All politics this time--what else would we be thinking about?
The Republican mayor of San Diego changes his mind on Prop 8
Nate Silver's final pre-election take on the cellphone effect
From Errol Morris, People in the Middle for Obama--I'm always interested in how Morris moves between documentary and advocacy
My Wife Made Me Canvas for Obama; Here's What I Learned
Finally, don't worry: my opinions aren't likely to influence my students'.
Showing posts with label Nate Silver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nate Silver. Show all posts
Monday, November 03, 2008
Monday, October 06, 2008
No-risk free money in the presidential betting markets
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a couple of posts about the divergence between Intrade and fivethirtyeight.com in their estimates of the probable results of the upcoming Presidential election. In the second of those posts, I linked to Nate Silver's recognition that the betting markets themselves did not agree: Intrade consistently leans Republican relative to the Iowa Electronic Markets.
As it happens, I paid close attention to the two markets on Saturday, and I saw the prices converge, with the IEM probability of a Democratic victory steady around 71 and the Intrade probability drifting up to that level from the sixties. That evening, a hammer dropped: a huge, sudden sell order of the kind Nate had identified reinstated the Republican lean of the Intrade markets, and it has remained intact since, even growing. At this writing, the probability of a Democratic victory (which creates a slightly neater comparison than the Obama-only price) is this:
Intrade: 68.1 (ask 68.3)
IEM: 76.4 (bid 75.0)
That's spread of 8.3 points between the prices of the most current sales! (Incidentally, the Nate Silver model has the probability creeping closer to 90% now.) That spread is the kind of problem that arbitrage should be fixing, and I hope people who understand these markets better than I do can comment on why it's not. But here's how the arbitrage trade would work, and this is why I included the current ask (selling) price for Intrade and bid (buying) price for IEM as a more realistic estimate of what a trader could do right now.
The way the arbitrage trade works is that you short sell the commodity where it is priced high and buy shares where it is priced low. The principle is incredibly simple, although its application is often wickedly complicated: it's like buying a bag of peaches for eight dollars and then selling them for ten.
In this case, let's say you start by selling 100 DEM shares on IEM, where the price is higher. Buy low, sell high. (This is short selling, so you sell first and pledge to buy later; a short sell makes money if the price goes down.) At $75 each, that gives you $7500. At the same time, you buy 100 DEM shares on Intrade. at $68.30, that costs you $6830.
In a month, you're going to get the value of 100 Intrade DEM shares (the ones you bought) in exchange for the value of 100 IEM DEM shares (the ones you sold short). And this is the key: at that point, the values will necessarily be the same. Either all those shares are worth $100, or they're all worth nothing. Either the Democrats will have won, or they won't have won. The share values must converge.
So if Obama wins, you get $10000 for the 100 shares you bought on Intrade (now worth $100 each), which nets you $3170 ($10000 minus the original cost of $6830). That's balanced by your loss on the short sale of $2500 (buying back shares for $10000 that you sold for $7500). The net is $670.
And you get the same amount if McCain wins. In that case, you lose the $6830 you paid for the Obama shares, but you get to buy back your short sell for nothing, which means you keep the original $7500 you received by making the sale. The difference is again $670.
Your balance on November fifth, no matter who wins: $670.
That's a fantastic guaranteed return for a month, even if you add in the transaction costs, and even if you don't compare it with the current behavior of the equity markets.
So why on earth is this difference persisting? There seems to be a serious issue with market manipulation--as Nate suggested--or with some other kind of market inefficiency. My sense is that the problem is more with Intrade with IEM, which is important given that a lot of serious people, such as Greg Mankiw, use Intrade to represent the voice of betting markets as a whole. Something is not working as it should here.
Note: this post does not constitute investment advice. I am not a professional. If you make investments based on blog posts by English majors, well, you figure out the end of the sentence.
As it happens, I paid close attention to the two markets on Saturday, and I saw the prices converge, with the IEM probability of a Democratic victory steady around 71 and the Intrade probability drifting up to that level from the sixties. That evening, a hammer dropped: a huge, sudden sell order of the kind Nate had identified reinstated the Republican lean of the Intrade markets, and it has remained intact since, even growing. At this writing, the probability of a Democratic victory (which creates a slightly neater comparison than the Obama-only price) is this:
Intrade: 68.1 (ask 68.3)
IEM: 76.4 (bid 75.0)
That's spread of 8.3 points between the prices of the most current sales! (Incidentally, the Nate Silver model has the probability creeping closer to 90% now.) That spread is the kind of problem that arbitrage should be fixing, and I hope people who understand these markets better than I do can comment on why it's not. But here's how the arbitrage trade would work, and this is why I included the current ask (selling) price for Intrade and bid (buying) price for IEM as a more realistic estimate of what a trader could do right now.
The way the arbitrage trade works is that you short sell the commodity where it is priced high and buy shares where it is priced low. The principle is incredibly simple, although its application is often wickedly complicated: it's like buying a bag of peaches for eight dollars and then selling them for ten.
In this case, let's say you start by selling 100 DEM shares on IEM, where the price is higher. Buy low, sell high. (This is short selling, so you sell first and pledge to buy later; a short sell makes money if the price goes down.) At $75 each, that gives you $7500. At the same time, you buy 100 DEM shares on Intrade. at $68.30, that costs you $6830.
In a month, you're going to get the value of 100 Intrade DEM shares (the ones you bought) in exchange for the value of 100 IEM DEM shares (the ones you sold short). And this is the key: at that point, the values will necessarily be the same. Either all those shares are worth $100, or they're all worth nothing. Either the Democrats will have won, or they won't have won. The share values must converge.
So if Obama wins, you get $10000 for the 100 shares you bought on Intrade (now worth $100 each), which nets you $3170 ($10000 minus the original cost of $6830). That's balanced by your loss on the short sale of $2500 (buying back shares for $10000 that you sold for $7500). The net is $670.
And you get the same amount if McCain wins. In that case, you lose the $6830 you paid for the Obama shares, but you get to buy back your short sell for nothing, which means you keep the original $7500 you received by making the sale. The difference is again $670.
Your balance on November fifth, no matter who wins: $670.
That's a fantastic guaranteed return for a month, even if you add in the transaction costs, and even if you don't compare it with the current behavior of the equity markets.
So why on earth is this difference persisting? There seems to be a serious issue with market manipulation--as Nate suggested--or with some other kind of market inefficiency. My sense is that the problem is more with Intrade with IEM, which is important given that a lot of serious people, such as Greg Mankiw, use Intrade to represent the voice of betting markets as a whole. Something is not working as it should here.
Note: this post does not constitute investment advice. I am not a professional. If you make investments based on blog posts by English majors, well, you figure out the end of the sentence.
Monday, September 22, 2008
What are the current odds of an Obama victory?
Reader, I know not what to think!
Like a lot of other people, I have for a while had the sense that Nate Silver and friends at FiveThirtyEight.com and the gloriously impersonal markets at Intrade gave me my best reading of the winds of political opinion.
The two sites use radically different methods, but they attempt to answer the same kinds of questions, and for present purposes, the question is precisely the same: what are the chances that Barack Obama will win the election in November? (Naturally, I could use McCain's name throughout this post, but I find it easier to use the numbers for the current favorite.)
FiveThirtyEight is driven by Nate Silver's attempt to aggregate poll numbers and to interpret them based on the history of polling and election results. The site combines state and national polling, tweaking the model along the way and running simulations to estimate the most likely results given current conditions.
Intrade, however, uses the emergent collective wisdom of a market to answer the same question. In theory, the simplicity of the market might do as well or better than Silver at taking all information into account. For example, Silver has been trying to model the distortions of cellphone usage in this year's polls. Because the possibility of cellphone distortions is well known, a real-money market has the potential, at least, to account for their effects without relying on a controlling modeler to estimate them: in many cases, the aggregated crowd can be sharper than the market. (See the work of Robin Hanson for more on the power of markets in politics.)
In spite of these differences, the two ways of answering the questions have produced similar predictions, with small variations due in part to Silver's model deliberately reacting slowly to new developments. Until now.
As I write, FiveThirtyEight's "win percentage" for Obama has rocketed up to 74.4%, although Obama was a slight underdog shortly after the Republican convention. Intrade's bettors also made Obama a slight underdog at that point, and they too think that Obama has regained his status as the frontrunner, but only barely: there, Obama leads 51.5%-47.4%. (For reasons not worth explaining here, FiveThirtyEight's win percentages add up to 100, whereas Intrade's probabilities will be slightly lower.)
I do not see an easy explanation for such a huge divergence. Both sites attempt to look beyond a current snapshot to project the November result, and both attempt to use all the relevant public information (Silver explicitly, Intrade by means of the market).
I welcome correction on this, but I think the plain-language way to sum up the difference is this: the market is making a big bet that McCain will perform better than candidates who had similar poll results at this point in past campaigns.
The difference must rest on a claim about the present or a claim about the future. A claim about the present would involve something like the Bradley effect--the notion that polls will artificially favor Obama because voters don't want to admit they are voting against the Black candidate. Silver has written a series of posts discounting the Bradley effect in this election, however, and even a strong belief in the effect would not explain a divergence as sudden as what we've seen.
If the implicit claim is about the future, the logic might run something like this: we're seeing a close race, and the spectacle of the current Wall Street meltdown has directed the race in a direction favorable to Obama, but this is a bubble. That is, the polls we're seeing today are like post-convention polls, which involve a predictable but fleeting bump. Today's polls are a parenthetical remark, not the story itself.
Whatever explanation you favor, this is certain: the wisdom of the betting crowd sees something behind the numbers that favors McCain--not enough to make McCain the favorite, but enough to keep the race close to a coin flip. The divergence between FiveThirtyEight and Intrade has given us a window into the differences between analytical modeling and market mechanisms.
Like a lot of other people, I have for a while had the sense that Nate Silver and friends at FiveThirtyEight.com and the gloriously impersonal markets at Intrade gave me my best reading of the winds of political opinion.
The two sites use radically different methods, but they attempt to answer the same kinds of questions, and for present purposes, the question is precisely the same: what are the chances that Barack Obama will win the election in November? (Naturally, I could use McCain's name throughout this post, but I find it easier to use the numbers for the current favorite.)
FiveThirtyEight is driven by Nate Silver's attempt to aggregate poll numbers and to interpret them based on the history of polling and election results. The site combines state and national polling, tweaking the model along the way and running simulations to estimate the most likely results given current conditions.
Intrade, however, uses the emergent collective wisdom of a market to answer the same question. In theory, the simplicity of the market might do as well or better than Silver at taking all information into account. For example, Silver has been trying to model the distortions of cellphone usage in this year's polls. Because the possibility of cellphone distortions is well known, a real-money market has the potential, at least, to account for their effects without relying on a controlling modeler to estimate them: in many cases, the aggregated crowd can be sharper than the market. (See the work of Robin Hanson for more on the power of markets in politics.)
In spite of these differences, the two ways of answering the questions have produced similar predictions, with small variations due in part to Silver's model deliberately reacting slowly to new developments. Until now.
As I write, FiveThirtyEight's "win percentage" for Obama has rocketed up to 74.4%, although Obama was a slight underdog shortly after the Republican convention. Intrade's bettors also made Obama a slight underdog at that point, and they too think that Obama has regained his status as the frontrunner, but only barely: there, Obama leads 51.5%-47.4%. (For reasons not worth explaining here, FiveThirtyEight's win percentages add up to 100, whereas Intrade's probabilities will be slightly lower.)
I do not see an easy explanation for such a huge divergence. Both sites attempt to look beyond a current snapshot to project the November result, and both attempt to use all the relevant public information (Silver explicitly, Intrade by means of the market).
I welcome correction on this, but I think the plain-language way to sum up the difference is this: the market is making a big bet that McCain will perform better than candidates who had similar poll results at this point in past campaigns.
The difference must rest on a claim about the present or a claim about the future. A claim about the present would involve something like the Bradley effect--the notion that polls will artificially favor Obama because voters don't want to admit they are voting against the Black candidate. Silver has written a series of posts discounting the Bradley effect in this election, however, and even a strong belief in the effect would not explain a divergence as sudden as what we've seen.
If the implicit claim is about the future, the logic might run something like this: we're seeing a close race, and the spectacle of the current Wall Street meltdown has directed the race in a direction favorable to Obama, but this is a bubble. That is, the polls we're seeing today are like post-convention polls, which involve a predictable but fleeting bump. Today's polls are a parenthetical remark, not the story itself.
Whatever explanation you favor, this is certain: the wisdom of the betting crowd sees something behind the numbers that favors McCain--not enough to make McCain the favorite, but enough to keep the race close to a coin flip. The divergence between FiveThirtyEight and Intrade has given us a window into the differences between analytical modeling and market mechanisms.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and the race of folk wisdom
I'm going to spend a few sentences explaining why I think Sarah Palin's place in politics is oddly and vexingly like Barack Obama's, so let me foreshadow the end of the argument by illustrating the profound difference between them. Imagine Obama saying at the Democratic National Convention,
Before I became a senator of the great state of Illinois, I was a community organizer. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a community organizer is sort of like a small-town mayor, except that you have actual responsibilities.
As I'm sure you know, this is a reversal of Palin's famous zinger from the RNC, with a similar level of sneering inaccuracy. While Palin's line about community organizers immediately stood out as unusually inflammatory and mean, this Obama version would, I think you'll agree, have ended the campaign in an instant: hello, President McCain. I'll return to this.
Lots of Democrats, including me, are feeling their heads explode anew every time Palin reveals her ignorance of the fundamentals of federal policy: she doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is (OK, it's complicated, and an informed request for clarification would have been fine--but not a look of uncomprehending fear), she doesn't know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work, she doesn't know how countries get admitted to NATO--this last in a way that brought her alarmingly close to arguing for a war with Russia that even McCain wouldn't seek. And pointing out these problems seems only to prod Palin's supporters to new levels of defensive loyalty.
Obama's supporters have a similarly defensive loyalty. The defensiveness does not arise from policy-related gaffes, which Obama avoids with wonderful deftness: as M. J. Rosenberg has said (supported by details that are worth reading), Obama "knows his sh*t." But when his rivals challenge Obama's experience, the defense lies not in his knowledge, exactly, but in his "judgment," which partly means judgment but is also politically acceptable code for curiosity and, yes, utterly extraordinary intelligence--not only the possession of such intelligence but the unapologetic willingness to display it.
In other words, Obama supporters want someone with that kind of mind running the country: dispassionate, probing, academic. Big issues require elite capabilities, the kind of extraordinary talents that may be visible in a young candidate. This fact explains part of Obama's longstanding education gap among Democrats, which is more widely known than when I first noted it but remains underanalyzed. This valuing of the extraordinary young candidate works directly against the logic of blue-collar unions, which tend instead to value experience and credentials.
The logic of the Palin candidacy holds that big issues require the expansion of common sense: a connection with regular people and a certain set of values trump policy and elite rhetoric. As David Brooks points out today, this conflict between Obama and Palin has deep roots in American political rhetoric--or, I would say, in a longer, more European line of thinking about the potential sovereignty of the people. The arguments about Obama and Palin reflect centuries of debates about the relative powers of individual intelligence, personal experience, and collective (or folk) experience.
This last factor deserves more attention. Every major candidate must make a populist claim to the wisdom of the folk. Among the four major candidates now, Biden makes the most conventional claim: he has experienced a working-class childhood in Scranton and a terrible tragedy within his family. The other three candidates' claims are more interesting. McCain has used his military experience to express his solidarity with others' experience of battle, a routine political idea in itself but remarkable in its ability to cover for McCain's otherwise entirely unfolksly and occasionally sordid personal life.
As ever, though, the truly fascinating cases are those of Obama and Palin. Obama does speak convincingly of his family's financial difficulties, but his signature piece of folk experience has always been his move from editing the Harvard Law Review to doing community organizing on the South Side of Chicago: this is the folk connection of an elite man. And his rhetorical populism was until recently characterized by the call-and-response tradition of American Black churches. His DNC speech was essentially an artful reworking of old material with the call-and-response sequences removed.
Palin, however, identifies strongly with a "small-town" background. Other parts of her RNC speech have attracted more attention, but this theme was dominant: she claimed to represent a small-town culture that Washington and media elites could not appreciate, but the folk can.
The oddity of these identifications is that, taken narrowly, they are losing electoral identifications. A Democrat doesn't win an election by winning the Black church vote; a Republican doesn't win by winning the small-town vote. In the politics of folk identification, therefore, Obama and Palin are targeting the popularly marketed fantasies of these identifications, the fantasies that have made hip hop and country music into "popular" genres.
The difference is race.
Palin can mobilize the small-town identification explicitly, even relentlessly. The notion that rural people can represent the purer form of everybody is authorized by centuries of cultural products. While the identification with urban culture may be as powerful as that with rural folk, it must be hinted at and hedged against. In the conventions, Palin emphasized her rurality while Obama dropped the most racially-inflected elements of his rhetoric.
Palin played up her rural roots most memorably in the sequence I referenced at the beginning of this post:
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.
This statement was, from the beginning, obviously extreme. As Nate Silver put it based on the advance text before Palin spoke, "it seems awfully petty for a party campaigning on the theme of service .... If you want a punchline that underscores liberal 'elitism', why not go after Obama's time as the President of the Harvard Law Review instead?"
My answer: this line was always about the reaction it would inevitably produce, which is the retelling of the well-known story that includes the Harvard Law Review and the South Side of Chicago. Palin's sneering portrayal seeks to reframe Obama's story of selfless service in a way that emphasizes simultaneously his elite education and his blackness. Thanks to the obvious demographic differences between small-town Alaska and South-Side Chicago, Palin's speech carefully mapped the common-elite opposition onto a white-black opposition.
Now consider my reversal of Palin's statement at the top of this post, its unspeakable mirror image. Unlike Palin's, it privileges mobility over rootedness and urban experience over rural experience. In the reversal, you can see what kinds of elitism are (and have long been) acceptable and unacceptable in American politics.
Before I became a senator of the great state of Illinois, I was a community organizer. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a community organizer is sort of like a small-town mayor, except that you have actual responsibilities.
As I'm sure you know, this is a reversal of Palin's famous zinger from the RNC, with a similar level of sneering inaccuracy. While Palin's line about community organizers immediately stood out as unusually inflammatory and mean, this Obama version would, I think you'll agree, have ended the campaign in an instant: hello, President McCain. I'll return to this.
Lots of Democrats, including me, are feeling their heads explode anew every time Palin reveals her ignorance of the fundamentals of federal policy: she doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is (OK, it's complicated, and an informed request for clarification would have been fine--but not a look of uncomprehending fear), she doesn't know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac work, she doesn't know how countries get admitted to NATO--this last in a way that brought her alarmingly close to arguing for a war with Russia that even McCain wouldn't seek. And pointing out these problems seems only to prod Palin's supporters to new levels of defensive loyalty.
Obama's supporters have a similarly defensive loyalty. The defensiveness does not arise from policy-related gaffes, which Obama avoids with wonderful deftness: as M. J. Rosenberg has said (supported by details that are worth reading), Obama "knows his sh*t." But when his rivals challenge Obama's experience, the defense lies not in his knowledge, exactly, but in his "judgment," which partly means judgment but is also politically acceptable code for curiosity and, yes, utterly extraordinary intelligence--not only the possession of such intelligence but the unapologetic willingness to display it.
In other words, Obama supporters want someone with that kind of mind running the country: dispassionate, probing, academic. Big issues require elite capabilities, the kind of extraordinary talents that may be visible in a young candidate. This fact explains part of Obama's longstanding education gap among Democrats, which is more widely known than when I first noted it but remains underanalyzed. This valuing of the extraordinary young candidate works directly against the logic of blue-collar unions, which tend instead to value experience and credentials.
The logic of the Palin candidacy holds that big issues require the expansion of common sense: a connection with regular people and a certain set of values trump policy and elite rhetoric. As David Brooks points out today, this conflict between Obama and Palin has deep roots in American political rhetoric--or, I would say, in a longer, more European line of thinking about the potential sovereignty of the people. The arguments about Obama and Palin reflect centuries of debates about the relative powers of individual intelligence, personal experience, and collective (or folk) experience.
This last factor deserves more attention. Every major candidate must make a populist claim to the wisdom of the folk. Among the four major candidates now, Biden makes the most conventional claim: he has experienced a working-class childhood in Scranton and a terrible tragedy within his family. The other three candidates' claims are more interesting. McCain has used his military experience to express his solidarity with others' experience of battle, a routine political idea in itself but remarkable in its ability to cover for McCain's otherwise entirely unfolksly and occasionally sordid personal life.
As ever, though, the truly fascinating cases are those of Obama and Palin. Obama does speak convincingly of his family's financial difficulties, but his signature piece of folk experience has always been his move from editing the Harvard Law Review to doing community organizing on the South Side of Chicago: this is the folk connection of an elite man. And his rhetorical populism was until recently characterized by the call-and-response tradition of American Black churches. His DNC speech was essentially an artful reworking of old material with the call-and-response sequences removed.
Palin, however, identifies strongly with a "small-town" background. Other parts of her RNC speech have attracted more attention, but this theme was dominant: she claimed to represent a small-town culture that Washington and media elites could not appreciate, but the folk can.
The oddity of these identifications is that, taken narrowly, they are losing electoral identifications. A Democrat doesn't win an election by winning the Black church vote; a Republican doesn't win by winning the small-town vote. In the politics of folk identification, therefore, Obama and Palin are targeting the popularly marketed fantasies of these identifications, the fantasies that have made hip hop and country music into "popular" genres.
The difference is race.
Palin can mobilize the small-town identification explicitly, even relentlessly. The notion that rural people can represent the purer form of everybody is authorized by centuries of cultural products. While the identification with urban culture may be as powerful as that with rural folk, it must be hinted at and hedged against. In the conventions, Palin emphasized her rurality while Obama dropped the most racially-inflected elements of his rhetoric.
Palin played up her rural roots most memorably in the sequence I referenced at the beginning of this post:
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities.
This statement was, from the beginning, obviously extreme. As Nate Silver put it based on the advance text before Palin spoke, "it seems awfully petty for a party campaigning on the theme of service .... If you want a punchline that underscores liberal 'elitism', why not go after Obama's time as the President of the Harvard Law Review instead?"
My answer: this line was always about the reaction it would inevitably produce, which is the retelling of the well-known story that includes the Harvard Law Review and the South Side of Chicago. Palin's sneering portrayal seeks to reframe Obama's story of selfless service in a way that emphasizes simultaneously his elite education and his blackness. Thanks to the obvious demographic differences between small-town Alaska and South-Side Chicago, Palin's speech carefully mapped the common-elite opposition onto a white-black opposition.
Now consider my reversal of Palin's statement at the top of this post, its unspeakable mirror image. Unlike Palin's, it privileges mobility over rootedness and urban experience over rural experience. In the reversal, you can see what kinds of elitism are (and have long been) acceptable and unacceptable in American politics.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style
Back from a vacation week, and published on Saturday, but that lacks the alliteration I require:
I know I shouldn't link to Nate Silver every week, but I blame him for writing something irresistible every time. This time around it's the best strategic analysis I've seen of the Biden choice.
Merlin Mann on kicking ass with outcome-based thinking. I especially like the Foo for Bar formulation.
Via Very Short List, a great little accent identification game, with creepy patriarchal and colonialist undertones brought to you by Rudyard Kipling.
A good piece on humiliation, China, and the Olympics: "In 2001, the National People's Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official 'National Humiliation Day.'"
And following an impeccable pass of the baton, Errol Morris runs the anchor leg analyzing photography as a weapon.
I know I shouldn't link to Nate Silver every week, but I blame him for writing something irresistible every time. This time around it's the best strategic analysis I've seen of the Biden choice.
Merlin Mann on kicking ass with outcome-based thinking. I especially like the Foo for Bar formulation.
Via Very Short List, a great little accent identification game, with creepy patriarchal and colonialist undertones brought to you by Rudyard Kipling.
A good piece on humiliation, China, and the Olympics: "In 2001, the National People's Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official 'National Humiliation Day.'"
And following an impeccable pass of the baton, Errol Morris runs the anchor leg analyzing photography as a weapon.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style
Beyond overconfidence: Tyler Cowen reports on new views of ability bias
Find out why last week's ruling on executive privilege is such a big deal. This is worth understanding.
Zombies reciting haiku
Nate Silver strikes again: a lovely little contextualization of Evan Bayh's politics
San Diego Padres General Manager Paul DePodesta, on his blog of unprecedented GM transparency, runs down how trading after the deadline works in baseball
Find out why last week's ruling on executive privilege is such a big deal. This is worth understanding.
Zombies reciting haiku
Nate Silver strikes again: a lovely little contextualization of Evan Bayh's politics
San Diego Padres General Manager Paul DePodesta, on his blog of unprecedented GM transparency, runs down how trading after the deadline works in baseball
Friday, August 01, 2008
Friday Five: Links to take you to the weekend in style
The NINES project is at the cutting edge of literary studies; here is a taste of the work it's doing to enhance digital scholarship and teaching.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com develops a fascinating little metric for evaluating Vice Presidential candidates' political strength
Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson discuss uncertainty and humility
Some of the young folk don't know about Laurie Anderson: Here's an interview to introduce them to her.
Kevin Kelly, always good for a striking insight, projects the second 5000 days of the web. I especially like the idea that we will start linking ideas rather than pages.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com develops a fascinating little metric for evaluating Vice Presidential candidates' political strength
Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson discuss uncertainty and humility
Some of the young folk don't know about Laurie Anderson: Here's an interview to introduce them to her.
Kevin Kelly, always good for a striking insight, projects the second 5000 days of the web. I especially like the idea that we will start linking ideas rather than pages.
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