosphere, the particle is a meteoroid.

 

As it goes through the earth's atmosphere, usually burning up in a last blaze of light, it's a meteor.

 

If it makes it to the ground, it is called a meteorite.

 

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/184/what-are-the-chances-of-a-huge-meteor-smashing-us-flat

Auctioning Pro Football Overtimes

Pro football overtimes have the excitement of sudden death, but the problem of being determined largely by the coin toss: 70% of the coin-toss winners win the game.

What to do? One solution is to auction off the overtime. When I first heard this mentioned in an economics journal article  I had visions of millionaire owners bidding fantastic amounts to win the "coin toss", and thought this would be a marvelous way to make money for some charity for, say, medical research on dementia.

But the idea of the auction is a bit different, as Tim Harford explains: "The Quanbecks suggested that the referee could act as an auctioneer, calling out the field position in 1-yard increments [starting at the 1]. The first coach to throw his red challenge flag wins the ball at whatever yard line the ref last spat out. Or perhaps the two head coaches could come to midfield with sealed bids, with the envelopes to be opened by a cheerleader representing each team—a gridiron version of Deal or No Deal."

We can go further. Suppose both coaches throw the flag at the same time. Then, there's a second auction, which relies on the number of offensive players, starting with 1. Surely, no coach would want to start with just one player, or even five players.  But 9? 10? That's reasonably likely, particularly for teams with great offensive lines and a star receiver.

Polygamy as a social reform

I recommend this article as a view into how another culture proposed working out problems.

"Caroline Humphrey, Sigrid Rausing professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, says central Asia and Russia have much to teach us."In the 1990s, Russia and central Asia experienced huge economic change: what a bank was, how your career was going, what you could expect from life, everything changed overnight..."

Improbably, for both groups [Islamic men and rural women], this is polygamy as a solution to contemporary social ills – and, according to Humphrey, is appearing outside Islamic regions. In rural areas the "man shortage", exacerbated by war, alcoholism and mass economic migration, is even more serious."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/27/polygamy-study-russia-central-asia

Kiva.org works

I've made a lot of microfinance loans in developing countries through Kiva.org. If you are curious, you can look at my loan profile.

As I read through these profiles, I've become concerned about the "Queen for a Day" nature of these stories. "Queen for a Day" is a classic game show of the 1950's in which 3 women told a sob story of their woes, and the one the audience judged most deserving -- by an Applause-O-Meter -- won. They usually won a washer and dryer. (Even as a kid, I never thought Queen Elizabeth did her own laundry.)

I like seeing what the money is being used for, but I can't judge in reading these profiles who's worthy and who's not and I feel uncomfortable feeling that an ignorant person thousands of miles away (me) is deciding who gets "Loans that change lives" and who doesn't.  And I hate to think somebody's going to be told "No, you said you needed $1000 but the rich Americans only donated $225. Maybe if you'd looked more pitiful in your picture." 

I'm happy to see that they've updated their explanation of how it really works, and that I'm not really making the decision, just supporting the microlending agency on this specific loan to a specific person and on others which they have already made, in order for them to make similar loans in the future.

Saddest statistic of the day

“Federal statistics indicate that in more than three-quarters of runaway cases, parents or caretakers have not reported the child missing, often because they are angry about a fight or would simply prefer to see a problem child leave the house.” 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26runaway.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1256565779-%20qwXF6pTULPZQmr8m6FV2g&pagewanted=all

 

Minitab Automation: Simple Instructions

Minitab Automation
notes by Mike Kruger October 2009
This tab describes how to enter command scripts into Minitab. [Unless you use the Minitab statistical package, these won’t be of interest.]
This is particularly useful if you have tried one set of parameters and
want to vary them in some way.  We will use as an example
a run of Winters smoothing (in the Time Series Analysis section).
Minitab calculates basis a set of input parameters, but does not have an option to
optimize those parameters.  One can do a simple "by hand" investigation of the
space by typing in various combinations of parameters, but that gets tedious.
Let's see how we can automate this.
1. In Minitab, find where the commands are.
From the top menu ribbon, choose
	Window	Session
Enable commands to be entered (you'll need this later)
From the top menu ribbon, choose
	Editor	Enable Commands
(should end with a check mark next to Enable Commands)
Find the commands that you want to modify
From the top menu ribbon, choose
	Window	Project Manager
Open "History" at the left. You will see a set of commands.
Figure out which ones you want. For our example, these are
	TSWint 'TheGapSales' 4;
	Weight 0.2 0.2 0.2;
	First 1.
which describe a single run of Winters smoothing.
A full discussion of Minitab commands is well beyond what I intend
to cover!!! But note the semicolons at the end of intermediate lines.
2. Make additional copies of these commands
Paste these in a text editor, or in Excel.
Make additional copies as desired. You may want to change the
parameters; you may want to change the independent or dependent
variables in the model; you are limited only by what Minitab will do.
If you are good in Excel, you can automate some of this parameter
generation.  The final result should look like what you just had, only
more so. For example:
	TSWint 'TheGapSales' 4;
	Weight .2 .2 .1 ;
	First 1.
	TSWint 'TheGapSales' 4;
	Weight .2 .2 .2 ;
	First 1.
	TSWint 'TheGapSales' 4;
	Weight .2 .2 .3 ;
	First 1.
This runs Winters smoothing 3 times, with different values for the
third parameter.
Copy the lines you want to run.
3. Copy these commands back into Minitab and run them.
From the top menu ribbon, choose
	Window	Session
On the last line of the session, you should see
	MTB >
Move the cursor to the end of this line, and paste you lines in.
Hit the "Enter" key.
Output will result.

 

 

The Theatre of Wall Street Salaries

Gosh, the horror of the government actually putting in restrictions so that the Wall Street bankers have compensation restrictions.

Lest we forget, if they were physicians they'd be up to their necks in malpractice lawsuits. They did, after all, bring on a the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

But this is likely to be largely theatre. Marginal Revolution points me to this Washington Post article noting that many of the people whose compensation is being restricted don't even work at these companies any more.

"At Bank of America, for instance, only 14 of the 25 highly paid executives remained by the time Feinberg announced his decision. Under his plan, compensation for the most highly paid employees at the bank would be a maximum of $9.9 million. The bank had sought permission to pay as much as $21 million, according to Treasury Department documents.
"At American International Group, only 13 people of the top 25 were still on hand for Feinberg's decision."

The problem remains that Wall Street has achieved far too much influence in Washington, under both Democrats and Republicans. (Note the many of the architects of the bumbled GWBush response are still in charge, notably Geitner and Bernacke.)

The salary restrictions are going to turn out to be mostly theatre, just done to convince the masses that the administration is "getting tough". Those who remain at these companies have probably already found enough loopholes to drive a Brinks truck through.

Haunted Forest Opens

It had been raining here fairly steadily all last night and most of today, and stopped just as it got dark and the Church Boys and Girls Club Haunted Forest opened.  This is perfect weather -- a bit cool, dark, and scarily damp, but not raining right then.  They seemed to be drawing a good crowd on opening night.  Some families were going through twice.

The nice things about this is that it's fully staffed by the kids themselves, albeit with the requisite substantial adult supervision.  If you are around the Glenview area this weekend or next Friday (NOT Saturday Oct 31), drop by. $5 for adults, $3 for kids.

Pay $25,000 to look utterly silly

Just the thing for that wedding they will talk about for years are these cupcake cars from Neiman-Marcus, at $25,000 per

http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/sitelets/christmasbook/fantasy.jhtml?cid=CBF10_O4428&icid=NMCDpage48&r=cat24050744&rdesc=The%20Christmas%20Book&rparams=xpage%3D48

Want to stay married? Try New York

Counterintuitive, given stereotypes of Bible Belt family values and libertine liberals:

 

“Ten percent of Arkansans have been married three or more times, double the national average. That’s according to new data from the Pew Center. Arkansas also has one of the lowest median ages for first marriage: 26. If you’re looking for marital stability, look no further than New York State, where the “serial marriage” share is among the lowest in the country, at 2 percent (tied for last place with New Jersey and Massachusetts).” http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/marry-young-marry-often/#comments

 

Interesting maps here

http://pewsocialtrends.org/assets/flash/marriage/  

 

New Yorkers also have a lower rate of being married, and tend to marry later.

Martin Gardner turns ... how old, exactly?

The My Yahoo RSS feed apparently shows Martin Gardner as 25 * 3 -1, or 74, in the headline. This would be a monumental gaffe considering the wonderful Martin Gardner was the Mathematical Recreational columnist for Scientific American for many years.

The actual headline is 2^5 * 3 -1, or 32 * 3 - 1, or 95, which is Gardner's correct age.

SuperFreakonomics

Author Steven D. Levitt laments:

 

“SuperFreakonomics isn’t even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway.”

 

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/the-rumors-of-our-global-warming-denial-are-greatly-exaggerated/

 

Sending out advance copies to a bunch of people with competing blogs (who get paid by the Google hit) certainly would seem guaranteed to produce attacks. These attacks are ill-timed only to the extent that the rest of us can’t buy the book yet, and the controversy might simmer down before Levitt and Dubner can get buyers.

 

Being one of the millions of obscure bloggers not important enough to merit a free copy, I don’t know enough about the whole issue to comment, which is the real frustration.

A world of pumpkins

Many of the shops in South Haven, Michigan had pumpkins displayed, painted as globes.  This was a project of a local 6th grade class. They looked great, and probably helped both with an understanding of spatial relationships and as a geography lesson.

Amy's Green Cleaning

The vehicle for Amy's Green Cleaning in South Haven, Michigan is as dusty and dirty a vehicle as you could find anywhere. (Yes, that's actual dirt, not a paint job.)

 

I'm not sure whether this is an argument for or against their competence.

Thought for the day

It's hard to distinguish people who are smart from people who just agree with you.

 

Similarly, it's hard to distinguish people who are stupid from people who disagree with you.

 

It’s easier to do in chess or poker (with near-term outcomes that are clear), than in politics, economics, or religion, which don’t.

 

 

 

Quote of the Day: Wrong, Wrong, & Blind

Today's quote of the day comes from Tim Harford, economics columnist for FT.

"In short, you have the wrong objective, suggest the wrong rule to achieve it, and are blind to the side-effects. Any banking regulator in the world would be proud to give you a job."

East German jokes

West German spies used to keep track of jokes told in East Germany, and now these files are available -- a treasure trove of German humor, if that's not an oxymoron.

My favorite: "Christmas has been canceled.... Mary didn't find any diapers for the baby Jesus, Joseph was called up to the army and the three kings didn't get a travel permit."

Of course, telling jokes was dangerous with the East German secret police everywhere. But there was a joke for that, too:

"There are people who tell jokes. 
There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. 
And there are people who collect people who tell jokes."

Engine Ringtones

Hybrids, like the Prius, are very quiet when using only the electric engine – such as when they are backing up. This can pose a hazard for pedestrians. So automakers have proposed adding sounds.

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/automobiles/14hybrid.html?_r=1&ref=science

 

Nobody’s going to want just ordinary sounds. I can see this becoming like ringtones, with everyone downloading a specific song of their choice. I can see “Born to be Wild” being very popular, or “Pink Cadillac”, or that old Chuck Berry song that has the lyric “Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio … with no particular place to go.”  That one has a great guitar solo.

Support Ellipsis Day!

My good friend Chuck suggests a new campaign topic for National Punctuation Day (here and here).

I'd like to suggest an addendum to National Punctuation Day - Support Ellipsis Day.  As you can tell, I appreciate commas, and I can be accused of overusing the ellipsis ..., but often the world could be improved by an additional ellipsis...

 What I left out there, with the "..." elipsis, was Chuck wondering "what is the plural of ellipsis?". That's ellipses.

I like the idea of campaigning for additional ellipses -- it has that not-quite-self-contradictory quality, like campaigning for added omissions,

What day should this be? Well, 3 dots is "S" is Morse code, "S" looks a bit like "5", so probably May 5th (5/5) would be good.  Or maybe September 3rd, with S for September and 3 for the 3 dots.  Or March 3rd (3/3)  What do you think, Chuck?

Weinberg's Law of Twins

John D Cook's blog, The Endeavor, has a nice post on Weinberg's Law of Twins.

In his book Secrets of Consulting, Gerald Weinberg tells the story of a woman who had several pairs of twins. Someone asked her if she and her husband got twins every time. She replied no, most of the time they got nothing at all. Just as intimacy doesn’t usually result in one child, much less two, most efforts in business don’t produce any significant results. Weinberg summarizes this observation in Weinberg’s Law of Twins:

Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens.

Later he turns this around and states the principle more positively in Weinberg’s Law of Twins, Inverted:

Some of the time, in some places, significant change happens — especially when people aren’t working hard at it.

(Because this is an older post, and because I can't really figure out what to cut without substantial loss, I hope Cook will forgive me for quoting his entire post above.)

Success has a thousand father, failure is an orphan

As a young marketing research analyst, I worked on a project to improve our new product prediction models. For successful products, I found many files in the archives. For failed products, there were few files in the archives.  My first conclusion was that marketing research works: doing more leads to more success.

Then I tried to get information on two failed brands introduced several years ago. I could only find a misfiled memo giving some of the needed information. This memo was by "Mr X", who was by then a senior member in the department, so I went to see him. He looked me in the eye and said slowly, "I never worked on those brands and don't have any information.".

I showed him the memo with his name on it.  He didn't look at the memo, but looked me in the eye again and said VERY slowly, "I never worked on those brands and don't have any information.".

I left. It was clear that the only things Mr. X had worked on were the brands that had become successful. That's one reason he had risen in the department.

It's a world of luck, and even a highly skilled person will be flipping a coin (1 chance in 2 of  winning) rather than rolling a die (1 chance in 6). But if you can get people to forget about the times you flip tails, you will look like a genius -- the type of person who can have twins every time.

Quote of the Day

 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it." Matthew 7:13

But Matthew never dealt with the Evanston Public Works department.