Bill Mill

"Despite campaign rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama Administration has yet to make any genuine..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:29:58 -0500

“Despite campaign rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama Administration has yet to make any genuine progress against the infringements on civil liberties and constitutional federalism created by the War on Drugs. If the president really wanted to stop federal medical marijuana prosecutions in states where medical marijuana is legal under state law, he could have issued a clear and unequivocal executive order forbidding federal prosecutors from doing so, or instructed the attorney general to issue a firm policy guidance to that effect. Unfortunately, he chose not to do so.”

- As Predicted, New Justice Department Policy Didn’t Stop Federal Medical Marijuana Arrests in States Where Medical Marijuana is Legal Under State Law - Ilya Somin

prison population per 100,000 people via abbyjean via Africa is a Country via wiki

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:03:00 -0500

prison population per 100,000 people via abbyjean via Africa is a Country via wiki

"The lyrics presented in Figure 5 revolve around the theme of receiving oral sex, alcohol, and going..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:33:14 -0500

“The lyrics presented in Figure 5 revolve around the theme of receiving oral sex, alcohol, and going to the club. Thus, words like “club” and “bust” have relatively high TFICF scores (TFICF=1.83e-4 and TFICF=1.67e-4) than other non-related words TFICF=4.24e-7). The lyrics presented in Figure 6 also generally revolve around the themes of sex and partying.”

- Rap Lyric Generator - Hieu Nguyen and Brian Sa

"But we are who we are collectively as well as individually. Large organizations can and do evolve to..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:26:02 -0500

“But we are who we are collectively as well as individually. Large organizations can and do evolve to do evil things while isolating people individually from illegal or morally uncomfortable acts. That capacity can confer tremendous advantages over smaller, more personal and accountable, collectives. It’s harsh, but we don’t get a pass just because the particular lever we are paid to pull only shifts a cog in a vast machine whose overall function we don’t control. As moral agents, it is not enough to follow the law and let pecuniary incentives guide us. We have to take responsibility for the behavior of the collectives to which we belong.”

- In defense of incivility - Steve Randy Waldman
A point that we can all stand to remember.

"in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:05:00 -0500

“

in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another…

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

It was pure luck that led to the actual discovery of vitamin C.

”

- Scott and Scurvy - Maciej Cegłowski

"Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer find that in the fourth and fifth grade, the math test scores of..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:22:48 -0500

“Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer find that in the fourth and fifth grade, the math test scores of charter school lottery winners and losers are virtually identical to those of a typical black student in the New York City schools. After attending the Promise Academy middle school for three years, black students score as well as comparable white students. They are 11.6 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in sixth grade, 17.9 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level in seventh grade, and 27.5 percent more likely to be scoring at grade level by eighth grade. Overall, Promise Academy middle school enrollment appears to increase math scores by 1.2 standard deviations in eighth grade, more than the estimated benefits from reductions in class size, Teach for America, or Head Start.”

- Linda Gorman via Alex Tabarrok
1.2 standard deviations! Go charter schools!

I seriously don’t understand people who support the public school system status quo. Is there anybody reading this who does, and wants to explain to me why charter schools are a bad thing?

"For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x. The story of their..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:00:51 -0500

“For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x. The story of their struggle to find the “roots” — the solutions — of increasingly complicated equations is one of the great epics in the history of human thought.”

- Finding Your Roots - Stephen Strogatz
That’s a neat way of thinking about it.

"Keith Henson has coined the name ‘memeoids’ for ‘victims that have been taken over by a meme to the..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:03:17 -0500

“Keith Henson has coined the name ‘memeoids’ for ‘victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential…You see lots of these people on the evening news from such places as Belfast for Beirut’”

- Richard Dawkins via TGGP

"One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:51:37 -0500

“One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons of investigation to scientists around the world. However, the results from fMRI research may be somewhat less reliable than many researchers implicitly believe. While it may be frustrating to know that fMRI results are not perfectly replicable, it is beneficial to take a longer-term view regarding the scientific impact of these studies. In neuroimaging, as in other scientific fields, errors will be made and some results will not replicate. Still, over time some measure of truth will accrue. This chapter is not intended to be an accusation against fMRI as a method. Quite the contrary, it is meant to increase the understanding of how much each fMRI result can contribute to scientific knowledge.”

- Bennett and Miller via Mind Hacks

"With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market built,..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:49:28 -0500

“With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market built, testing the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce. Predictalot is a game, and we hope it’s fun to play. We’d also like to pave the way for serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology.”

- Predictalot! (And we mean alot] - David Pennock
Great work! I had an idea for something like this the other day, and it appears to be beautifully executed here.

"I don’t mean to underplay the importance of financial sector reform. A continually malfunctioning..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:25:21 -0500

“

I don’t mean to underplay the importance of financial sector reform. A continually malfunctioning financial sector has brought the American economy to underappreciated ruin and left us with an overhang of unfulfillable promises that may engender conflict for decades. Further, the financial sector has generated the rump of a crony capitalist class which threatens to set us on the Argentine path. We have to fix the financial sector.

But we cannot fix the financial sector without addressing the problems and contradictions which we depend upon financiers to paper over. This never was just a financial crisis. It was, and is, an economic and political crisis, and we are only a very short way down the path towards resolving it.

”

- Rooseveltian reflections - Steve Randy Waldman

"The tremendomeatatarian refuses to eat meat simply because it is what his parents did, or because it..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:39:19 -0500

“The tremendomeatatarian refuses to eat meat simply because it is what his parents did, or because it is convenient, or because he lacks willpower. The tremendomeatatarian respects the fact that his food came from a living being, which died to provide him with dinner, and which may have suffered or be rare and overfished.† Or perhaps it’s bad for the environment. Any of these things are costs, so the good utilitarian must balance them out. So he vows that he will respect that sacrifice by only eating meat if it is tremendously delicious.”

- Tremendomeatatarianism - Justin Blank

"The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:11:24 -0500

“The unauthorized release last fall of hundreds of e-mail messages from a major climate research center in England, and more recent revelations of a handful of errors in a supposedly authoritative United Nations report on climate change, have created what a number of top scientists say is a major breach of faith in their research.”

- Scientists Taking Steps to Defend Work on Climate - John M. Broder
How does anyone read this sentence without gagging? A major breach of faith? Did the author consider what he was writing? Did any “top scientists” actually say that phrase? Did the editor not notice it?

I had no faith in climate science to begin with, just as I’ve no faith that gravity exists. There is ample evidence to convince me of the latter, while the former seems to be only justified by the overabundant “faith” of our media in what Anonymous Top Scientists have to say.

"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:47:00 -0500

“

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

”

- Václav Havel

"Here’s one of the examples from Schervish’s paper. Suppose data come from a normal distribution with..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:20:04 -0500

“Here’s one of the examples from Schervish’s paper. Suppose data come from a normal distribution with variance 1 and unknown mean μ. Let H be the hypothesis that μ is contained in the interval (-0.5, 0.5). Let H’ be the hypothesis that μ is contained in the interval (-0.82, 0.52). Then suppose you observe x = 2.18. The p-value for H is 0.0502 and the p-value for H’ is 0.0498. This says there is more evidence to support the hypothesis H that μ is in the smaller interval than there is to support the hypothesis H’ that μ is in the larger interval. If we adopt α = 0.05 as the cutoff for significance, we would reject the hypothesis that -0.82”

- p-values are inconsistent — John D. Cook

"the purpose of the proposed systemic-risk regulator is not only to spot the impending systemic risk..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:46:25 -0500

“

the purpose of the proposed systemic-risk regulator is not only to spot the impending systemic risk - but to intervene to prevent it from happening. Consider the power such a regulator would have…

For example, let’s say the regulator spots what he believes is a dangerous national real estate bubble. He acts quickly to snuff it out by raising interest rates or requiring minimum 40 percent down payments or some other intervention. What was a booming economy with 3 percent unemployment turns into a hard recession with 8 percent to 10 percent unemployment.

But later it is determined that it was not a bubble, but rather the beginning of what would have been a steady, healthy increase in value. Imagine if such a regulator had existed in 1955 and snuffed out the great post-World War II expansion that made America a prosperous middle-class nation of homeowners in suburbia rather than poorer renters in the city.

”

- Placing our faith in economic oracles - Tony Blankley

"Indeed my only disagreement with those on the left is about incentive effects, not ethics. I think..."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:30:32 -0500

“Indeed my only disagreement with those on the left is about incentive effects, not ethics. I think the supply-side effects of high taxes and subsidies (in the long run) are much more important than many others believe, indeed they are much more important than common sense suggests. Thus I favor a low-tax welfare state similar to Singapore, which spends enough to eliminate severe poverty, and also provide universal health care, education, etc. BTW, Singapore spends much less than we do, so calling for the US to move to that “welfare state” system is equivalent to calling for dramatically lower taxes on the rich.”

- on Mankiw and Utilitarianism - Scott Sumner

"Just to be clear, we’re not just picking on President Obama here. The pay increase in his..."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:55:28 -0500

“Just to be clear, we’re not just picking on President Obama here. The pay increase in his budget would actually be the smallest in 20 years. But total compensation per federal worker—cash earnings plus fringe benefits—now averages twice that of the private sector.”

- Cut Pay For Government Workers - Brian S. Wesbury and Robert Stein

"DNSSEC, a project to cryptographically sign DNS records, has been under development for ten years by..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:03:18 -0500

“DNSSEC, a project to cryptographically sign DNS records, has been under development for ten years by a large (and obviously rather incompetent) team of protocol developers. I’ve designed a new DNS security system, DNSSEC2, with several advantages over DNSSEC: it’s faster; it uses much stronger cryptographic tools; it protects against denial of service; it allows end-to-end security without help from the centralized root servers; and, most importantly, it works with existing DNS database software, so it’s much easier than DNSSEC to deploy.”

- djb

"The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:27:55 -0500

“

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain ‘private data’.

This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment – if you wish to publish the image – or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to ‘judge’ whether the subject might object. Now work that one out if you can.

Applied to professional photographers, this is, of course, the perfect charter for politicians, crooks, and bent officials to avoid being photographed and exposed. How many working press photographers will find themselves in court?

”

- Photographers to lose copyright and right to take photographs in public - Philip Dunn
This massive change to copyright law and photographic rights in the UK is contained within a couple of amendments to a larger law. England just gets creepier and creepier.