just a link

http://www.longbets.org/ - public long-term bets about society

and a bit more politics. this one is actually from the uk.

while i'm at it: the sex museum amsterdam. who is that shadowy figure in the white cap on the left? and the well-known international lawyer next to her?

i can't stand this tropical heat no more tracy!

a (slightly altered) political sticker in Ann Arbor. This is a very liberal town, not like the flyover stereotype.

it is HOT. and HUMID. I am drinking gallons of water, unable to concentrate or do anything.

things I didn't mention. When we were out dancing, two beautiful cornfed teenagers randomly came up and started shaking their booties at us in the most shocking way, bending right over a la detroit kronk. (If that's the expression?) They were chortling throughout.

So like previous generations of Englishmen, I am impressed with the frank and natural manner of American ladies.

What else? Well, the architecture isn't up to much and I haven't yet found a good breakfast spot. But thank god I have found a place to stay with aircon.

So, America. In Detroit airport I wander around looking for a bus and getting ever more irate at the lack of infrastructure. Then a kindly man from the airport staff points me towards the shuttle bus and gives me four quarters in change to phone them; the shuttle bus company, ie a guy and his Mom, spend the entire journey trying to figure out where I should stay in Ann Arbor. And I end up in some kind of co-operative.

We go out. A band playing greatest hits of the 70s - funk, country and soul indiscriminately. This is unique. I have never been in a place where I was the best dancer. People standing around and watching. Couples where the girl wants to get into it and the guy is just standing there, ass rooted to the floor. She thinks she's a free spirit being held back, but she's playing a role too and is quite comfortable in her self-imposed restraint! So we show them what it's all about.


.... and then we go outside and there's a black guy playing his guitar, a two chord blues version of the latest dance hit, I think, and some couples doing the best, most joyous dancing I have ever seen. They jive to his blues - Asian, Latino, Black and White, the crowd clapping - just out on the sidewalk! Unimaginable in Europe.

But then you realise they are all professional.

But then, here anybody can be professional. No certificate required:all you have to be is good.

You see, this ambivalence is not really going to go away. It can be so amazing and then so dull.

Harrogate

Just recovering from a couple of nights' hard partying in Harrogate. (Don't laugh.) Chris Sorsby is off to Canada so me, Dave and Chris Baehrend have been up to see him.

I'm off to New York, then Ann Arbor on Thursday, where I'll be attending the University of Michigan Summer School - course on advanced game theory. Perhaps I'll finally develop some half-decent formal modelling abilities.... Stranger things have happened. There are many cool things at UMich, as well as Robert Axelrod (the Evolution of Cooperation guy) and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (progenitors of evolutionary psychology) they have Juan Cole, a historian with a great blog about the Iraq war. (Hmm, scribbling this on Chris' PowerBook which although very beautiful does not seem to have a web browser that lets me put links into blogger. Juan Cole is at http://www.juancole.com .)

SPSS is a crock of crap

The people who wrote the user interface for SPSS should be burned to death with matches. That is all.

A little sample from my current paper

(The context is a discussion of cues and heuristics in voting - ie how voters can make decisions without being hugely knowledgeable about politics. But I think this is interesting anyway. It is partly inspired by the economics literature on "informational cascades". This is just a very simple example.)

If I trust that you know better than me how to vote, I may vote correctly. But I am certainly not helping make the democratic majority decision any more accurate. Under certain conditions, I may even make it less accurate.

Here's a simple formal example. Suppose that there are three voters on a simple Yes-No issue. One of these outcomes is unequivocally the right one. The voters each receive some information (a signal) about whether Yes or No is the right outcome. The accuracy of those signals varies: the voters have probabilities 0.7, 0.75 and 0.8 respectively of getting accurate information which suggests they should vote in the correct way. Also, these probabilities are known to all the voters in common, although the signals themselves are private. Suppose that the voters vote independently, and try to vote the right way. They all then follow their signals, which are more likely to be right than wrong. The chance of a correct decision is the chance of all three voting right, plus the probability of three different majorities of two voting correctly: 0.7*0.75*0.8 + 0.3*0.75*0.8 + 0.7*0.25*0.8 + 0.7*0.75*0.2 = 0.845.

Now suppose that the best informed voter, Mrs Point Eight, announces what her signal is (which way her information points) before the vote. The other two voters are then each in one of two situations. Either their signal agrees with Mrs Point Eight: if so they vote the same way anyway. Or their signal disagrees. If so, they now have two conflicting signals. But Mrs Point Eight's signal is more accurate than theirs, so they sensibly choose to ignore their own signal. In either case, they vote with Mrs Point Eight. Unfortunately, this means that the chance of reaching a correct decision has gone down to 0.8.1 By trusting a better-informed person, the individual voters have become more accurate (their chance of being right is 0.8 instead of 0.7 or 0.6) but have made the collective outcome less accurate.

Evolutionary Psychology

... when Rational Choice Theory just isn't right wing enough.

Cambridge at the weekend

Down to Jesus college at the weekend for a 10 year anniversary dinner. There were only about 20 of us so I suppose I am now officially qualified as a Cambridge old fart. Yikes.

Anyway, it was a psychedelic evening. Thanks to Juliet Banfield for putting it on, and a big shout out to old friends and also new, or rather recently remade - hello Holly, Mike, Susie, et al. A night when I make a spectacular ass of myself, my dears, can still give me such intense happiness that I spend most of the drive back home actually singing. (Perhaps this is bad in some way?)

As usual, there are photographs, some of which involve Dave Padua and are sexually ambiguous. Watch this space.

Platypus

This is bonzer.

Google scholar monitor

If you have the Firefox web browser, and regularly use Google Scholar, then check out this wonderful little bit of tech. It basically adds a "saved searches" box to Google scholar, which lets you see if new articles have been added. Very useful for monitoring research. You'll need the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. I love this idea of consumers customizing web pages.

turned on by car insurance policy documents?

Then maybe you should read this red hot little number. (Just something I'm looking at at the moment. No, really, you do not have any reason to read this document.)

Game theory of killer initiatives and legislative responses to initiatives

(Just something I jotted down - a sample of the kind of work I do.)

A common institution in the context of direct legislation is to allow the legislature to respond to a proposed initiative. I put forward a game-theoretic rationale for having this institution, but point out some potential problems. The problems also apply to cases where interest groups outside the legislature sponsor “killer initiatives” which are drafted so as to affect other initiatives on the ballot box.

The rationale is as follows. We consider policy on a single dimension. The status quo is SQ and voter median ideal point is at MV. All utility functions are given by distance:

utility = |outcome – ideal point|

We assume that proposing an initiative costs C, and that the potential proposer is extreme, with ideal point marked PIP. MV' marks the point [MV + (MV -SQ)], i.e. the median voter is indifferent between MV' and SQ. To simplify, we assume that indifferent voters vote “yes” on all proposals.

SQ--------------MV-------------MV'----------------PIP--------

If the legislature may not respond to the initiative, and if MV' – SQ > C, then the proposer proposes an initiative at MV', which the voters accept. Policy is now as far from the median voter as it was before, but in the opposite direction.

Now suppose that the legislature can respond to proposed initiatives by bringing forward its own counter-proposal. If it does so, then the counter-proposal, rather than the status quo, will be the result if the ballot proposal fails. The legislature incurs no cost in bringing forward a counter-proposal: this seems reasonable, as it has no signature requirement to fulfil. Most likely the legislature's ideal point LIP will be at SQ: however, we consider all alternatives.

SQ--------LIP-----MV-------------Mv'----------------PIP--------

1. If LIP < MV: any proposal to the right of MV can be countered by a proposal to the left of MV, but closer to MV. Therefore, if MV – SQ > C, the proposer proposes MV; otherwise the proposer does nothing.

SQ--------------MV-------LIP-----MV'----------------PIP--------

2. If MV' > LIP > MV, any proposal to the right of LIP will be met by a counter-proposal at LIP. Therefore, if LIP – SQ > C, the proposer proposes LIP; otherwise the proposer does nothing.

3. If PIP > LIP > MV' (ie legislature and proposer are both extreme), and if LIP – SQ > C, again the proposer proposes LIP or any proposal to the right. The legislature then responds with LIP and offers the public the unappealing choice between two proposals which are both less preferred to the median voter than the status quo. The result is LIP.

4. If LIP > PIP > MV' then proposer proposes PIP and legislature responds with PIP or any proposal to the right; here again, proposer and legislature collude to offer the public a Hobson's choice. The result is PIP.

In the latter two cases, a rule like the one outlined makes outcomes worse from the point of view of the median voter and the associated majority in his or her lea. However, these seem rather implausible: why shouldn't the legislature legislate directly, rather than take the roundabout initiative route? In the more plausible first two cases, the result is always better for the median voter. Allowing legislative counter-proposals essentially turns the contest into a classic Downsian two-horse race.

Potential problems

The institution as proposed above is rather simple. However, it doesn't always work like that. Switzerland allows the legislature to bring forward proposals in response to an initiative, but rather than replacing the status quo, they are voted on separately. If both the original initiative and the legislature's response pass, the legislature's proposal overrides the original initiative. (I think. Hey, this is a blog entry.) In a less institutionalised, but broadly similar way, “killer initiatives” are sometimes seen in the US. These are drafted so as to override the effect of another proposed initiative: again, if both pass, the killer initiative will specify limitations to the effects of its target.

We can model both these situations similarly, as proposers 1 and 2 decide in turn to propose initiatives. If both proposers introduce initiatives which pass, we assume that 2's proposal is implemented, as it contains clauses designed to nullify the effect of 1's proposal.

The choice situation facing the voter now becomes complicated and may require sophisticated voting – something that, it is often believed, voters in a direct democracy find difficult (e.g. Lacy and Niou 2000). That paper points out a similar result when preferences over two initiatives are non-separable. In this case, preferences over outcomes are single-peaked and the space of outcomes is one-dimensional: the problems arise because voters don't know what the effect of their vote will be. As an example, consider the following choice situation where two initiatives have been proposed:

---SQ--------------P2-------------P1---

Given single-peakedness, there are four possible preference profiles for voters:

SQ > P2 > P1

P1 > P2 > SQ

P2 > SQ > P1

P2 > P1 > SQ

The last two groups of voters have no problem: they can vote yes on P2, and yes or no on P1. A voter who happened to be decisive on either outcome could not possibly experience regret, as they would always have brought about an outcome which they preferred to the alternative – either by achieving the best possible result, P2, or by preventing P1 from supplanting the status quo, or by possibly allowing P1 to win (assuming P2 was not implemented).

The “extremists” in the first two groups are not so lucky. Consider first those who wish to preserve the status quo. A voter (or group of voters) who happens to be decisive on P2 faces the following set of choices:

P1 outcome	Vote	Result
Passes	Yes	P1 and P2 pass: outcome P2
	No	P1 passes: outcome P1
Fails	Yes	P2 passes: outcome P2
	No	neither pass: outcome SQ

Clearly, if P1 is going to fail, it's better to vote no on P2 and preserve the status quo. Equally, if P1 will pass, you should vote for P2 in order to salvage something.

Partisans of P1 face a similar problem. They should vote for P2 if P1 is going to fail, but against P2 if P1 is going to pass. The problem in terms of votes is analogous to that mentioned in Lacy and Niou (2000). For example, a member of the first preference group has the following preference ordering for outcomes of the votes:

P1	P2	Result	Ranking
N	N	SQ	1
N	Y	P2	2=
Y	Y	P2	2=
Y	N	P1	3

Thus, despite single-peakedness over the actual issue, we end up with non-separable preferences over the outcomes of votes.

R notes

These are for myself but also public.

R project for statistical computing, in case you didn't know.

Adding a straight regression line to a plot

model = lm(y ~ x)

plot(y ~ x)

abline(model)

Adding a wiggly line to a plot

plot(foo ~ bar)

lines(lowess(bar, foo))

One day in Iraq

Sometimes the BBC does cool stuff.

fire and stuff

http://www.srl.org

and on a similar note

http://interpretivearson.com/ddi/

'kin ell.

Finally.

Blogfish 1.0 is out! W00t.

A great thing about my Gnome desktop

You can make any window fullscreen. This is great if you are easily distracted by other stuff onscreen (that tempting Firefox icon for example). To find the keyboard shortcut, just look under Desktop Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Gnome

Linux for newbies

aldeburgh

That's Bea on the left. She's Polish.