I'm back for Christmas, which for once might be white! The trains are packed but England doesn't seem quite as chaotic and rude as I remember it... is that just wishful thinking? Perhaps it's because I travelled first class for the first time in my life.
By the way, here's one thing I love about Germany. Sitting in the cafe idly scanning the supplement of Die Zeit. There's an interesting article about someone doing research on chimps - origins of human morality etc. It seems well-written. I wonder who the journalist is? Ah. Jürgen Habermas.
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Climategate
At first I thought Climategate was a storm in a teacup. I thought about it some more when Bill Easterly jumped in. (See also his interesting comparison with growth econometrics.) So I got reading. Two enjoyable blogs on climate science provided my jumping-in point: realclimate.org (which is, roughly speaking, pro-global-warming) and climateaudit.org (which is roughly anti). I enjoyed finding out how you can inform yourself on this hottest of all topics, and the strengths and weaknesses of the different resources available (scientific papers, blogs and the mainstream media).
Thoughts so far.
Thoughts so far.
- I don't think the emails can be dismissed as scientists using robust language among themselves. For instance, some have said that the now-infamous phrase "trick to hide the decline" just means a technically clever piece of work. Climateaudit goes into the details, and on their analysis, the trick was not innocuous - it made the science look more settled than it was for the 3rd IPCC report. Similarly, it's wrong (and illegal?) to delete emails or files if you are afraid of a freedom of information request.
- There seem to have been serious problems with the original "hockey stick" graph. Trying as best I could to read through the scientific papers on this, I thought that Mcintyre and McKittrick were fairly convincing.
- The hockey stick controversy (which is the context for the most controversial UEA emails) doesn't seem to bear much on whether global warming is happening. We know it is because we have data from weather stations around the world for the past century. The debate is about whether there was a "medieval warm period" when the earth was hotter than today or if today's global warming is unique (since 1000AD). (See here and here for more details.)
- Even if the medieval era was hotter than today, that wouldn't prove global warming doesn't matter. (The 13th century saw the Black Death, after all.)
- There seem to be plenty of other reasons to believe that global warming is real, and that CO2 contributes, and that this might cause severe problems for many parts of the world if we don't stop it. I haven't found anything that persuades me otherwise.
- ... actually, I think Jon Stewart sums up better than I could.
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Seeking an entry point into the literature
So, can any political scientist/economist out there give me an academic reference about Parliament's oversight role? I know about the literature on Congressional oversight of bureaucracy - patrols and fire alarms, etc. - is there something similar for oversight of the executive and the Cabinet? It would be nice to know about any modelling work, but classics would also be interesting.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Why is the EU seen as out of touch? Why oh why can that be?
"The [EU Human Rights] Charter is possibly the most wide-ranging human rights treaty in the world today. There are civil rights, political rights, social rights, ecological entitlements, rights for the arts, consumer rights."
Seriously. I'm trying to imagine what rights for the arts are.
Update
OK, read it. Mostly it's a combination of the innocuous and the innocuous-but-meaningless - lots of phrases like "in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right." (I.e., the EU can't violate this right but national governments can carry on as they were before.)
The stuff on collective bargaining, however, is hilarious.
Seriously. I'm trying to imagine what rights for the arts are.
Update
OK, read it. Mostly it's a combination of the innocuous and the innocuous-but-meaningless - lots of phrases like "in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right." (I.e., the EU can't violate this right but national governments can carry on as they were before.)
The stuff on collective bargaining, however, is hilarious.
Article 28Yes! At last, the natural demand of every human for a Jobcentre has been recognized! I think this right was first mentioned by Cicero in his classic treatise "de Jure Naturale Doleblodgiandi".
Right of collective bargaining and action
Workers and employers, or their respective organisations, have, in accordance with Community law and national laws and practices, the right to negotiate and conclude collective agreements at the appropriate levels and, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action.
Article 29
Right of access to placement services
Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
lme false convergence
If you are using the R package lme4, and get error messages about "false convergence", then use the option verbose=TRUE in your call to lmer, and examine the output, which shows how the estimates of your betas change as the estimation proceeds. If you see any values for your betas are rather small, then divide that variable by 10 or 100 or 1000. This seems to help lmer to converge correctly.
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Charter cities
Paul Romer has put up a website with his suggestion for freeing people from lousy rulers: create new "charter cities" they can move to.
I am rather sympathetic. A lot of Europeans in the C19 escaped to America from their lousy rulers. And as the FAQ states, within America, increased mobility was liberating - for example, in the Great Migration, Blacks moved from the South to Northern cities like Chicago.
Also, I have a related paper.
On the other hand, there are issues. One is the effect of competition on the lousy rulers themselves (and all the people who will still be living under them). This need not always make them better, as explained by the sophisticated graph on the left. A bit of competition might make rulers invest more and try harder to keep their people happy - after all, the population provide the ruler's tax base. But if there is so much competition that there's no way the ruler can match it, he may just opt for the short-term strategy and steal everything.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Happiness
Apparently, the UK has the lowest quality of life among 10* European countries, despite our higher income. Measures like this are important complements to the standard indicator of GDP. But as Nietzsche said, "Happiness is blessed, therefore it lies."
If a large part of our national income is invested in the future -- say, funding for social science research -- then some of our extra wealth compared to those happy-go-lucky Italians is being put into things that will benefit our children. The choice between GDP growth and quality-of-life is a choice between jam now and jam tomorrow. (In the eighteenth century, overworked English peasants probably had worse quality of life than the lucky inhabitants of Tahiti. Now the comparison is reversed, and we can go to Tahiti for our holidays.) Another way to put it: GDP levels are not very mean-reverting, so if we grow extra this year, we are likely to have that extra GDP for a long time.
That doesn't mean we are better off now. But it does mean that happiness indices and such should be taken with a pinch of salt... and we should be wary of replacing the Protestant work ethic with the ideals of those lotus-eating continentals.
* or is it 7? Great fact-checking, Grauniad.
If a large part of our national income is invested in the future -- say, funding for social science research -- then some of our extra wealth compared to those happy-go-lucky Italians is being put into things that will benefit our children. The choice between GDP growth and quality-of-life is a choice between jam now and jam tomorrow. (In the eighteenth century, overworked English peasants probably had worse quality of life than the lucky inhabitants of Tahiti. Now the comparison is reversed, and we can go to Tahiti for our holidays.) Another way to put it: GDP levels are not very mean-reverting, so if we grow extra this year, we are likely to have that extra GDP for a long time.
That doesn't mean we are better off now. But it does mean that happiness indices and such should be taken with a pinch of salt... and we should be wary of replacing the Protestant work ethic with the ideals of those lotus-eating continentals.
* or is it 7? Great fact-checking, Grauniad.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Costly signalling
I've just had a coffee at the fabulous Quirinus. They brought it to me in a little white cup with a green jug of milk and a glass of water and a biscuit. They could have brought it in a plastic beaker, it would have tasted the same. But man, what a difference it makes to how it feels!
Conclusion: costly signalling is pervasive, and good crockery matters.
Conclusion: costly signalling is pervasive, and good crockery matters.
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Modelling
(Apologies for the rhymes...)
Malaysia’s as black as a coalface;
So’s Iran; and our own democrats
Fly in victims to fill Bagram airbase.
I think my epsilons need hats.
I can’t turn the world with a letter
Or integrate beatings with bats,
Explain things till worser seems better:
But I can give my epsilons hats.
While I construct castles of sand art
From the stylized and hideous facts,
The world’s off to hell in a handcart.
Best give those epsilons some hats!
Monday, 6 July 2009
Work in progress
I've also just uploaded some early "work in progress" on political competition. This is much more mainstream political science, asking the question: how might increasing competition between states for footloose citizens affect democratic institutions within each state? We've got a very simple model and some initial empirics. Still, I'm pretty excited about the paper. Take a look here, but be warned, it's not very polished!
The anonymity paper
I thought I'd fulfil my promise to blog about the paper on anonymity, with David Reinstein, which we updated a few days back. It starts from a worry about the "costly signalling" theory of religion and ritual - the idea that people take part in collective activities, like rain dances and church fetes, so as to show their commitment to a particular group. Costly signalling theory comes out of game theory and has had a big impact in both social and biological sciences.
Fine... but if the penalties for not taking part are high, perhaps because the group excludes you, then there are big incentives to take part even if you aren't really committed. We propose that in some cases making the activity anonymous solves this problem. The example in the paper is "Secret Santa", which I saw for the first time at Essex. My fellow PhD students gathered together and drew names out of a hat, then each of us set off to spend £5 on a present for our name. Come Christmas, we all got our presents, but nobody knew who was the giver. The nice thing about Secret Santa is that when other people get you something thoughtful, it's truly anonymous: there's no selfish motive to show off. So you end up (hopefully) learning that your peers really are nice people.
This paper owes something to my undergraduate SPS degree, which included a year of anthropology. In fact, the original idea for the paper came from the Kula Ring institution, though we've dropped that example. But we include other examples from small-scale societies (which are especially likely to need collective solidarity): in particular, song and dance. The main interest of the paper, for me, is the insight it may offer into these very ancient forms of culture, and how they support human cooperation.
At a less exotic level, we think that the model offers some insight into why anonymous donations might be the norm in certain collective projects. When my mother's village raised money to turn the field in front of the church into a village green, they put up a sign with the amount raised so far, but they did not announce individual donations. That's not the sort of thing you do in Kingsland.
I and David Reinstein decided to test this in the lab: we ran some two-stage public goods games, in which small groups are asked to donate money to a common cause which benefits all group members. In one treatment, the first stage was anonymous so players didn't know who gave what. In the other, "revealed" treatment, amounts given were linked to player numbers. Both treatments allowed for certain players to be excluded by the others' choice.
Not surprisingly, in the revealed treatment, the lowest givers often got excluded, and as a result, stage one donations went up. But more surprisingly, stage two donations went down. Our theory explains it like this: in the anonymous treatment, players could observe stage one donations and figure out whether their fellow group members were likely to make big donations in stage two; if so, then they too would do that. (People are prepared to play nice so long as others play nice also - in the jargon, they are conditional cooperators.) In the revealed treatment, on the other hand, everybody was giving a lot in stage one just to avoid being excluded. But then nobody knew what to expect in stage two, and not wanting to be the sucker in a group full of meanies, they gave less.
Here's my favourite plot from the paper, showing stage one and stage two donations in each treatment. (Bubble size shows how many people made each combination of donations.) The anonymous treatment is on the left: you can see that guys who donated a lot in stage one did the same in stage two. On the right this is much less true: in fact many people gave 2 or even the maximum 4 in stage one, then nothing in stage two.
(The paper is on my website. My Secret Santa present was a rubber stamp, for marking students' essays, with the words "COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT". It was just what I needed. Thanks, guys.)
Fine... but if the penalties for not taking part are high, perhaps because the group excludes you, then there are big incentives to take part even if you aren't really committed. We propose that in some cases making the activity anonymous solves this problem. The example in the paper is "Secret Santa", which I saw for the first time at Essex. My fellow PhD students gathered together and drew names out of a hat, then each of us set off to spend £5 on a present for our name. Come Christmas, we all got our presents, but nobody knew who was the giver. The nice thing about Secret Santa is that when other people get you something thoughtful, it's truly anonymous: there's no selfish motive to show off. So you end up (hopefully) learning that your peers really are nice people.
This paper owes something to my undergraduate SPS degree, which included a year of anthropology. In fact, the original idea for the paper came from the Kula Ring institution, though we've dropped that example. But we include other examples from small-scale societies (which are especially likely to need collective solidarity): in particular, song and dance. The main interest of the paper, for me, is the insight it may offer into these very ancient forms of culture, and how they support human cooperation.
At a less exotic level, we think that the model offers some insight into why anonymous donations might be the norm in certain collective projects. When my mother's village raised money to turn the field in front of the church into a village green, they put up a sign with the amount raised so far, but they did not announce individual donations. That's not the sort of thing you do in Kingsland.
I and David Reinstein decided to test this in the lab: we ran some two-stage public goods games, in which small groups are asked to donate money to a common cause which benefits all group members. In one treatment, the first stage was anonymous so players didn't know who gave what. In the other, "revealed" treatment, amounts given were linked to player numbers. Both treatments allowed for certain players to be excluded by the others' choice.
Not surprisingly, in the revealed treatment, the lowest givers often got excluded, and as a result, stage one donations went up. But more surprisingly, stage two donations went down. Our theory explains it like this: in the anonymous treatment, players could observe stage one donations and figure out whether their fellow group members were likely to make big donations in stage two; if so, then they too would do that. (People are prepared to play nice so long as others play nice also - in the jargon, they are conditional cooperators.) In the revealed treatment, on the other hand, everybody was giving a lot in stage one just to avoid being excluded. But then nobody knew what to expect in stage two, and not wanting to be the sucker in a group full of meanies, they gave less.
Here's my favourite plot from the paper, showing stage one and stage two donations in each treatment. (Bubble size shows how many people made each combination of donations.) The anonymous treatment is on the left: you can see that guys who donated a lot in stage one did the same in stage two. On the right this is much less true: in fact many people gave 2 or even the maximum 4 in stage one, then nothing in stage two.
(The paper is on my website. My Secret Santa present was a rubber stamp, for marking students' essays, with the words "COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT". It was just what I needed. Thanks, guys.)
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
New working paper
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Am I missing something?
So what's the actual evidence that the Iranian elections were fraudulent?
The National Post reports a poll that put Ahmadinejad ahead by 2 to 1. There's a statistical analysis here which basically gives no answer. (It looks for evidence of made-up poll numbers and finds none; it finds deviations in favour of Ahmanidejad compared to a model based on 2005 election results, and on growth in turnout, in certain areas. That could be for a hundred reasons (think about trying to estimate a model of the recent Euro elections, based on turnout and 2005 results).
I can't stand Ahmadinejad and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the election was rigged, but where is the evidence?
The National Post reports a poll that put Ahmadinejad ahead by 2 to 1. There's a statistical analysis here which basically gives no answer. (It looks for evidence of made-up poll numbers and finds none; it finds deviations in favour of Ahmanidejad compared to a model based on 2005 election results, and on growth in turnout, in certain areas. That could be for a hundred reasons (think about trying to estimate a model of the recent Euro elections, based on turnout and 2005 results).
I can't stand Ahmadinejad and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the election was rigged, but where is the evidence?
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Pop quiz
Which brilliant young evolutionary economist said the following recently?
XXXXX: 13.30-15.00
Motion: Let it be resolved that this conference believes that the notion of prediction has high value as a criterion for research in social sciences.
[00:12:01] … i'll tell you who will win...
[00:12:29] David Hugh-Jones: go on
[00:12:53] XXXXX: ?
[00:13:01] David Hugh-Jones: who will win?
[00:13:13] XXXXX: well, that is the motion
[00:13:27] … the conference vote about it at the beginning
[00:13:44] … i'll vote against, of course
XXXXX: 13.30-15.00
Motion: Let it be resolved that this conference believes that the notion of prediction has high value as a criterion for research in social sciences.
[00:12:01] … i'll tell you who will win...
[00:12:29] David Hugh-Jones: go on
[00:12:53] XXXXX: ?
[00:13:01] David Hugh-Jones: who will win?
[00:13:13] XXXXX: well, that is the motion
[00:13:27] … the conference vote about it at the beginning
[00:13:44] … i'll vote against, of course
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Presentation
I put up the presentation that I gave at the M-BEES conference on my website. The first slides are a bit cryptic. In order:
- Title slide.
- Families watch striking miners return to work. Strikes are a good example of the need to cooperate outside of a contractual framework.
- Worshippers at a church in Virginia. Religion and rituals have been explained as costly signals of commitment to a particular group.
- Simeon Stylites, who spent 37 years on top of a pillar. Costly signalling can be very costly.
- Still from There Will Be Blood. But if it's not costly enough, it fails to deter selfish people from entering the community. (You'll know what I mean if you've seen the film.)
- Examples of anonymous rituals: marching and uniforms.
- Examples of anonymous rituals: music. Gertrude Bell has a fabulous quote on this which is in the powerpoint notes.
- More examples: church donations, Secret Santa, anonymous voting.
- ... and applause. (Spot the Stalin connection.)
Friday, 12 June 2009
The guardian's data blog is quite fun
I did this as a break from the actual real empirics I'm doing. Needless to say, you'd be crazy to take this seriously. I was hoping to see the opposite: Mum's a strong UKIP supporter and I figured they would be substitutes. Maybe in the individual voting calculus they are (the data points are constituencies).
Monday, 25 May 2009
Life imitates Facebook
I've been given a piece of yeast in order to make a cake. After I bake it I have to hand on the yeast to 3 other people. The process takes five days, and you're not allowed to do it more than once. So if 4^16 = 4 billion roughly, in about 3 months everybody in the world will have had this yeast.
It says it's from the Vatican and will bring me luck and fulfilment. I suppose I will be filled full of cake so that is a kind of fulfilment. Anyway I am obeying its instructions, only wooden spoons, no fridge.
My conclusions are thus:
1. Surely it's highly hypocritical that Church leaders criticize the greed of hard-working business executives. And yet here they are endorsing a cake-based Ponzi scheme. It seems there's one law for us and another for the Reverends.
2. If you are Al-Qaeda, don't bother flying planes into buildings. Just stick some slowacting Anthrax into a bag of yeast and send it on with a message saying "send this cake to 5 dear loved ones for happiness". Civilization destroyed in a jiffy.
It says it's from the Vatican and will bring me luck and fulfilment. I suppose I will be filled full of cake so that is a kind of fulfilment. Anyway I am obeying its instructions, only wooden spoons, no fridge.
My conclusions are thus:
1. Surely it's highly hypocritical that Church leaders criticize the greed of hard-working business executives. And yet here they are endorsing a cake-based Ponzi scheme. It seems there's one law for us and another for the Reverends.
2. If you are Al-Qaeda, don't bother flying planes into buildings. Just stick some slowacting Anthrax into a bag of yeast and send it on with a message saying "send this cake to 5 dear loved ones for happiness". Civilization destroyed in a jiffy.
haircut
I went to the hairdresser today. She gave me a pitying look and said "shall we leave it long around the top?" That's the second time that's happened.
I guess there's some conspiracy among hairdressers to keep balding men's hair long. To keep us kidding ourselves, so we don't go and shave it all off with a Number One.
I'm not going to go back there again. Those people are so tactless.
I guess there's some conspiracy among hairdressers to keep balding men's hair long. To keep us kidding ourselves, so we don't go and shave it all off with a Number One.
I'm not going to go back there again. Those people are so tactless.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
plastic
Very interesting Daily Telegraph article about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I think a lot of us have virtuously given up plastic shopping bags, but simultaneously started to drink mineral water in plastic bottles, which end up in the ocean. I will try to cut down on that.
Hmm, songs about plastic:
Plastic Fantastic Lover - Jefferson Airplane
Plasticman - Kinks
How I Wrote Plastic Man - The Fall. Actually it's called How I Wrote Elastic Man but he sings "plastic man".
Hmm, songs about plastic:
Plastic Fantastic Lover - Jefferson Airplane
Plasticman - Kinks
How I Wrote Plastic Man - The Fall. Actually it's called How I Wrote Elastic Man but he sings "plastic man".
Friday, 13 March 2009
New paper up on my website
... at davidhughjones.googlepages.com (or download directly). This is an early draft which I'll present at MPSA. It tackles the question of why people go to war. Essentially it provides microfoundations for thinking that the decision to fight is like a Stag Hunt, rather than a Prisoner's Dilemma. (Stag Hunts are relatively benign collective action problems, in which everyone is willing to cooperate so long as everybody else does.) Most people's intuition is that war is a PD. I try to show this is not always the case. Along the way, I provide a very simple model of the social construction of ethnic identity, handwave vaguely at endogenizing ethnic boundaries, and say mean things about Social Dominance Theory.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Thursday, 18 December 2008
"and so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me"
Hurrah, I'm incredibly proud of the awesome democracy we've created in Iraq.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
Thursday, 4 December 2008
Peter Simple is writing for the Press Association
Bad news from Stretchford, as Santa Punch-up Park is closed.
Was this a seasonal amenity of lovely, sex-maniac haunted Sadcake Park?
Was this a seasonal amenity of lovely, sex-maniac haunted Sadcake Park?
Monday, 24 November 2008
Coalitional signalling
There at the top, on the edge of the castle moat we found a group of Druzes, young men and boys, standing in a circle and singing a terrible song. They were all armed and most of them carried bare swords. "Oh Lord our God, upon them! upon them!" I too joined the circle with my guide. "Let the child leave his mother's side. Let the young man mount and be gone." Over and over again they repeated a single phrase. Then half a dozen or so stepped into the circle, each shaking his club or his drawn sword in the face of those standing round. "Are you a good man? are you a true man? are you valiant?" they shouted. "Ha! ha!" came the answer, and the swords glistened and quivered in the moonlight. Then several came up to me and saluted me. "Upon thee be peace" they said "the English and the Druze are one." I said: "Praise be to God! we too are a fighting race." And if you had listened to that song you would know that the finest thing in the world is to go out and kill your enemy.
Gertrude Bell, Letters
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Meme
Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.
For me: "Very probably the occupational, ethnic, and other subgroups that combined to form Sumerian (and other subsequent) cities and civilizations danced together among themselves on appropriate occasions" (a classic evolutionary Just So Story from Keeping Together In Time by William H. McNeill.)
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.
For me: "Very probably the occupational, ethnic, and other subgroups that combined to form Sumerian (and other subsequent) cities and civilizations danced together among themselves on appropriate occasions" (a classic evolutionary Just So Story from Keeping Together In Time by William H. McNeill.)
Saturday, 15 November 2008
A million?
UK's 'secure' child protection database will be open to one million
ContactPoint is now scheduled to launch in January. It will store and share data including every child's name, home address and school, and information about their legal guardians...
Monday, 10 November 2008
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Nothing new under the sun, part II
At one point in the proceedings, Bishop Turner rose to the podium and thundered a diatribe against legalized U.S. racism, prompting the Constitution to report "He Prefers Hell To United States; Calls American Flag Dirty and Contemptible Rag." ... Turner wrote to the Constitution a letter accusing them of misquotation but reiterating, "there was more color babble in the United States than in hell itself."
-- Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta 1906
-- Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta 1906
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Dammit, even the Economist is against me.
When Obama wins, I'll probably feel kind of excited. But every time I read his election plans and McCain's, I think "McCain's are better".
As for Obama: well I'd call it 55-45. 55% he's a Clinton. 45% he's a Carter. What worries me about the guy is that he's got ideas. That's a terrible thing for a politician. Politicians should just have instincts.
When Obama wins, I'll probably feel kind of excited. But every time I read his election plans and McCain's, I think "McCain's are better".
As for Obama: well I'd call it 55-45. 55% he's a Clinton. 45% he's a Carter. What worries me about the guy is that he's got ideas. That's a terrible thing for a politician. Politicians should just have instincts.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Blame the banks not the markets
... my thoughts entirely. (Well, except these guys probably know what they are talking about.)
Friday, 10 October 2008
Why the ECB Can't Fix Europe
which could also be titled "why it is a good idea for monetary sovereignty to be aligned with fiscal sovereignty".Monday, 6 October 2008
Quote
It is not enough to propose things that are good in the end, but suppose this model were an excellent model, and fit for England and the kingdom to receive, it is our duty as Christians and men to consider consequences, and to consider the way.
-- Oliver Cromwell, during the Putney Debates
-- Oliver Cromwell, during the Putney Debates
Sunday, 5 October 2008
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
Reading on the financial crisis
Here's one via Martin Wolf in the FT: why Paulson is wrong. I've been reading FT alphaville - great fun - and various bloggers, articles etc. At least we are not short of opinions....
Me & Debbie were talking about this last night, like a pair of concerned amateur astrologers trying to understand a comet.... I think our conclusions were something along these lines:
1. Governments face inevitable pressures to protect voters' savings and houses; banks are therefore quite rational in lending irresponsibly.
2. If it goes ahead, the Paulson government bailout will create the conditions for another house price boom in the next economic cycle. This isn't sustainable. The banks are socializing their losses. (But, on a personal note - stay bullish on property in the long term!)
3. Larger banks are more likely to be "too big to fail" and therefore to lend irresponsibly. What is more, there is an incentive to grow so that one becomes too big to fail.
4. One solution might be to tilt the market towards smaller banks, to dampen the incentive towards inefficient growth. (I don't know how this could be done - maybe by offering them favourable interest rates?)
Me & Debbie were talking about this last night, like a pair of concerned amateur astrologers trying to understand a comet.... I think our conclusions were something along these lines:
1. Governments face inevitable pressures to protect voters' savings and houses; banks are therefore quite rational in lending irresponsibly.
2. If it goes ahead, the Paulson government bailout will create the conditions for another house price boom in the next economic cycle. This isn't sustainable. The banks are socializing their losses. (But, on a personal note - stay bullish on property in the long term!)
3. Larger banks are more likely to be "too big to fail" and therefore to lend irresponsibly. What is more, there is an incentive to grow so that one becomes too big to fail.
4. One solution might be to tilt the market towards smaller banks, to dampen the incentive towards inefficient growth. (I don't know how this could be done - maybe by offering them favourable interest rates?)
Monday, 15 September 2008
Getting your Creative Live! Webcam to work on Linux
This is for those of you with a Creative Live! Notebook Webcam - which IDs itself as 041e:4068 if you type "lsusb" on the command line - you'll get something like:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 041e:4068 Creative Technology, Ltd
The issue with this baby is that it sends JPEG-compressed data, which your computer needs to decompress. For older kernels (2.6.24 and before) you can install the ov51x-jpeg driver. This contained JPEG decompression right in the kernel module. However this was only a part-time project (merci Romain) and not a permanent solution.
For newer kernels (2.6.27), there's a newer and less crazy trick - though obviously it would be nice to have things work out of the box so that Linuxhater won't laugh at us. In the meantime, go to this page to understand what's going on. Then download libv4l and untar it in your home directory.
You will now need the kernel headers for your latest kernel version. (That is, you need videodev2.h in /usr/include/linux.) This is probably best done by installing the package "linux-libc-dev" - at least, that works for me on Ubuntu. You can install the package from synaptic or with "sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev". Make sure, of course, that it is the right one for your 2.6.27 kernel. (At the moment, I have to add the intrepid sources by hand.)
Now you are ready to go. In a terminal, go into the untarred directory "libv4l-0.1" and type "make". If this completes successfully, you should have some nice files ending in ".so" in a new subdirectory called "lib". Next, follow the instructions in the README file, by entering
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/lib
export LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/lib/v4l1compat.so
on the command line. Finally - with your camera plugged in - type "camorama" (or start another webcam application if you prefer - for me, camorama works but "cheese" doesn't). You should now see yourself on screen.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 041e:4068 Creative Technology, Ltd
The issue with this baby is that it sends JPEG-compressed data, which your computer needs to decompress. For older kernels (2.6.24 and before) you can install the ov51x-jpeg driver. This contained JPEG decompression right in the kernel module. However this was only a part-time project (merci Romain) and not a permanent solution.
For newer kernels (2.6.27), there's a newer and less crazy trick - though obviously it would be nice to have things work out of the box so that Linuxhater won't laugh at us. In the meantime, go to this page to understand what's going on. Then download libv4l and untar it in your home directory.
You will now need the kernel headers for your latest kernel version. (That is, you need videodev2.h in /usr/include/linux.) This is probably best done by installing the package "linux-libc-dev" - at least, that works for me on Ubuntu. You can install the package from synaptic or with "sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev". Make sure, of course, that it is the right one for your 2.6.27 kernel. (At the moment, I have to add the intrepid sources by hand.)
Now you are ready to go. In a terminal, go into the untarred directory "libv4l-0.1" and type "make". If this completes successfully, you should have some nice files ending in ".so" in a new subdirectory called "lib". Next, follow the instructions in the README file, by entering
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/lib
export LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/lib/v4l1compat.so
on the command line. Finally - with your camera plugged in - type "camorama" (or start another webcam application if you prefer - for me, camorama works but "cheese" doesn't). You should now see yourself on screen.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
Reasons to vote for McCain
Jonathan Freedland: Obama is "the fresh start the world is yearning for". " If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama."
Chris Spurgeon: the Republicans held a rally - just like the fascists - and support strong leadership - just like the fascists. "Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to 'drill baby drill,' (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to 'kill baby, kill.'"
Chris Spurgeon: the Republicans held a rally - just like the fascists - and support strong leadership - just like the fascists. "Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to 'drill baby drill,' (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to 'kill baby, kill.'"
Friday, 12 September 2008
OMGWTF Neurotic animals!
From "Genes, Evolution and Personality", Bouchard and Loehlin 2001. Formatting slightly screwed up, sorry, but I know none of you can resist the news that octopuses are neurotic.
Octopus neurosis 1: you change colour, but you think a passing crab may be laughing at you.
Octopus neurosis 2: nervously tangling your tentacles together.
Adapted from Gosling and John (1999); an x indicates that the factor or a combination of two factors was found for that species.
Octopus neurosis 1: you change colour, but you think a passing crab may be laughing at you.
Octopus neurosis 2: nervously tangling your tentacles together.
Table I. Animal Personality Factors Based on Factor Analyses of Individual Animals Classified According to the Five-Factor Model
and Two Additional Factorsa
Five-factor model trait names Additional dimensions
Species Neuroticism Agreeableness Extraversion Openness Conscientiousness Dominance Activity
Chimpanzee x x x x x x x
Gorilla x x x x
Rhesus monkey x x x x x
Vervet monkey x x x
Hyena x x x x
Dog x x x x x
Cat x x x x
Donkey x x
Pig x x x
Rat x x
Guppy x x
Octopus x x x
a
Adapted from Gosling and John (1999); an x indicates that the factor or a combination of two factors was found for that species.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Surrealism news
Nice article on Nicolas Bourbaki. This made me laugh out loud - kind of a funnier preview of the Derrida/Searle debate:
"In the 1950s, Ralph Boas of Northwestern University wrote an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Bourbaki, explaining that it was the pseudonym for a consortium of French mathematicians. The editors of the encyclopedia soon received a scalding letter signed by Nicolas Bourbaki himself, declaring that he would not allow anyone to question his right to exist. In revenge, Bourbaki began spreading the rumor that Ralph Boas himself didn’t exist, and that B.O.A.S was an acronym of a group of American mathematicians."
In other news, Geoffrey Perkins is dead. Allegedly he was the inventor of the game Mornington Crescent - there's a lively round being played on Slashdot now, Duke of Edinburgh's rules.
Saturday, 30 August 2008
Argh, numbers
I just love articles like these. You can picture some pimply junior reporter struggling to read through the latest issue of Social Trends, grabbing some numbers and writing them down.
"Divorces in the 45 to 49 age group also increased, with more women than men getting divorced. In 2006 there were 14.9 divorces for every 1,000 married women aged 45 to 49, rising to 15.3 by 2007. For every 1,000 45 to 49-year-old married men in 2006 and 2007, 17.3 got divorced."
Eh? Shouldn't that be "more men than women?" Or do they mean, total numbers? But what would be the point of that? Wait, how can more women than men get divorced anyway - are loads of lesbian marriages breaking up? Never mind, just copy something out of the press release, look up a couple of numbers at random in the spreadsheet....
"Divorces in the 45 to 49 age group also increased, with more women than men getting divorced. In 2006 there were 14.9 divorces for every 1,000 married women aged 45 to 49, rising to 15.3 by 2007. For every 1,000 45 to 49-year-old married men in 2006 and 2007, 17.3 got divorced."
Eh? Shouldn't that be "more men than women?" Or do they mean, total numbers? But what would be the point of that? Wait, how can more women than men get divorced anyway - are loads of lesbian marriages breaking up? Never mind, just copy something out of the press release, look up a couple of numbers at random in the spreadsheet....
Thursday, 28 August 2008
BT bills
Small note. If you got a letter from BT giving you free local weekend calls, check your phone bills carefully. We did (in the old house) and we discovered they were still charging us for local calls. They overcharged us £50. Pretty outrageous really - it's hard to imagine how this could be an accident, given the whole billing system is automated.
My nightmare
"Imagine a world where companies and government must keep the public, or their employees, or both, happy with their plans and behavior," Assange says. "That is the world we are striving to create" (from a Wired interview with the founder of Wikileaks). Sounds like a nightmare to me.
Friday, 15 August 2008
Freedom, security
UK consultation on keeping location data (i.e. everywhere you've been over the past year) so that local council officers can find out if you've been overfilling your wheelie bins. This has been in the headlines lately.
Read it, wade through the hideous Eurojargon, write them a letter telling them to reconsider. Or don't. You're probably one of the Germans from my office in Essex, thinking "ha ha! Those crazy eccentric Brits with their privacy obsession! I voluntarily write to my local council every two weeks, detailing my religious beliefs and current favourite sexual position, because in Germany, we have high social capital!" Yes I do mean you, Nils & Steffen. Anyway, here's mine.
Dear Mr Knight
I am a UK citizen. I picked up on the Home Office consultation document on “Transposition of Directive 2006/24/EC” and felt the need to respond.
As I understand it, if the current plan goes ahead, ISPs, phone companies etc. will be required by law to keep data about my communications for a year, including for example mobile phone data that shows where I have been. Up till now there have been only voluntary guidelines about this.
I believe this is a bad idea. I am sure that the police would often find this data useful, as your examples suggest. But it also allows the government – including local councils – too easy access to information about my private life. I think the balance here has gone too far towards centralized storage of our personal data. I do not want local councils to know where I have been. I want to give up some security in exchange for some freedom.
Re: competition. Although the proposals to reimburse ISPs for the cost of keeping location and traffic data may help sustain a competitive market, this is trivial compared to the more serious problem that they turn ISPs into paid government informants, giving them a vested interest in the proposed system.
For these reasons, I support the “Do Nothing” option. It is the least worst.
Yours sincerely,
David Hugh-Jones
Read it, wade through the hideous Eurojargon, write them a letter telling them to reconsider. Or don't. You're probably one of the Germans from my office in Essex, thinking "ha ha! Those crazy eccentric Brits with their privacy obsession! I voluntarily write to my local council every two weeks, detailing my religious beliefs and current favourite sexual position, because in Germany, we have high social capital!" Yes I do mean you, Nils & Steffen. Anyway, here's mine.
Dear Mr Knight
I am a UK citizen. I picked up on the Home Office consultation document on “Transposition of Directive 2006/24/EC” and felt the need to respond.
As I understand it, if the current plan goes ahead, ISPs, phone companies etc. will be required by law to keep data about my communications for a year, including for example mobile phone data that shows where I have been. Up till now there have been only voluntary guidelines about this.
I believe this is a bad idea. I am sure that the police would often find this data useful, as your examples suggest. But it also allows the government – including local councils – too easy access to information about my private life. I think the balance here has gone too far towards centralized storage of our personal data. I do not want local councils to know where I have been. I want to give up some security in exchange for some freedom.
Re: competition. Although the proposals to reimburse ISPs for the cost of keeping location and traffic data may help sustain a competitive market, this is trivial compared to the more serious problem that they turn ISPs into paid government informants, giving them a vested interest in the proposed system.
For these reasons, I support the “Do Nothing” option. It is the least worst.
Yours sincerely,
David Hugh-Jones
Monday, 11 August 2008
RSS feeds for papers
I've been getting into this as a way of keeping up with new papers before they hit the journals.
Here's one that seems to be hidden on the NBER website:
http://www.nber.org/rss/newpol.xml - new NBER papers in political economics.
I mentioned REPEC already. SSRN's feeds for individuals don't seem to work. Most individual journals also have RSS feeds and some have feeds for pre-published papers.
Here's one that seems to be hidden on the NBER website:
http://www.nber.org/rss/newpol.xml - new NBER papers in political economics.
I mentioned REPEC already. SSRN's feeds for individuals don't seem to work. Most individual journals also have RSS feeds and some have feeds for pre-published papers.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
RSS feeds for New Economics Papers
RSS feeds are now available for New Economics Papers, so you can read them in your favourite feed reader. (I use google reader. Most journals have RSS feeds, so I can keep up with what's new in one place.)
I mention this because I wrote the code for it! The NEP people were very helpful in giving me access to their system to implement this feature, which I wanted. (Example of a public good which was cheap enough for a single person to provide.)
To subscribe, just go to the page for a particular report, e.g. nep-pol (positive political economics) and click on the orange icon in your brower's location bar.
(Update: not all the RSS feeds are available yet so you may get a "Page Not Found" error for some of these. Should go away when the next report is published.)
I mention this because I wrote the code for it! The NEP people were very helpful in giving me access to their system to implement this feature, which I wanted. (Example of a public good which was cheap enough for a single person to provide.)
To subscribe, just go to the page for a particular report, e.g. nep-pol (positive political economics) and click on the orange icon in your brower's location bar.
(Update: not all the RSS feeds are available yet so you may get a "Page Not Found" error for some of these. Should go away when the next report is published.)
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
Author (date) referencing in TeXMacs
This is quite hard to do.
First, you need a bibtex bibliography, and the bibtex tool somewhere that texmacs can access it - I run TeXmacs under Cygwin so I need the Cygwin version of bibtex, not just the windows version.
Next, you can't use the TeXMacs bibliography tools unless there are no spaces in the paths to either your document or your bibliography. So save copies in some appropriate location - for me: C:/cygwin/tmp.
Now, choose the TeXMacs menu option Text->Automatic->Bibliography to insert your bibliography. TeXMacs will ask you for
(1) the bibliography style; type in "plain" for the moment.
(2) the path to the bibliography file. Under Cygwin it's a "unix-style" file path like /cygdrive/c/tmp/biblio.bib
Next use Insert->Link->Citation to put in citations. You will get a cite tag like this:. Fill it in with the bibtex key of your citation. You can see this key in your bibtex manager, or in the raw .bib file. Here's an example with the key highlighted in red:
@ARTICLE{benoit_models_2004,
author = {Kenneth Benoit},
title = {Models of electoral system change}}
Now use Document->Update->Bibliography and you should see your bibliography be filled in with a citation. You will probably also see something like "[1]" where your citation is.
So far so good. If you want to do author-date referencing... unfortunately it gets more complicated.
First, you will need the new cite-author-date.st TeXMacs package file. If you have this already, use the menu option Document->Add package->Customize->cite-author-year. If this option doesn't exist, try getting it from here and putting it in /usr/share/TeXMacs/packages/customize (or the equivalent on your system - your mileage may vary).
Your troubles are not yet over. To use this correctly, you need to get the plainnat.bst style file and put it in your $HOME/.TeXMacs/system/bib directory. This is a bibtex style file and can be found all over the web, e.g. here. Now, change your bibliography in your TeXMacs document to use "plainnat" style. Probably simplest just to delete your old Bibliography and put the new one in.
Now you should be able to type \cite-author [return]bibtex_key and get an author citation, or \cite-year[return]bibtex_key and get a year citation. One warning - sometimes you will need to run Document->Update->Bibliography twice before you see your citations properly; and sometimes you will need to update the citations themselves e.g. by putting the cursor in front of them and hitting [backspace]
But if you are like me you want more - you'd like a single command to put in "(Author year)" or "Author (year)". Maybe there's a way to do this with standard TeXMacs tools, but this way works for me:
Go to Document->View->Edit source tree so you can see the beautiful raw TeXMacs code of your document. Now enter this at the start of your document:
<assign|caby|<macro|x|<cite-author|x>(<cite-year|x>)>>>
<assign|cay|<macro|x|<cite-author|x><cite-year|x>>>
<assign|cbay|<macro|x|(<cay|x>)>>
Unfortunately, you can't type this in verbatim AFAIK - you have to type \assign[return]caby to type in assign, similarly for macro and cite-author etc., type alt-right before the first x's, and type alt-# before inserting the second and third x's. (If this sounds insane, it is - see the Texmacs help on writing style files. There's probably an easier way to do this.)
If you have done this right, you can go back and uncheck Edit source tree. You should now be able to type
\cbay[return]bibtex_key and get a nice (Author year) citation; while
\caby[return]bibtex_key gets you Author (year).
I guess all of this reads like a kind of propaganda post for Scientific Word. The fact is TeXMacs has terrible usability - sorry, Joris - but it still has the ONLY mathematical word processor that I can use fast enough for it to be intuitive. So until LyX lets me define keyboard shortcuts the way I like, I'm stuck with it.
First, you need a bibtex bibliography, and the bibtex tool somewhere that texmacs can access it - I run TeXmacs under Cygwin so I need the Cygwin version of bibtex, not just the windows version.
Next, you can't use the TeXMacs bibliography tools unless there are no spaces in the paths to either your document or your bibliography. So save copies in some appropriate location - for me: C:/cygwin/tmp.
Now, choose the TeXMacs menu option Text->Automatic->Bibliography to insert your bibliography. TeXMacs will ask you for
(1) the bibliography style; type in "plain" for the moment.
(2) the path to the bibliography file. Under Cygwin it's a "unix-style" file path like /cygdrive/c/tmp/biblio.bib
Next use Insert->Link->Citation to put in citations. You will get a cite tag like this:
@ARTICLE{benoit_models_2004,
author = {Kenneth Benoit},
title = {Models of electoral system change}}
Now use Document->Update->Bibliography and you should see your bibliography be filled in with a citation. You will probably also see something like "[1]" where your citation is.
So far so good. If you want to do author-date referencing... unfortunately it gets more complicated.
First, you will need the new cite-author-date.st TeXMacs package file. If you have this already, use the menu option Document->Add package->Customize->cite-author-year. If this option doesn't exist, try getting it from here and putting it in /usr/share/TeXMacs/packages/customize (or the equivalent on your system - your mileage may vary).
Your troubles are not yet over. To use this correctly, you need to get the plainnat.bst style file and put it in your $HOME/.TeXMacs/system/bib directory. This is a bibtex style file and can be found all over the web, e.g. here. Now, change your bibliography
Now you should be able to type \cite-author
But if you are like me you want more - you'd like a single command to put in "(Author year)" or "Author (year)". Maybe there's a way to do this with standard TeXMacs tools, but this way works for me:
Go to Document->View->Edit source tree so you can see the beautiful raw TeXMacs code of your document. Now enter this at the start of your document:
<assign|caby|<macro|x|<cite-author|x>(<cite-year|x>)>>>
<assign|cay|<macro|x|<cite-author|x><cite-year|x>>>
<assign|cbay|<macro|x|(<cay|x>)>>
Unfortunately, you can't type this in verbatim AFAIK - you have to type \assign[return]caby to type in assign, similarly for macro and cite-author etc., type alt-right before the first x's, and type alt-# before inserting the second and third x's. (If this sounds insane, it is - see the Texmacs help on writing style files. There's probably an easier way to do this.)
If you have done this right, you can go back and uncheck Edit source tree. You should now be able to type
\cbay[return]bibtex_key and get a nice (Author year) citation; while
\caby[return]bibtex_key gets you Author (year).
I guess all of this reads like a kind of propaganda post for Scientific Word. The fact is TeXMacs has terrible usability - sorry, Joris - but it still has the ONLY mathematical word processor that I can use fast enough for it to be intuitive. So until LyX lets me define keyboard shortcuts the way I like, I'm stuck with it.
Saturday, 19 July 2008
Thursday, 17 July 2008
Dumb
Dumbest EU idea ever: extend copyright to 95 years retroactively.
The best length of copyright protection is a subject of heated economic research and debate. Almost everyone agrees on one thing, though - retroactively extending copyright protection does society no good at all. (Extending protections in the future might encourage more creative musicians. Obviously there won't be any effect like this from protecting works already produced.)
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is a notorious US example. I didn't think the EU would bow to special interests so transparently. How naive of me! I can hear Mum, UKIP supporter extraordinaire, going "I told you so".
UPDATE: there's a petition against this bullshit here.
The best length of copyright protection is a subject of heated economic research and debate. Almost everyone agrees on one thing, though - retroactively extending copyright protection does society no good at all. (Extending protections in the future might encourage more creative musicians. Obviously there won't be any effect like this from protecting works already produced.)
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is a notorious US example. I didn't think the EU would bow to special interests so transparently. How naive of me! I can hear Mum, UKIP supporter extraordinaire, going "I told you so".
UPDATE: there's a petition against this bullshit here.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Wikigroan
Here's a nice wikigroan for political scientists:
William H. Riker, political scientist
William T. Riker, star trek captain
William H. Riker, political scientist
William T. Riker, star trek captain
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Monday, 30 June 2008
google scholar alerts
a neat bit of web trickery to get alerts on new articles from google scholar:
http://mikelove.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/google-scholar-yahoo-pipes-scholar-alerts/
see if it works for you
http://mikelove.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/google-scholar-yahoo-pipes-scholar-alerts/
see if it works for you
Friday, 27 June 2008
Making Creative Live! Webcam work in Ubuntu Hardy
1. Go read linuxhaters.blogspot.com and make sure you don't want to stick with Windows...
2. You need the ov51x-jpeg module from here. The version in the Hardy repository (1.5.4) is too old, so instead download the latest source code.
3. Unpack the tarball (rightclick and choose "extract here")
4. open a terminal and type cd ov51x-jpeg-1.5.8 (or whatever the latest version is)
5. compile with "make" and "sudo make install". You will probably need kernel headers etc. etc. installed. An easy way to get this stuff is to install "module-assistant" from the repository and then on the command line type "sudo module-assistant prepare". That should set you up nicely.
6. Once installed type "sudo modprobe ov51x-jpeg". (If that doesn't work, do "find /lib -name 'ov51x'" and use the resulting filename (ending in .ko) for "sudo insmod")
7. To make Skype work you may need to do "sudo modprobe ov51x-jpeg forceblock=1".
8. After this cheese, Skype etc. should recognize your webcam.
Good luck... it "only" took me 2 hours or so.... (/me wonders why he can't be satisfied with Windows)
(NB: on the plus side, the picture quality seems to be much better under Linux. I don't know why, maybe I need to change a Windows option or something....)
2. You need the ov51x-jpeg module from here. The version in the Hardy repository (1.5.4) is too old, so instead download the latest source code.
3. Unpack the tarball (rightclick and choose "extract here")
4. open a terminal and type cd ov51x-jpeg-1.5.8 (or whatever the latest version is)
5. compile with "make" and "sudo make install". You will probably need kernel headers etc. etc. installed. An easy way to get this stuff is to install "module-assistant" from the repository and then on the command line type "sudo module-assistant prepare". That should set you up nicely.
6. Once installed type "sudo modprobe ov51x-jpeg". (If that doesn't work, do "find /lib -name 'ov51x'" and use the resulting filename (ending in .ko) for "sudo insmod
7. To make Skype work you may need to do "sudo modprobe ov51x-jpeg forceblock=1".
8. After this cheese, Skype etc. should recognize your webcam.
Good luck... it "only" took me 2 hours or so.... (/me wonders why he can't be satisfied with Windows)
(NB: on the plus side, the picture quality seems to be much better under Linux. I don't know why, maybe I need to change a Windows option or something....)
Monday, 23 June 2008
The Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, side by side
Open Europe have laid the Lisbon Treaty out side by side with the original Constitutional Treaty, so you can see the differences. (There aren't many.)
http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/comparative.pdf
http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/comparative.pdf
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Deborah Hyde on the new anti-porn laws
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7364475.stm
Interesting stuff, you can hear an interview with her on the web page.
Interesting stuff, you can hear an interview with her on the web page.
Friday, 25 April 2008
'...It is this latter ability that has caused so many problems for Facebook users. Third-party plugins such as "SuperWall" claim to extend functionality of the Facebook application, but have behaved in anything but a friendly manner. SuperWall would randomly send messages to existing people in a user's Facebook friends list, claiming that they had to install SuperWall in order to read a new message from that user. Once installed, it would keep performing this trick with the next person, and so forth. As it turned out, this behavior was by design.'
from Between black and white: the state of grayware on the PC
from Between black and white: the state of grayware on the PC
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Sunday, 13 April 2008
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
woohoo, just became a fan of Margaret Thatcher
that's one in the eye for the snivelling pinkos. suddenly facebook is cool again.
Sunday, 16 March 2008
Bit of background
'At the end of 2005, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr Manfred Nowak, visited China, Tibet and Xinjiang. Dr Nowak stated that "he was struck by the strictness of prison discipline and a palpable level of fear and self-censorship when talking to detainees". He also confirmed that a variety of torture methods are still widely and systematically used; including beatings, use of electric shock batons, submersion in pits of sewage, exposure to conditions of extreme heat or cold, deprivation of sleep, food or water, prolonged solitary confinement, denial of medical treatment and hard labour.'
from http://www.freetibet.org/campaigns/stoptorture/index.htm
Friday, 1 February 2008
National Identity Scheme document leaked
A policy document on the ID card scheme has been leaked to the internet. No2ID have done a write up on it.
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Seriously geeky
Mas-Collel, Whinston and Green provide an elegant proof of the fact that lexicographic preferences cannot be represented by a utility function. Here's an alternative proof that is more intuitive to present. I use ^ to represent superscripts and _ to represent subscripts, as in Latex.
Lexicographic preferences in R^2 are defined as follows: x is weakly preferred to y if and only if either x_1>y_1 or (x_1=y_1 and x_2>=y_2). In words, even the smallest gain in the first dimension outweights even the largest gain in the second dimension.
For a contradiction, suppose there is a utility function u:R^2->R representing these preferences. Consider the line segment from (1,1) to (2,1). Along this line segment, u is increasing and hence continuous at all but a countable set of points (for a proof see Rudin Theorem 4.30). Find a point x where u is continuous. Now consider any point y=(x_1,x_2+e) with e>0. As y is strictly preferred to x, u(y)>u(x). But as we approach x from the right, i.e. for some point z=(x_1+h,x_2) with h>0 small enough, by continuity u(z) approaches u(x) and hence u(z) < u(y). However, by lexicographic preferences, z is strictly preferred to y as it is higher on the first dimension. This contradicts the premise that u represents preferences. QED.
Lexicographic preferences in R^2 are defined as follows: x is weakly preferred to y if and only if either x_1>y_1 or (x_1=y_1 and x_2>=y_2). In words, even the smallest gain in the first dimension outweights even the largest gain in the second dimension.
For a contradiction, suppose there is a utility function u:R^2->R representing these preferences. Consider the line segment from (1,1) to (2,1). Along this line segment, u is increasing and hence continuous at all but a countable set of points (for a proof see Rudin Theorem 4.30). Find a point x where u is continuous. Now consider any point y=(x_1,x_2+e) with e>0. As y is strictly preferred to x, u(y)>u(x). But as we approach x from the right, i.e. for some point z=(x_1+h,x_2) with h>0 small enough, by continuity u(z) approaches u(x) and hence u(z) < u(y). However, by lexicographic preferences, z is strictly preferred to y as it is higher on the first dimension. This contradicts the premise that u represents preferences. QED.
Thursday, 27 December 2007
Nothing new under the sun
The day was gentle and fair…. It was curiously quiet everywhere, not so much silent as hushed and muted. Although the West End pavements were packed with a vast multitude it was a subtly different crowd from any that the authorities had seen before. What had happened was that this most stately public show was being observed with an intensely private emotion…. As the coffin was carried in to the Abbey there was a sense of release…. After the funeral came the homage. In five days over a million people visited the grave and left a hundred thousand wreaths….
Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: the burial of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey, 1920
But the worst outcry of this sort came after a talk on birth control by Julian Huxley and Cecil Lewis and was caused by a well-rehearsed voice breaking into the discussion, with a dramatic, ‘I protest… I never… It’s indecent… I protest!’ The discussion stopped, as though shocked, then continued as before. It was all a put-up job by a realistic producer, and when this came out the B.B.C. was loudly condemned for going in for such stunts. The Manchester Guardian likened it to a man who blacks himself all over to play Othello.
Ibid.: the era of Reith at the BBC
Monday, 17 December 2007
Friday, 14 December 2007
Inequality, three
Worries: can I really make this neat dividing line between unacceptable, absolute poverty that allows the people in it to be humiliated and acceptable, relative poverty? Brazil is a middle income country, after all. Our needs are socially defined. Perhaps it’s naïve to think that only some level of absolute poverty “forces” people to sell their dignity. If so, then the move from inequality to indecency to absolute poverty fails. Relative poverty would indeed matter. (Or I could just give up the strong feeling I have that buying people’s humiliation is evil; or I could punt this into the arena of social capital and civic culture, by saying that the problem was the video participants’ lack of self-respect.)
Worries on the other side: can I really neatly divide porn up into what’s acceptable although not my personal cup of tea – maybe even quite gross – and what’s bad and exploitative? I am uncomfortably reminded of that Chris Morris line from Brass Eye: “the amount of heroin I use is harmless.... But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example.”
Worries on the other side: can I really neatly divide porn up into what’s acceptable although not my personal cup of tea – maybe even quite gross – and what’s bad and exploitative? I am uncomfortably reminded of that Chris Morris line from Brass Eye: “the amount of heroin I use is harmless.... But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example.”
Inequality, two
Let's get a little more conceptual, staying with the video example.
Why should a convinced free-marketeer like me worry about inequality? Well, I believe in freedom of contract, but I cannot happily accept that one person can buy the ritual humiliation of other people before a global audience. (There is no freedom-of-speech, S&M roleplay, deconstructing-power-games context here, by the way. The context is purely commercial.) The problem, I think, is that this violates the basic respect for human dignity which, among other things, justifies human rights. These things would not exist in a decent society.
On the other hand, I do not want to say that the women who made this movie were misguided. (Basic idea behind rational choice theory: your objects of study are not stupid.) Instead I suppose that they were desperate. That leads me to think that the real problem with inequality is not the customer’s relative wealth, but the women’s absolute poverty. Most reasonably well-off people wouldn’t eat shit on video for a million dollars. (Some people probably would – humans vary – and I’m OK with that as a choice, I take my libertarianism about sex seriously. I’m not OK with extremely poor people being used as playthings.)
That in turn makes me think that the best remedy for “obscene inequality” is pro-poor growth, as fast as possible. As for the expensive cocktails, well, the vulgar new rich will be always with us, and with a bit of luck their children will found libraries.
Inequality, one
Inequality has crept back on to the agenda, witness the recent story about the £35000 cocktail.
For anybody who thinks “obscene wealth” refers to people richer than they are, here’s an anecdote. You know these artists who e.g. pay homeless Russians £25 to pose for nude photographs, thus challenging our ideas of, oh, fill in the blanks? One person, not an artist, just a guy on the internet, pushed this idea a little farther. He hired a bunch of Brazilian women and got a video made in which they spend a lot of time – there is no nice way to put this – eating their own and each others’ shit. He was not motivated by profit, he just one day decided to create an extremely degrading and humiliating video. You can read about it at somethingawful.com, I won’t provide the link. The video is no doubt floating around the internet, and probably will be forever.
When I read this story, written in somethingawful.com’s world-weary tone of voice, it made me viscerally angry and sad, which not many pieces of news do any more. But the important point is: the whole shoot cost about $500.
For anybody who thinks “obscene wealth” refers to people richer than they are, here’s an anecdote. You know these artists who e.g. pay homeless Russians £25 to pose for nude photographs, thus challenging our ideas of, oh, fill in the blanks? One person, not an artist, just a guy on the internet, pushed this idea a little farther. He hired a bunch of Brazilian women and got a video made in which they spend a lot of time – there is no nice way to put this – eating their own and each others’ shit. He was not motivated by profit, he just one day decided to create an extremely degrading and humiliating video. You can read about it at somethingawful.com, I won’t provide the link. The video is no doubt floating around the internet, and probably will be forever.
When I read this story, written in somethingawful.com’s world-weary tone of voice, it made me viscerally angry and sad, which not many pieces of news do any more. But the important point is: the whole shoot cost about $500.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
in memoriam Evel Knievel
... I had one of his toy motorbikes.
From the Independent obit: 'the Inland Revenue Service pursued him for many years claiming $21m in unpaid taxes. He told the IRS that if they sent anyone round to his house, "I'll blow his head right off his shoulders".'
From the Independent obit: 'the Inland Revenue Service pursued him for many years claiming $21m in unpaid taxes. He told the IRS that if they sent anyone round to his house, "I'll blow his head right off his shoulders".'
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
I could go on
Facebook. like it's 1999 and nobody's yet learned not to forward chain letters.
Facebook: the web's second childhood.
Facebook: A VIRTUAL POKE IS NO GOOD TO ME.
Facebook: [ ] allow this application to rape your privacy.
Facebook: make friends! discover they are vacuous!
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. NNNNGGGGG.
Facebook: the web's second childhood.
Facebook: A VIRTUAL POKE IS NO GOOD TO ME.
Facebook: [ ] allow this application to rape your privacy.
Facebook: make friends! discover they are vacuous!
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. NNNNGGGGG.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Poem
The Dog and Fox at Play
Every morning, the dog and the fox pup
Played in the garden without a sound,
Damp and delighted in the knee-high grass,
Chasing each other round and round.
After the divorce, the dog and people went away,
Furniture was packed and the house was sold.
There in November, I saw the adult fox
Check bins for scraps in a moderate cold.
Joy, life and warmth are merely accidental
In a world a sere God made for reasons of His own.
Echoes sometimes reach Him of the hound and fox pup playing
Like the skipping in a wide lake of a stone.
Monday, 29 October 2007
bit o' Nietzsche for a Monday morning
O Mensch! Gib acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
"Ich schlief, ich schlief -,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht: -
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh -,
Lust - tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit -,
- Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!"
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
"Ich schlief, ich schlief -,
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht: -
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh -,
Lust - tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit -,
- Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!"
Friday, 26 October 2007
Facts about jumpers
Hear me, my brothers:
Sooner or later, in every relationship, comes the key moment when your girlfriend gives you a jumper.
Brothers, we know what this jumper means. It is warm and fluffy, it is for you to wear and the message it conveys is:
"This man belongs to me. He is my boyfriend.
He is a little shorn sheep. "
And yet it is most strangely and mysteriously true, as you will undoubtedly discover, that the quality of the jumper is a very good indicator of the quality of the girlfriend.
Sooner or later, in every relationship, comes the key moment when your girlfriend gives you a jumper.
Brothers, we know what this jumper means. It is warm and fluffy, it is for you to wear and the message it conveys is:
"This man belongs to me. He is my boyfriend.
He is a little shorn sheep. "
And yet it is most strangely and mysteriously true, as you will undoubtedly discover, that the quality of the jumper is a very good indicator of the quality of the girlfriend.
Friday, 19 October 2007
Monday, 10 September 2007
I wonder how many people actually read this
(b) Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your "About Me" section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.
Emphasis added. When you add an application to Facebook, these are examples of what the application (and its developers) can find out about you. In other words, if you don't let everybody read your Facebook profile, you certainly shouldn't let applications do the same.
Emphasis added. When you add an application to Facebook, these are examples of what the application (and its developers) can find out about you. In other words, if you don't let everybody read your Facebook profile, you certainly shouldn't let applications do the same.
Wednesday, 29 August 2007
The government has rejected calls for a referendum on the EU treaty, claiming that it is "very different... in absolute essence" from the previous constitutional treaty.
There is a work of art in the Tate Modern which looks like a glass of water. The accompanying blurb describes it as a yucca plant (or some such) and explains, in Aristotelian terms, that by decree of the artist, the object has the substance of a yucca plant with the accidents of a glass of water. Perhaps the EU treaty could be hung next to it.
(Update: not a yucca plant, an oak tree.)
There is a petition demanding a referendum on the constitution - sorry, constitutional treaty - sorry, treaty - here, and the Telegraph is running another one here.
There is a work of art in the Tate Modern which looks like a glass of water. The accompanying blurb describes it as a yucca plant (or some such) and explains, in Aristotelian terms, that by decree of the artist, the object has the substance of a yucca plant with the accidents of a glass of water. Perhaps the EU treaty could be hung next to it.
(Update: not a yucca plant, an oak tree.)
There is a petition demanding a referendum on the constitution - sorry, constitutional treaty - sorry, treaty - here, and the Telegraph is running another one here.
Friday, 24 August 2007
finished a first draft of another paper....
and decided to put it up on my new website. That one is meant to be for serious academic stuff, working papers etc. This one is more for issuing fatwahs against innocent programmers of statistical software, abusing Sting, and ranting bitterly about Europe/Iraq/Blair [passim]. Potential employers, please go read the other one....
Sunday, 12 August 2007
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
Friday, 20 July 2007
So I went out last night with the guys and got into an argument with Sonya. She’s nice, she’s doing a JD/PhD. Anyway she was all like how the US should subsidize the arts because, you know, the oiks are ignorant and don’t know what real music is and the best music of the past century is apparently Steve Reich. And in Europe they manage things so much better….
So the Europeans piled in, basically along the lines of “You don’t know what it’s like, we live with these f***ing 1950s institutions and the parasite unions and nothing f***ing works and….” It was funny man, you’ve never heard such freemarket vehemence as from the European cognitive elites. And this led to about a two hour long discussion about is there any hope for European political science and when are they gonna get the goddamn monkeys off our backs. And my final conclusion (as you may guess I am hungover) is that like Mar said: it’s very cool to be a European.
Sunday, 15 July 2007
Friday, 6 July 2007
Great songs for expats in America
Elvis Costello - New Amsterdam
Proclaimers - Letter from America
Prefab Sprout - Hey Manhattan (or Faron Young)
Sting - Englishman in New York... no, wait, he's a c***.
Proclaimers - Letter from America
Prefab Sprout - Hey Manhattan (or Faron Young)
Sting - Englishman in New York... no, wait, he's a c***.
Thursday, 28 June 2007
late night reading Austen-Smith and Banks
... and listening to somebody else's music on the iTunes shared thingy. A new group of people have arrived in the building: they are coming for the 16th C. Elegans conference. (Apparently it's a kind of worm.)
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Just arrived in EITM
My brother got married yesterday, in a very nice and sweet ceremony. Now I'm arrived at UCLA. We are surrounded by high school summer campers, it's a bit like Essex Summer School with the Italian kids. Everyone is just getting to know each other (i.e. we are all showing off like mad) - no doubt it will settle down after a few days. Rebecca Morton is my "mentor" and seems very nice. As massive amounts of academic gossip seem to be de rigueur, here's my contribution: Skip Lupia owns an Apple Mac. Make of it what you will.
So, Tony Blair then.
(Warning: nothing that follows is promised to be original, clever, based on deep knowledge of the political scene, or plausible to someone who doesn’t share a certain view of recent intellectual history.)
Blair’s genius was to realized that the left wing needed to adapt to the ideas of the Thatcherite New Right, and develop new means to achieve its traditional goals. Now there is nothing special about that: by the end of the 80s, everybody knew that the ideas of the old Left were out of date; even Marxists like Stuart Hall et al. realised that Thatcherism posed a novel challenge which required new analysis and new political responses. Blair’s genius was how he took up this challenge politically: he would simply apply Thatcherite ideas about the reform of public services with more dedication and plausibility than the Right could.
That doesn’t sound particularly clever, but at the time it was. The rest of the Left thought their response must consist of their own Big New Ideas to match those of the New Right. They were waiting for a bus that never came. (As Jerry Cohen puts it somewhere, new political ideas are not arrived at just by fishing in the intellectual sea.) Blair saw the important thing and did it. Most importantly, he persuaded the rest of Labour to do it too. Although you could fault the execution, the principles have become completely dominant. We are all Blairites now. Choice and competition in public services is the widely accepted agenda.
So what went wrong? Blair’s political genius was to read the winds and build a consensus round new ideas. But as I said, this was not an act of original thought and in fact Blair is not at all a thinker. After 9/11, he again sensed the way the wind was blowing. He understood that “everything changed” and that a new set of ideas would come to prominence – neoconservatism. And again he tried and to a large degree succeeded in building a consensus around them. The problem is that the ideas of the New Right were basically good ones – at least in terms of the reform of public services (I appreciate you may be choking on your sandwich). But neoconservatism contains mostly bad ideas, partly because it lacks a sound intellectual foundation and is instead an ideology which serves the interests of military and security bureaucrats. In particular, it contained the idea that Western democracies could and should wage preemptive wars and spread democracy by force. (Which doesn’t even have the excuse of novelty; it is the domino theory that got America into Vietnam, writ larger, stupider and more aggressive.) So Blair, who is not smart enough to distinguish good from bad ideas, and who built his political career as an evangelist, evangelized us into Iraq.
Apart from that one cock up - which admittedly spoils everything - Blair makes me think Britain has been fortunate in its leaders during my lifetime. The scene now looks much less promising, but that is a story for a different day.
Thursday, 21 June 2007
Monday, 18 June 2007
LA vs Chicago
It's a tough one but I think in the abstract LA wins. Because Chicago's quite like Europe, there are loads of concerts and events put on by the mayor, like a medieval lord providing pigroasts for the peasants. Cf. Ken Livingstone, though I don't think Ken ever let the police get away with torturing black people. Whereas LA is just barbaric, it's Baudrillard's America, a primitive culture of strange tribal music (soft rock) and ritual scarification (nose jobs).
And Tzvika is their monkey god.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
British films that think they're left wing but secretly hate the oiks
V For Vendetta, 28 Days Later, Children of Men. 28 Days Later is ok, the other two are utterly shit.
Friday, 15 June 2007
deep thoughts, I don't really have those
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT AMERICA
In American English you can turn adjectives into nouns, like "my bad", or one prof told me "no worries about the late"
The squirrels and deer really look much more like Disney squirrels and deer. True!
Can-doism
People say "You're welcome!" when you say "Thanks".
The national conversation is less self-righteous and better informed, on the whole.
Cheap!!!
Public employees who actually know their job and want to help
WHAT I DON'T LIKE SO MUCH
Straight lines everywhere
Girls' voices that span the octaves in a single syllable
No countryside, just wilderness instead. Maybe not true everywhere.
Yay! Woo!! Let's all give ourselves a round of applause!!! This makes me want to join the Taliban
Weird-tasting butter
So to sum up, Chelsea are playing the LA Galactic and this must be the best of both worlds, I guess.
In American English you can turn adjectives into nouns, like "my bad", or one prof told me "no worries about the late"
The squirrels and deer really look much more like Disney squirrels and deer. True!
Can-doism
People say "You're welcome!" when you say "Thanks".
The national conversation is less self-righteous and better informed, on the whole.
Cheap!!!
Public employees who actually know their job and want to help
WHAT I DON'T LIKE SO MUCH
Straight lines everywhere
Girls' voices that span the octaves in a single syllable
No countryside, just wilderness instead. Maybe not true everywhere.
Yay! Woo!! Let's all give ourselves a round of applause!!! This makes me want to join the Taliban
Weird-tasting butter
So to sum up, Chelsea are playing the LA Galactic and this must be the best of both worlds, I guess.
Done!
I'm done, finished, complete - today I handed in my last bit of work and tomorrow i graduate. W00t! So after doing that I sat around in the library and read H.P. Lovecraft. Things I learnt today: H.P. Lovecraft was fully a white supremacist.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Los Angeles
Arrived here on Saturday after a big drink on Friday, saying goodbye to people. The past few day's I've been staying at Dan's and busing it into UCLA campus every day, to complete the very last bit of Northwestern work. For some reason I have never, once, managed to come to LA and have a car. So LA makes me feel like a hobo. Anyway, the campus here is cool and high on the hillside and has rather nice architecture, not 19th-century Oxford knockoff and not 20th-century modernist brutalism, just nice red brick buildings in a kind of art nouveau style.
Dan and Kate are busy preparing for the wedding - major project management - and have a sweet black cat called Booboo.
Dan and Kate are busy preparing for the wedding - major project management - and have a sweet black cat called Booboo.
Sunday, 10 June 2007
CIA torture techniques
Via Digg.com: the CIA's favourite torture technique.
On the same subject, here's a poem about water.
On the same subject, here's a poem about water.
Wednesday, 6 June 2007
they actually called him a fascist
so Pat and Chris came over and we headed to the Red Line Tap which is part of the Heartland megaconglomerate. For some reason the talk turned to politics, now those of you who know Chris B will appreciate that he is pretty fully leftwing, whereas Pat is slightly more to the right, by which I mean that he makes me look like a bleeding-heart communist. The conversation ranged on various topics from Islam to immigration (that was when some girl at the bar started calling Pat a fascist, which didn't go down too well) and after some wavering during which the Petty Bourgeois Napoleonist Philistine (moi) joined the Running Dog Imperialist Warmongerer (Pat) to oppress the Glorious Future of Socialist Youth (Chris), eventually PBNP and GFSY formed a Patriotic Left Front and denounced RDIW for his right deviationism - by this time things had progressed back to the flat and Giorgios' whisky and in the heat of the revolutionary moment it all became a bit blurry. So that is why I did not achieve a great deal today, except if you count staring at the porcelain and having intimations of life's absurdity as a great achievement, or maybe lying on the grass and falling asleep or reading webcomics for two hours. 'S'all good. Over and out.
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