Apparently Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan was asked which Twilight team she is on, as Senator Amy Klobuchar asked:

The senator jokingly asked Kagan’s thoughts on ”the vampire versus the werewolf.”

…

Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said she realized Kagan ”can’t comment on future cases. So I’ll leave that alone.”

Of course she couldn’t answer that. (Team Edward)

p.s And this is posted in the NYTimes under Politics?

In less than five minutes, the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled about 565 points, dropping almost 1,000 points on the day. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq followed suit. Computer programs intensified the selloff as markets fell through some trading limits.

And then, almost as quickly, the markets recovered most of the decline.

…

Mr. Hogan said that it was difficult to figure out just what was driving the market. “We have got a lot of competing forces,” he said.

via Markets Tumble Almost 4% on Greek Worries – NYTimes.com.

The market is such a racket.  I recently read Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker
and I am more convinced than ever. I don’t know how someone can watch these markets and think prices are perfectly set.  It’s mostly herd behavior and algorithms.

UPDATE: Fat-fingered trading was the cause

Before going on vacation for a week, you ask your spacey friend to water your ailing plant.  Without water, the plant has a 90 percent chance of dying.  Even with proper watering, it has a 20 percent chance of dying.  And the probability that your friend will forget to water it is 30 percent.  (a) What’s the chance that your plant will survive the week?  (b) If it’s dead when you return, what’s the chance that your friend forgot to water it?  (c) If your friend forgot to water it, what’s the chance it’ll be dead when you return?

….

Naturally, the first few semesters I taught this topic, I stuck to the book, inching along, playing it safe.  But gradually I began to notice something.  A few of my students would avoid using “Bayes’s theorem,” the labyrinthine formula I was teaching them.  Instead they would solve the problems by a much easier method.

What these resourceful students kept discovering, year after year, was a better way to think about conditional probability.  Their way comports with human intuition instead of confounding it.  The trick is to think in terms of “natural frequencies” — simple counts of events — rather than the more abstract notions of percentages, odds, or probabilities.  As soon as you make this mental shift, the fog lifts.

via Chances Are – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

A helpful way to think about a non-intuitive calculation.

Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Clever challenging of the recent SCOTUS decision that confers some rights of citizens upon corporations.  The ad, itself, I don’t find very clever, but the concept, definitely.

It’s too obviously satirical, and yet Murray Hill Inc. actually set up a paypal “support” link with the text “Murray Hill Inc. video program. This is NOT a federal campaign account or a tax-exempt donation.”.  So, they *will* accept money, but admit it’s *not* a campaign. Odd.

Links:  Murray Hill Inc. is launching the campaign with a website, Facebook page and YouTube video, products.

Paypal Images:

Murray Hill Inc PayPal

Murray Hill Inc, Support Paypal

Far too many people still use easy-to-guess passwords. Admittedly, keeping track of multiple passwords for every occasion is difficult, but at least one’s universal password should not be easily guessable!

A lot of people like KeePass (portable) to securely manage their passwords, though I have my own system.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”

Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

…

Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou…  The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it.

…

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

One commenter also suggested this tool:  http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

“As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”

While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.

via When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com.

Wow, a clinical psychologist that focuses on environmental issues.  I suppose I’m not surprised as my first experience of meeting a vegan was getting yelled at.

Mikey Hicks is 8-years old, was born shortly before 9/11/01, and is on the terrorist selectee list for extra screening when flying. Story: Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List

There are two problems with this type of screening that are well-illustrated in the article.

1) That the list’s only criterium for flagging a person is a name match. There are no other factors taken in account: not history, demographics, nor other intelligence. In one case, someone managed to avoid the list by changing his name. In effect, this renders the list totally useless in that it captures very high false positives and can easily made to result in false negatives.

2) There is no reason that this child has spent eight years, his entire life, on this list without some sort of effective recourse.

It points to a complete lack or interest or inability of our government to design an intelligent system.

My guess, is that it is designed this way so that no one actually needs to be trained. A computer flags the kids, and a TSA staff member does the computer’s bidding. There is no apparent place for the assessment of the TSA agent him or herself.

What a poorly thought-out use case.

An article in the New York Times today battles a common meme that it is more ethical to eat plants than animals because they don’t feel pain.

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

I, personally, find arguments regarding sustainability and environmental impact as more convincing arguments for vegetarianism than the ‘animals feel pain’ argument. Perhaps it’s the scientist in me that daily remembers that that I exist in an animal body and have animal needs, and that, regardless of ‘higher’ impulses, I am constrained by my physical being and my evolutionary nature.

I am an omnivore. I have nutritional needs that perhaps can be met on a vegan diet, but it requires effort that I consider unnatural. However, I think people eat too much meat, and I still do not understand how a burger at McDonald’s can cost less than a salad.

Historically, for most people, meat-eating was reserved for special occasions. For better and sometimes worse, refrigeration and mass transit have changed the immediacy of eating a just-slaughtered full animal.

I think I would feel better about eating meat if I slaughtered my own animal, but until I get there, I am comfortable eating it rarely, but for health and other reasons.  It does not make sense to elevate one animal kingdom above another as more worthy to live just because we belong to it.

An ancient thought that captures the difficulty of our duality as self-conscious animals.  Psalm 8:

5 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
6 Yet Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
7 Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
8 Sheep and oxen, all of them, yea, and the beasts of the field;
9 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea; whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

Posted today on the freakonomics blog:
Where Has All the Viagra Spam Gone? By DANIEL HAMERMESH

I assume that the spammers realized that the return per period of time — the price of the activity — was less than its marginal cost: the opportunity cost of their time. They have shut down the business and moved to other activities that might yield higher returns.

A simple look at the comments proves how little thought (hopefully) he put into his post.

Link Daniel, you really should give credit where credit is due and thank your mail admins and others who are fighting to keep the spam out of your inbox.

…

Link

Ouch, is this how research is done these days?

As all the other comments have mentioned, the spam is still flowing (at the same rate if not more) only it’s your filters that are better.

Your hypothesis is simply incorrect.

…

Link

My spammers must have a lower opportunity cost of their time than your spammers, as I have no shortage of bank presidents, fabuloulsy rich widows, and foreign dignitaries offering me millions of dollars just to hold onto their money for them for a few weeks.

….

Link

All of the major mail filtering companies (Messagelabs for example) publish daily statistics and monthly intelligence reports about spam, viruses, other malware and what this month’s favoured delivery method is. If you’re going to write an article about whether spam is increasing, decreasing, or remaining about the same, you really do have an obligation to your employer (and audience) to at least glance at well-known and freely available sources of information about your subject, don’t you think?

…

Link

As an academic economist, I expect you are familiar with the Bayesian branch of statistics. Spam filters are generally a real-life implementation of Bayes’ theorem.

…

Link

I agree that spam mails have lessened since last year, but not for the reasons you think Mr.Hammermesh…

The marginal cost of sending a batch of spam mail is, I believe, close to zero. If the marginal cost exceeded the marginal benefits, spammers would change their strategy, for example, by taking off e-mail contacts who have never responded to their mail. However, they never bother to narrow down their audience. Why? MB>MC.

Plus, the major reason spam mails may have lessened(if at all) would be because of legal crackdowns on such spammers. The effect of such crackdowns may not be as big as we’d want, but the fact that spammers now know they face possible legal consequences may be what raised their MC…(though I doubt it, since they can just move to lawless countries and send spam from there)

…

etc.

Now that we have so much data, we need tools to manage and understand it.  This reminds me of my eternal quest for a better to-do list that can manage all my tasks. There is just too much data for traditional tools to manage.

In a speech given just a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007, Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, sketched out an argument that computing was fundamentally transforming the practice of science.

Dr. Gray called the shift a “fourth paradigm.” The first three paradigms were experimental, theoretical and, more recently, computational science. He explained this paradigm as an evolving era in which an “exaflood” of observational data was threatening to overwhelm scientists. The only way to cope with it, he argued, was a new generation of scientific computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze the data flood.

…

“We have access to too much data now to understand what’s going on,” Dr. Horvitz said….

…

In his chapter, “I Have Seen the Paradigm Shift, and It Is Us,” John Wilbanks, the director of Science Commons, a nonprofit organization promoting the sharing of scientific information, argues for a more nuanced view of data explosion.

“Data is not sweeping away the old reality,” he writes. “Data is simply placing a set of burdens on the methods and the social habits we use to deal with and communicate our empiricism and our theory.”

From A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing , Book: The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery